Steven Levitt
About
Economist (Freakonomics) who became a top poker player
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Claims by Steven Levitt (20 of 26)
Ideas Need Proof Of Concept To Win
Ideas alone are not enough to change policy; what is missing is the entrepreneurial intermediate stage of taking an idea to a working proof of concept, which is what RISC aims to do—demonstrating in Cook County that monitoring works, saves money, and is replicable via open-source software so other jurisdictions can adopt it turnkey.
Causal-Inference Skills Became Commoditized
When natural-experiment and causal-inference techniques were new 30 years ago, doing them was a scarce, hard talent that carried academic rewards; now there is a cookie-cutter recipe for extracting causal results from a law change, so the skill is no longer scarce and academics have moved on to complicated structural models, making economics less policy-relevant.
Interviewing Is Harder And Induces Flow
Levitt found interviewing surprisingly harder than being interviewed, carrying a real sense of obligation and weight, and discovered that the deep preparation for interviews puts him into a flow state—an intense immersion he rarely experiences in his other work.
Levitt Uses Economic Tools On Non-Economic Questions
Levitt sees himself as not a conventional economist but as data-driven and interested in society and culture, using economic tools (especially incentives and externalities) to study questions at the edges of what counts as economics.
Tricking The Inattentive Beats Educating Them
Because people are busy and inattentive rather than stupid, it is often easier to get desired outcomes by quietly changing defaults or design ('tricking' people) than by educating them or changing incentives—an insight Levitt credits to Thaler and now places at the top of his toolkit, while noting it raises ethical concerns.
Behavioral Economics Effects Are Small In Real World
Behavioral Economics produces large behavioral effects in laboratory experiments, but in the real world most nudges (with the exception of defaults like automatic retirement enrollment) yield only modest results, while getting incentives and prices right is often far more powerful.
Internet Lets Patients Outlearn Doctors On Rare Conditions
For a relatively rare medical condition, an individual can study hard for a day and come to know more about that specific malady than their general-practitioner doctor, illustrating how the Internet has dramatically increased the availability and usefulness of information to individuals.
Science Used As Weapon Against Climate Argument
After SuperFreakonomics discussed climate change, a group invoking the authority of science (the Union of Concerned Scientists) ran what Levitt characterizes as a propaganda exercise to discredit them, even though the book cited top scientists' work in Nature and Science, illustrating how the reputation of science can be strategically weaponized regardless of truth.
Climate Needs Technological Not Moral Solutions
Asking people to 'do the right thing' on climate change when the benefits accrue to others never really works; therefore any real solution to climate change will likely be a technological one—a position Levitt says the world has increasingly moved toward over the past decade.
Marginal Pay Changed Department Course Offerings
When the University changed incentives so the Economics Department was paid on the margin for additional students taking courses, Levitt and List responded by creating a popular non-majors economics course that drew about 500 students—demonstrating that incentive structures shape even academic behavior.
Chemotherapy Incentive System Is Perverse
Much chemotherapy is relatively ineffective with enormous side effects and high expense, yet a perverse incentive system in which doctors receive part of the revenue from selling the treatments sustains its use; if patients understood this system better they would be less open to it.
Chicago Economists Violate Their Own Principles
Levitt observed repeated 'defining moments' in which University of Chicago economists, brilliant at applying Chicago economics in their papers, made real-life departmental decisions (classroom allocation, tenure timing, allocating trivial sums) completely at odds with the rational, incentive-based reasoning they espouse professionally.
KKK And OrangeJello Were Journalism Errors
The two things in Freakonomics that turned out to be plain wrong—the Stetson Kennedy KKK infiltration story and the OrangeJello/LemonJello naming anecdote—were both based on credible-seeming sources rather than Levitt's own data analysis, while his research-based findings have stood the test of time.
Economics Ignores Suspected Fraud Due To Fragmentation
Unlike psychology where suspected fraud carries huge penalties, economics tolerates suspected fabrication because the field's problem space is so vast relative to the number of economists that only a handful care about any one result; Levitt and List failed to replicate two outrageous experimental papers and suspected fraud, but editors forced them to remove fraud language and the author paid no price.
Most Economics Papers Cannot Be Truly Replicated
Replication in economics is narrowly defined as whether posted code reproduces the published tables, but starting from raw data most—if not all—papers contain enormous numbers of mistakes; most such errors push results toward zero rather than away from it, and full replication is unlikely to happen for most findings.
Academia Rewards Small Questions Answered Completely
Academia does not reward answering big questions halfway; it rewards answering little questions 100% of the way, which produces a systematic under-investment in broad thinking (like why China succeeded) because there is no academic return to it.
GPS Monitoring Could Slash Crime And Prison Population
Placing GPS monitoring on people under criminal-justice jurisdiction creates a strong deterrent—monitored people commit virtually no crime because locations can be cross-referenced with crime databases—so offering voluntary early release in exchange for monitoring could, by back-of-envelope estimates, reduce violent crime by 25% while simultaneously reducing the prison population by 25%, benefiting government, society, and offenders.
Hard Social Problems Go Unsolved Or Have Unpopular Answers
Big social problems remain unsolved either because they are genuinely too hard, or because the answers are not that hard but are so unpopular that no one with common sense will pursue them—so a center freed from caring about being liked can carve out a different space by tackling those unpopular-but-effective solutions.
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