| Economics is, at root, the study of incentives. |
| If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world. |
| The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public. |
| Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists. |
| There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one to every adult, you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns. |
| Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control. |
| Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. |
| An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation. |
| If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. |
| If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is. |
| When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight. |
| Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary. |
| An expert must be bold, if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. |
| There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. |
