In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

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

In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings - much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.

Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation