Tag: Steven Levitt

Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”

Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics shows how internet has bridged gap between experts and ordinary public.

“Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”

Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.”

Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics

“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity“. It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”

Adopted from the following great insight shared by Steven Levitt from the book Freakonomics..

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”