I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time - in the stock market, in reports of crime and natural disaster, etc. The fact is that big, noisy, anomalous events catch our attention because they're anomalous, which isn't a problem in and of itself.

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

Spielberg may have intended 'Schindler's List' as the opposite of entertainment, but the film grossed $321 million and engaged audiences as only entertainment can, coaxing them to cry and shudder, leaving their hearts more heavy than broken.

Stephen J. Dubner

That's what's good about the digital revolution is it makes information asymmetry much harder to maintain.

Stephen J. Dubner

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

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

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?'

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

As everyone knows, tips constitute the bulk of a waiter's or waitress's income. But they are also optional, at least in theory. Does it really seem like a good idea to make someone's salary so susceptible to customers' whims on a given day - or whether any customers happen to show up at all?

Stephen J. Dubner

When certain people have certain beliefs, they can be unyielding, and that's really what faith is. There's a large place in the world for faith, but when it comes to a scientific, political, and economic issue, dogma is not a very good place to start.

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

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

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they're also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don't know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don't.

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.

Stephen J. Dubner

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

Religion is a way to make order from chaos, and I think economics is not dissimilar. In religion and in economics, you're trying to figure out the way we perceive the world and move through it, and that's what I like to learn.

Stephen J. Dubner

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

Stephen J. Dubner

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

Stephen J. Dubner

A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.

Stephen J. Dubner