Steven D. Levitt

Nor should failure be considered a total loss.

David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hundred academic publications, he has explored the relationship between suicide and, among other things, alcohol, anger, antidepressants, astrological signs, biochemistry, blood type, body type, depression, drug abuse, gun control, happiness, holidays, Internet use, IQ, mental illness, migraines, the moon, music, national-anthem lyrics, personality type, sexuality, smoking, spirituality, TV watching, and wide-open spaces. Has all this study led Lester to some grand unified theory of suicide? Hardly. So far he has one compelling notion. It__ what might be called the __o one left to blame_ theory of suicide. While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. __f you__e unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on__f it__ the government, or the economy, or something__hen that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,_ he says. __t__ when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I__e used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.

There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.

A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.

But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.

Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.

The fact is that solving problem is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer one small question well.

An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

When the solution to a given problem doesn__ lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not to say the world is perfect. Nor that all progress is always good. Even widespread societal gains inevitably produce losses for some people. That__ why the economist Joseph Schumpeter referred to capitalism as __reative destruction._ But humankind has a great capacity for finding technological solutions to seemingly intractable problems, and this will likely be the case for global warming. It isn__ that the problem isn__ potentially large. It__ just that human ingenuity__hen given proper incentives__s bound to be larger. Even more encouraging, technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined. Indeed, in the final chapter of this book we__l meet a band of renegade engineers who have developed not one but three global-warming fixes, any of which could be bought for less than the annual sales tally of all the Thoroughbred horses at Keeneland auction house in Kentucky.

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question__hy is there so much crime in modern society?__nd stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail__hereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties__s certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong).

By the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago__ho you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn__ so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it__ who you are.