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Book: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Quotes of Book: SuperFreakonomics: Global
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  1. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. 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.
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  2. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

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

    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.
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  4. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    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.
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  5. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
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  6. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.
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  7. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    When 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.
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  8. Steven D. Levitt _ SuperFreakonomics: Global

    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.
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