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

by Steven D. Levitt

brothel is dressing up some good old-fashioned price discrimination arguments in a green

Tropicana carton, they will set aside one hundred square feet of rain forest to preserve on your behalf.

When I asked my daughter how much she thought the land was worth, she said twenty dollars. When I asked a friend, he guessed five dollars. Whenever a company can give away something worth eleven cents that people think is worth five or twenty dollars, they are doing something right.

complex than it might seem. 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.

My friend Anders Ericsson popularized the magic number of ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert.

basic tenets of economics is what we call diminishing marginal returns. The first little bit of something yields big returns; the more you do of something, the less valuable it is. For example, the first ice cream cone is delicious. The fourth is nauseating.

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. This strategy actually prevents membership from expanding, at least in big cities where gangs are economically oriented.

Let’s say you catch one of us—I’d make the boy wear a dress and makeup. Maybe for two weeks. Let the boy go to school looking like a girl. Let him walk the streets looking like he’s gay. I guarantee you, we’d have a hard time holding on to n----rs if you do shit like that!

Is there any point to asking questions when you know that people will never give a yes answer? It turns out that there actually is a point to such questions: U.S. law enforcement can use demonstrably false answers against individuals to prosecute or deport them. Indeed, some officers I was speaking with the other day said they wished there were more questions on terrorist activities on the N-400.

I’ve been thinking a lot about terrorism lately.

America ideas

So why is it that KFC’s service remains so bad? I have two mutually consistent hypotheses as to why: 1. KFC doesn’t have enough people working. The next time you are at McDonald’s, count the number of workers. It always stuns me how many people are on duty. It is not uncommon to see fifteen to twenty people working at a time in a busy McDonald’s. There seem to be many fewer people working at KFC. I think there were only four or five workers yesterday when I visited. 2. KFC’s clientele is poorer than the customers at other fast-food outlets, and poor people are less willing to pay for good service. There is no question in my mind

that service is generally terrible in places frequented by the poor. Whether it is because poor people care less about service, I’m not sure. I do know that I virtually never saw bad service in the entire year I spent visiting Stanford, which I’ve always attributed to the fact that there are so many rich people in the area.

I survived my appearance on The Daily Show.

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Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

These business books are mostly backward-looking: What have companies done that made them successful? The future is always hard to predict,

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.

Would it matter to you whether, in the photograph of the unopened iPod, the person holding the iPod (all you can see is their hand and wrist) was black or white? What if the hand holding the iPod had a visible tattoo?

I prefer to reward good behavior rather than punish bad, I would give the hot-dog man some or all of my money. He’s the one, after all, who’s out there every day providing a service, having to pay taxes, licensing fees, etc. The panhandler, meanwhile, has far more efficient and effective options for getting food and shelter than getting a random few dollars from the likes of me, and the more I give, the more I ask him to spend his time on the street.

All eight of the University of Chicago economists to whom I posed the shrimp question thought the answer had something to do with producing shrimp more efficiently—i.e., supply-based explanations.