As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

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

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.

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

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.