Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.
- Stephen J. Dubner
'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.
- Stephen J. Dubner
As everyone knows, tips constitute the bulk of a waiter's or waitress's income. But they are also optional, at least in theory. Does it really seem like a good idea to make someone's salary so susceptible to customers' whims on a given day - or whether any customers happen to show up at all?
- Stephen J. Dubner
A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.
- Stephen J. Dubner
I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time - in the stock market, in reports of crime and natural disaster, etc. The fact is that big, noisy, anomalous events catch our attention because they're anomalous, which isn't a problem in and of itself.
- Stephen J. Dubner
These are the two sides of Steven Spielberg: the reverent grown-up who knows when to say the right thing and the exuberant kid who loves a good laugh. Both sides are sincere, and both are necessary, for Spielberg knows he can't feel good about himself unless everyone else feels the same way.
- Stephen J. Dubner
When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.
- Stephen J. Dubner
Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.
- Stephen J. Dubner
If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years.
- Stephen J. Dubner
Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.
- Stephen J. Dubner
We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.
- Stephen J. Dubner
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