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Steven Levitt Biography

Steven David "Steve" Levitt (born May 29, 1967) is an American economist known for his work in the field of crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007. With journalist Stephen J. Dubner, he co-authored the best-selling book Freakonomics (2005) and its sequels SuperFreakonomics (2009), Think Like a Freak (2014), and When to Rob a Bank (2015). In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Levitt their fourth favorite living economist under the age of 60, after Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Daron Acemoglu.

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Steven Levitt Quotes

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

Corruption, Good, Inquiry, Mask, Purity

The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

Sex, Lying, Data, Street, Cop

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.

Data, Huge, Powerful, Think, Thinking

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

Information, Olive, Olive Branches, Olives, Wields

An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom.

Conventional, Conventional Wisdom, Expert, Experts, Hopes, Theory

No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

Checklists, Expert, Experts, May, Outcomes

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Decided, Done, Enough, Gets, Harder, Problem

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Children, Gun, Likely, Pool, Swimming, Yard

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.

Law, People, Real, Reasons, Sorts, Way

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Conventional, Conventional Wisdom, Wisdom, Wrong

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.

Ailing, Decisions, Kids, Mean, Mother, Rare

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

Doe, People, Wheareas, Work, World

Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

Book, Fantastic, Ideas, Scarcity, Simple

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.

Articles, Believe, Media, Reading, Standard, Wisdom

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Chances, Fun, Impact, Price, Winning

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

Average, Build, Laws, Reality, Thinking