Steven Levitt
Steven Levitt
Steven David "Steve" Levittis an American economist known for his work in the field of crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth29 May 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.
Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.
If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.
Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.
In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.
Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
Don't trust, just verify.
Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.