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Steven D. Levitt quotes
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.
Steven D. 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 D. Levitt
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.
Steven D. Levitt
An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
Steven D. Levitt
Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.
Steven D. Levitt
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Steven D. Levitt
I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.
Steven D. Levitt
You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.
Steven D. Levitt
The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.
Steven D. Levitt
Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.
Steven D. Levitt
I don't expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.
Steven D. Levitt
Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.
Steven D. 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 D. Levitt
