Top 100 Steven D. Levitt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.”

— Steven D. Levitt

52. “Poverty is a symptom – of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.”

— Steven D. Levitt

53. “It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”

— Steven D. Levitt

54. “The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.”

— Steven D. Levitt

55. “Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don’t be afraid of the obvious.”

— Steven D. Levitt

56. “Conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting – though not necessarily true.”

— Steven D. Levitt

57. “Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote across many genres, including children’s books. In an essay called “Why I Write for Children,” he explained the appeal. “Children read books, not reviews,” he wrote. “They don’t give a hoot about the critics.” And: “When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.” Best of all – and to the relief of authors everywhere – children “don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.”

— Steven D. Levitt

58. “With any problem, it’s important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.”

— Steven D. Levitt

59. “The next time you’re in a real jam, facing an important question that you just can’t answer, go ahead and make up something – and everyone will believe you, because you’re the guy who all those other times was crazy enough to admit you didn’t know the answer.”

— Steven D. Levitt

60. “Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?”

— Steven D. Levitt

61. “The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don’t. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.”

— Steven D. Levitt

62. “Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.”

— Steven D. Levitt

63. “The more social science we learn, the more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life.”

— Steven D. Levitt

64. “That is in part because the very words “education reform” indicate that the question is “What’s wrong with our schools?” when in reality, the question might be better phrased as “Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?” When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.”

— Steven D. Levitt

65. “Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don’t know an answer.”

— Steven D. Levitt

66. “It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most.”

— Steven D. Levitt

67. “Five Terms Correlated to a Higher Sale Price Granite State-of-the-Art Corian Maple Gourmet Five Terms Correlated to a Lower Sale Price Fantastic Spacious ! Charming Great Neighborhood.”

— Steven D. Levitt

68. “If you really want to persuade someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.”

— Steven D. Levitt

69. “Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially – with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect – are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.”

— Steven D. Levitt

70. “Were writing Freakonomics, we had grave doubts that anyone would actually read it – and we certainly never envisioned the need for this revised and expanded edition.”

— Steven D. Levitt

71. “That is a lethal combination – cocky plus wrong – especially when a more prudent option exists: simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.”

— Steven D. Levitt

72. “Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn’t like the idea of quitting.”

— Steven D. Levitt

73. “The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.”

— Steven D. Levitt

74. “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 D. Levitt

75. “He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million?” he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn’t much to see – but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. “All right then, “ he said. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100?” “A hundred dollars!” she shot back. “What do you think I am, a prostitute?” “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

— Steven D. Levitt

76. “Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn’t resonate for the recipient, you won’t get anywhere.”

— Steven D. Levitt

77. “Running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.”

— Steven D. Levitt

78. “But being confident you are right is not the same as being right.”

— Steven D. Levitt

79. “You may not like this idea; none of us wants to admit that we are pack animals. But in a complicated world, running with the herd can make sense. Who has time to think through every decision and all the facts behind it? If everybody around you thinks that conserving energy is a good idea – well, maybe it is. So if you are the person designing an incentive scheme, you can use this knowledge to herd people into doing the right thing – even if they’re doing it for the wrong reasons.”

— Steven D. Levitt

80. “Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.”

— Steven D. Levitt

81. “So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.”

— Steven D. Levitt

82. “What sort of signal does a college diploma send to a potential employer? That its holder is willing and able to complete all sorts of drawn-out, convoluted tasks.”

— Steven D. Levitt

83. “Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the “right” thing to do.”

— Steven D. Levitt

84. “Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place.”

— Steven D. Levitt

85. “A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.”

— Steven D. Levitt

86. “Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.”

— Steven D. Levitt

87. “Prediction,” as Niels Bohr liked to say, “is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

— Steven D. Levitt

88. “Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think – or to even spend much time thinking at all.”

— Steven D. Levitt

89. “It’s much better to ask small questions than big ones.”

— Steven D. Levitt

90. “Trying to keep a public men’s room clean? Sure, go ahead and put up signs urging people to pee neatly – or, better, paint a housefly on the urinal and watch the male instinct for target practice take over.”

— Steven D. Levitt

91. “Here’s a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is – like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery – at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.”

— Steven D. Levitt

92. “The next time you encounter such a barrier, imposed by people who lack your imagination and drive and creativity, think hard about ignoring it. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.”

— Steven D. Levitt

93. “But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education. If these home-based inputs are lacking, there is only so much a school can do.”

— Steven D. Levitt

94. “An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention.”

— Steven D. Levitt

95. “When was the last time you sat for an hour of pure, unadulterated thinking?”

— Steven D. Levitt

96. “Unless you have more information, however, it’s hard to say what’s causing what.”

— Steven D. Levitt

97. “When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.”

— Steven D. Levitt

98. “Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don’t contain methane.”

— Steven D. Levitt

99. “No CEO in the world, therefore, is so delusional as to expect his employees to show up every day and work hard for no money. But there is one gigantic workforce asked to do exactly that. In the United States alone, they number nearly 60 million. Who is this massive, underpaid throng? Schoolchildren.”

— Steven D. Levitt

100. “The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.”

— Steven D. Levitt