Freakonomics

there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.

The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.

The neighborhood’s median income was about $15,000 a year, well less than half the U.S. average. During the years that Venkatesh lived with J. T.’s gang, foot soldiers often asked his help in landing what they called “a good job”: working as a janitor at the University of Chicago.

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.

if you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile. The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the qu

It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false—noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking—is a nice place to start asking questions.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We al

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties.