Freakonomics Quotes

“una hamburguesa con queso, como ha calculado el economista Kevin Murphy, cuesta 2,5 dólares más que una ensalada en repercusiones en la salud a largo plazo.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“Might white voters lie to pollsters, claiming they will vote for the black candidate in order to appear more color-blind than they actually are? Apparently so. In New York City’s 1989 mayoral race between David Dinkins (a black candidate) and Rudolph Giuliani (who is white), Dinkins won by only a few points. Although Dinkins became the city’s first black mayor, his slender margin of victory came as a surprise, for preelection polls showed Dinkins winning by nearly 15 points. When the white supremacist David Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990, he garnered nearly 20 percent more of the vote than pre-election polls had projected, an indication that thousands of Louisiana voters did not want to admit their preference for a candidate with racist views.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes. Earning big money in the crack gang wasn’t much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a movie star or the high-school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives. So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chicago, people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. Or,”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients’ best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Lo que realmente importa para un candidato político no es cuánto gasta, sino quién es.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“«La disposición de causas y consecuencias de este mundo es tan inescrutable que un impuesto de dos peniques sobre el té, aplicado injustamente en una parte aislada, cambia la condición de todos sus habitantes.»”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“cuanto más arriba en el escalafón se encuentran los trabajadores, más propensos a engañar son.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“Las conductas social y económica, añade, «son complejas, y comprender su carácter resulta mentalmente agotador.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“Quizá resulte triste, pero para nada sorprendente, descubrir que expertos como Snyder son capaces de actuar en beneficio propio hasta el punto de engañar. Pero no pueden engañar solos. Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics

“There is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn’t keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn’t win elections, and—surprise—drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The theme of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was the innate honesty of mankind. “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith wrote, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Humans respond to incentives.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith wrote, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” There”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation,dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“One teenage boy, Amcher, had been named for the first thing his parents saw upon reaching the hospital: the sign for Albany Medical Center Hospital Emergency Room.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Some people would argue that we don’t do a very good job. But taking the long view, that is clearly not true. Consider the historical trend in homicide (not including wars), which is both the most reliably measured crime and the best barometer of a society’s overall crime rate. These statistics, compiled by the criminologist Manuel Eisner, track the historical homicide levels in five European regions. The steep decline of these numbers over the centuries suggests that, for one of the gravest human concerns—getting murdered—the incentives that we collectively cook up are working better and better.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“And what about the other half of the election truism—that the amount of money spent on campaign finance is obscenely huge? In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, about $ 1 billion is spent per year—which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than democratic elections. It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Or, as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“nuanced”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“tangential”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything