Book Byte #288 "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
“The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”
“Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.”
“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation”
“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.”
“If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”
“When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.”
“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 against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea
What you should take away from this book is that our daily lives are filled with seemingly straightforward choices and exchanges, from selling a house to raising children. However, a lot of unforeseen and frequently illogical elements influence our choices. Success depends on your ability to comprehend and accept them. The only way we can combat them is to recognize and understand them.
Until Tomorrow,
Jason (Founder Club255)