Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.
Steven D. LevittAnd 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 D. LevittWhen 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. LevittIn 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. LevittAn expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom.
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. LevittAre people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.
Steven D. LevittTags: people human-nature incentives innate
As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Steven D. LevittWhen the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That’s why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as “creative destruction.” But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn’t that the problem isn’t potentially large. It’s just that human ingenuity—when given proper incentives—is bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we’ll meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.
Steven D. LevittTags: economics incentives
If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, it's hard to believe that the fear of execution is a driving force in a criminal's calculus.
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