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

by Steven D. Levitt

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

in terms of human lives is relatively small, compared to other causes of death like motor-vehicle crashes, heart attacks, homicide, and suicide. It is the fear that imposes the real cost.

What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence).

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

Gifted? No, not many of us are. But dedicated and focused upon excellence, you bet! I have told my kids one thing many times since they were little children: “I don’t expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.

In reviewing the scientific evidence, Oliver shows there is little proof either that obesity causes so many diseases and deaths or that losing weight makes people any healthier.”

It is useful to distinguish the content of thoughts from the mechanisms of thinking. Some biases (e.g., preconceived notions, unscientific beliefs, specific stereotypes) are biases of content and are likely to be culture-bound. Other biases (e.g., the neglect of statistics, the neglect of ambiguity, the general fact that we are prone to stereotyping) are inevitable side effects of the operation of general-purpose psychological mechanisms.

Being self-conscious takes up mental capacity and is certainly not good for performance. Furthermore, the more self-conscious you are, the more likely you are to interpret (and

sometimes misinterpret) the attitudes of others

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.

The point isn’t that you can divide people into piles of bad people and good people, cheaters and non-cheaters. The point is that people’s behavior is determined by how the incentives of a particular scenario are aligned.

You pay five hundred rupees (about eleven dollars) to join an organization of fellow ticketless travelers. If you do get caught traveling without a ticket, you pay the fine and turn in your receipt to the ticketless-traveler organization, which refunds you 100 percent of the fine.

Consider why we use packaging in the first place. In addition to protecting food from its microbial surroundings, packaging significantly prolongs shelf life, which in turn improves the chances of the food actually being eaten. According to the Cucumber Growers’ Association, just 1.5 grams of plastic wrap extends a cuke’s shelf life from three to fourteen days, all the while protecting it from “dirty hands.” Another study found that apples packed in a shrink-wrapped tray cut down on fruit damage (and discard) by 27 percent. Similar numbers have been found for potatoes and grapes. Again, while it seems too simple a point to reiterate, it’s often forgotten: the longer food lasts, the better chances there are of someone consuming it.

Cops would much rather “control and contain” gang activity. Most officers who work in inner cities understand that you cannot eliminate gang activity entirely—arrest two gang members and you will find a dozen others waiting in line to take their places. Police know that gang members have great knowledge about local crimes, so they rely on a trade-off: keep gangs isolated to particular areas, don’t let their criminal activities spill over into other spaces, and use high-ranking gang members for information.

Any claims that toothpaste makes about preventing decay, whitening teeth, etc., are totally fallacious, Dr. Reiss told me, because the FDA can’t and won’t allow the ingredients necessary to perform those chores in an over-the-counter product that children can easily get hold of. (That’s why he recommends an antibacterial product like Gly-Oxide, a fairly foul-tasting but apparently effective means of killing the bacteria that cause decay.)

Levitt likes to say that morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents the way it actually does work.

In Adam Smith, the idea is that each individual pursuing his own self-interest is led, as if by an invisible hand, to promote the interest of society.

In order to encourage merchantmen to surrender, they needed to communicate the idea that, if you surrender to us, you’ll be treated well.

what we often see in the historical record is pirates displaying quite remarkable feats of generosity.

We have to recognize that pirates are rational economic actors and that piracy is an occupational choice. If we think of them as irrational, or as pursuing other ends, we’re liable to come up with solutions to the pirate problem that are ineffective. Since we know that pirates respond to costs and benefits, we should think of solutions that alter those costs and benefits to shape the incentives for pirates and to deter them from going into a life of piracy.

As the Inuits say, “Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.”