Sublime

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.

With the future weighted nearly as heavily as the present, the value of making a chance discovery, relative to taking a sure thing, goes up even more.

this argument is flawed, both logically and empirically.

If people were perfectly rational agents, if the brain weren't so bounded, then writing down the last two digits of their Social Security numbers should have no effect on their auction bids. In other words, a student whose Social Security number ended with a low-value figure (such as 10) should be willing to pay roughly the same price as someone wi

Self-interest makes the world go around, a point that seems so obvious as to be silly.

Good Judgment Project.

Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.

Economically relevant information is discovered from experimentation, not deduced from a model.

The answer lies in finding the right data, and the secret to finding the right data usually means finding the right person—which is more easily said than done.