Freakonomics

• Excellent. Exactly up my alley.
• Morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how the world really does work.
• Incentives are the cornerstone to modern life. Understanding them is the key to understanding just about any riddle. Mental Models
• The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Conventional wisdom often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through.
• Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.
• "Experts" use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. However they can be beat at their own game.
• Knowing what to measure and how to measure it, makes a complicate world much less so.
• Any incentive is inherently a trade off. The trick is to balance the extremes.
• So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and effects in this world that a 2 penny duty on tea unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the conditions of all its inhabitants,
• April 15th 1987, at midnight 7 million American children suddenly disappeared. Cause: The IRS changed a rule. Instead of listing the name of the dependent children, you now also had to provide a SSN (10% of all dependents vanished)
• IF economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also a science of statistical tool to measure how people respond to those incentives.
• Noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false - noticing perhaps the contrails of sloppy of self-interested thinking - is a nice place to start asking questions.
• Romanian communist party rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a women repeatedly failed to conceive she was forced to pay a "celibacy tax" Of all communist leaders deposed in the years around the Soviet collapse, only the Romanian lead met a violent death. (Claim: the unwanted children grew up to be violent)

Used To Believe

• To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is jarring.
• Be honest about your weaknesses. Rationality