Stephen J Dubner Quotes

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Statistics on religious affiliation are notoriously slippery: the government isn't allowed to gather such data, and the membership claims of religious organizations aren't entirely reliable.

The movement toward choosing religion, rampant as it is, shouldn't be surprising. Ours is an era marked by the desire to define - or redefine - ourselves.

Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

The things you think that really change your life a lot, don't.

I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don't want to steal; they don't want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.

One of the strangest unintended consequences of abortion, of legalized abortion, was that it drives the crime rate down because what abortion really was, was a mechanism for which fewer unwanted children could be born.

People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.

Cancer is, in general, an increasingly important topic, in part because we've gotten so good at preventing other forms of death that cancer, despite some gains made against it, is becoming even more prominent.

If the world gets a lot hotter in a hurry and the primary aim is to cool it down, then the current plan of carbon mitigation will almost certainly not be effective. It'll be too little, too late, and too optimistic - in large part because the atmospheric half-life of CO2 is roughly 100 years.

I like to bring my kids to the voting booth to show them how it works. I'll let them draw their own conclusions as to how worthwhile it is.

We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.

We're surrounded by big problems and people who have been attacking the same big problems for years and years and years and years, and often they're not getting anywhere.

Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.

What would you rather do? Fix a small problem well or answer a small problem well or flail around at the big ones and pay a lot of lip service?

What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'

I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college.

Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.

I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life.

Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.

We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true?

If I make the mistake of eating breakfast, I want to go back to bed and/or eat again immediately.

If the day's writing has been particularly good or particularly bad, a glass of scotch will be involved.

While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.

The world is complicated. But does every problem require a complicated solution?

We took our Catholicism very seriously. We never missed Mass; our father was a lector, and both our parents taught catechism. At 3 in the afternoon on Good Friday, we gathered in the living room for 10 minutes of silence in front of a painting of the Crucifixion.

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