For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor.

Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less

It may be sad but not surprising to learn that experts can be self-interested to the point of deceit. But they cannot deceive on their own. Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists. Every day there are newspaper pages and television newscasts to be filled, and an expert who can deliver a jarring piece of wisdom is always welcome.Advertising, too, is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wisdom.

Journalists & experts are the architects of conventional wisdom

<ul><li>Taste-based discrimination - one person discriminates simply because he prefers to not interact with a particular type of other person;</li><li>Information-based discrimination - one person believes that another type of person has poor skills and acts accordingly.</li></ul>

Two leading theories of discrimination

If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Epilogue

Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control.

No one is more susceptible to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. Fear is, in fact, a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creature's life, a creature who, in the beginning, is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.

Chapter 5 - Art of parenting

Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven't been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.But if you can question something that people really care about and find an answer that may surprise them - that is, if you can overturn the conventional wisdom - then you may have some luck.

Chapter 3 - Determine if your question is a good one

Experts depend on the fact that you don't have the information that they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn't know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn't dare challenge them.Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terorists, but the principle is the same.

Keep the information asymmetry as asymmetrical as possible

Any incentive is inherently a trade-off; the trick is to balance. For every incentive has its dark side. Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.

A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for

Cheating is more common in the face of a bright-line incentive (the line between winning and losing, for instance) than with a murky incentive.An athlete who gets caught cheating is generally condemned, but most fans at least appreciate his motive: he wanted so badly to win that he bent the rules.

It is true that sports and cheating go hand in hand

A gun is a great disrupter of the natural order. A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Gun advocates believe that gun laws are too strict; opponents believe exactly the opposite.

Whose hands happen to be holding the gun?

A group whose power was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information - once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on your view, right hands), much of the group's advantage disappears. The dissemination of the information diluted its power.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant

The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

It has become so unfashionable to discriminate against certain groups that all but the most insensitive people take pains to at least appear fair-minded, at least in public. This hardly means that discrimination has ended - only that people are embarrassed to show it.

Discrimination is not dead

It's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear - which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

What, exactly, are we afraid of?

People respond strongly to strong incentives. And there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence - which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.

Chapter 2 - Terrorism is so effective

<ul><li>You must start at the bottom to have a shot at the top.</li><li>You must be willing to work long and hard at substandard wages. In order to advance in the tournament, you must prove yourself not merely above average but spectacular.</li><li>Once you come to the sad realization that you will never make it to the top, you will quit the tournament.</li></ul>

The rules of a tournament are straightforward

It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a variety of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a customer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been gravely wounded by the internet.As a medium, the internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. It has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

Information is the currency of the internet

It would be naive to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or as agents of commerce. Agents and experts are people too - which suggests that we are likely to abuse information in our personal lives as well, whether by withholding true information or editing the information we choose to put forth.

We all use information for our own gains

An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.There are three basic flavors of incentive:<ul><li>Economic - they don't want to be punished by law or lose what they have</li><li>Social - they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong</li><li>Moral - they don't want to do something they consider wrong</li></ul>

Chapter 1 - Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life

Minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn't fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it's all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.

Chapter 4 - Broken Window Theory

That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play.

Fear best thrives in the present tense

When there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn't pay well. This is one of the four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.

Immutable law of labor

The legendary bestseller that made millions look at the world in a radically different way returns in a new edition, now including an exclusive discussion between the authors and bestselling professor of psychology Angela Duckworth. Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Which should be feared more: snakes or french fries? Why do sumo wrestlers cheat? In this groundbreaking book, leading economist Steven Levitt—Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and winner of the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal for the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the discipline—reveals that the answers. Joined by acclaimed author and podcast host Stephen J. Dubner, Levitt presents a brilliant—and brilliantly entertaining—account of how incentives of the most hidden sort drive behavior in ways that turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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En esta obra, Levitt y Dubner demuestran, a través de ejemplos y una sarcástica perspicacia, que la economía representa el estudio de los incentivos. ¿Qué resulta más peligroso: una pistola o una piscina? ¿Qué tienen en común un maestro de escuela y un luchador de sumo? ¿Por qué continúan los traficantes de drogas viviendo con sus madres? ¿En qué se parecen el Ku Kux Klan a los agentes inmobiliarios? Quizás éstas no sean las típicas preguntas que se formula un experto en economía, pero Steven D. Levitt y Stephen J. Dubner no son unos economistas muy típicos. Se trata de especialistas que estudian la esencia y los enigmas de la vida cotidiana y cuyas conclusiones, con frecuencia, ponen patas arriba la sabiduría convencional. A través de ejemplos prácticos y de una sarcástica perspicacia, Levitt y Dubner demuestran que la economía, en el fondo, representa el estudio de los incentivos: el modo en que las personas obtienen lo que desean, o necesitan, especialmente cuando otras personas desean o necesitan lo mismo.

Two leading theories of discrimination

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