More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 25 - March 1, 2023
Chapter 1: What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?
Chapter 2: How is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?
Chapter 3: Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?
turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.
But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other.
W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.
Here is the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.
and people inevitably respond to incentives. The incentives of the real-estate business, as currently configured, plainly encourage some agents to act against the best interests of their customers.
Earning big money in the crack gang wasn’t much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a movie star or the high-school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives. So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance.
An editorial assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament.
Because regulation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product. With guns so cheap and so easy to get, the standard criminal has no incentive to fill out a firearms application at his local gun shop and then wait a week.
Given the number of handguns in the United States and the number of homicides each year, the likelihood that a particular gun was used to kill someone that year is 1 in 10,000.
An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side.
Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close:
“Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,”
since I control the car, I am the one keeping myself safe; since I have no control of the airplane, I am at the mercy of myriad external factors.
Regression analysis is the tool that enables an economist to sort out these huge piles of data. It does so by artificially holding constant every variable except the two he wishes to focus on, and then showing how those two co-vary.
if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
