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.
Steven LevittMorality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
Steven LevittSolving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if youโve decided beforehand it canโt be done.
Steven LevittI do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We've come to believe - from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists - that there's another side to be heard.
Steven Levitt