When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants

by Steven D. Levitt

With that in mind, I’d want to do something that everybody thinks might be directed at them, even if the individual probability of harm is very low.

Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.

Another option is one the British have used: putting cameras everywhere. This is very anti-American, so it probably would never fly here. I also am not sure it is a good investment. But the recent terrorist attacks in the U.K. suggest that these cameras are at least useful after the fact in identifying the perpetrators.

For most government officials, there is much more pressure to look like you are trying to stop terrorism than there is to actually stop it. The head of the TSA can’t be blamed if a plane gets shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, but he is in serious trouble if a tube of explosive toothpaste takes down a plane. Consequently, we put much more effort into the toothpaste even though it is probably a much less important threat.

when you don’t charge people for things (including health care), they will consume too much of it.

In 12Glen’s voting mechanism, every voter can vote as many times as he or she likes. The catch, however, is that you have to pay each time you vote, and the amount you have to pay is a function of the square of the number of votes you cast.

a big check five or ten years down

The penny floor can be found at the Standard Grill at the new Standard Hotel in New York, the one straddling the High Line. The Standard tells us that it used 250 pennies per square foot, or 480,000 pennies in all.

More generally, the economist Richard Thaler coined the phrase mental accounts to describe the way in which people seem to treat different assets as non-fungible, even though in principle it seems like they should be.

For me, a dollar made playing poker means much more than a dollar earned from the stock market going up. (And a dollar lost playing poker is likewise far more painful.)

The Laffer curve is a unicorn-y concept that seeks to explain the rate of taxation at which revenues will fall because earners either move away or decide to earn less (or cheat more, I guess).

what he has also alluded to in some of his speeches is that it has taken years, even decades, to prepare himself for that one single “lifetime event” of guiding his jet into the safe, smooth landing on the Hudson River.

“I don’t expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do. This is the creed of every pilot I know.

Seriously. The data show that walking one mile drunk is eight times more dangerous than driving one mile drunk. But mostly people just laughed and ignored us. When it comes to evaluating risks, people stink for all sorts of reasons—from cognitive biases to the media’s emphasis on rare events.

“Each year in the United States, an estimated 30 million persons ride horses. The rate of serious injury per number of riding hours is estimated to be higher

for 9horseback riders than for motorcyclists and automobile racers.”

Oliver argues that the obesity debate

is rife with lies and misinformation. The book purports to show, as the jacket copy says, “how a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats, and health researchers, with financial backing from the drug and weight-loss industry, have campaigned to misclassify more than sixty million Americans as ‘overweight,’ to inflate the health risks of being fat, and to promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease.

Oliver shows there is little proof either that obesity causes so many diseases and deaths or that losing weig...

Yes, being happy (on average) in the moment and being satisfied retrospectively are not the same thing. People are most likely to be happy if they spend a lot of time with people they love, and most likely to be satisfied if they achieve conventional goals, such as

high income and a stable marriage.

As we’ve written before, most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. A given person might fear a terrorist attack and mad cow disease more than anything in the world, whereas in fact she’d be better off fearing a heart attack (and therefore taking care of herself) or salmonella (and therefore washing her cutting board thoroughly).

In general, we fear strangers way more than we should.

So the next time your brain insists on fearing strangers, try to tell it to cool out a bit. It’s not that you necessarily need to insist that it fear your friends

The book lie is what you might call a lie of reputation:

On reflection, this does make sense—profit maximization requires setting the marginal cost of an action equal to the marginal benefit.

The more social science we learn, the

more we realize that people, while treasuring their independence, are in fact drawn to herd behavior in almost every aspect of daily life. The good news is that once you realize this, you can exploit the herd mentality for your own benefit

The history of modern doping began with the cycling craze of the 1890s and the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night. Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders’ black coffee. Brandy was added to tea. Cyclists were given nitroglycerine to ease breathing after sprints. This

was a dangerous business, since these substances were doled out without medical supervision.

the trip, then the car would definitely