24+ Steven Levitt Quotes On Education, Politics And Child Car Seats

Steven Levitt is an American economist who is best known for his work on crime, education, and other topics in the field of economics. He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Medal in 2003. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Steven Levitt on education, leadership, politics.

Top 10 Steven Levitt Quotes

1. The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
2. No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.
3. An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation
4. When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
5. 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.
6. Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
7. Don't trust, just verify.
8. 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.
9. Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.
10. As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Steven Levitt Short Quotes

• It turns out, petty crime's a terrible way to make a living.
• Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.
• The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.
• An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.

Steven Levitt Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Steven Levitt

Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular. — Steven Levitt

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality — Steven Levitt

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy. — Steven Levitt

People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along. — Steven Levitt

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done. — Steven Levitt

The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one. — Steven Levitt

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. — Steven Levitt

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work. — Steven Levitt

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another. — Steven Levitt

Life Lessons by Steven Levitt

1. Steven Levitt's work emphasizes the importance of looking beyond the surface to uncover the root causes of social and economic phenomena.
2. His unconventional approach to economics highlights the power of data-driven analysis to uncover hidden relationships and to inform public policy decisions.
3. By challenging conventional wisdom and questioning assumptions, Levitt's work encourages us to think critically and to develop creative solutions to complex problems.