“When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”

“What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.”

“It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society?—and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail—thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties—is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong).”

“By the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.”

“The fact is that solving problem is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it. Easy problems evaporate; it is the hard ones that linger. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to track down, organize, and analyze the data to answer one small question well.”

“Nor should failure be considered a total loss.”

“But a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.”

“Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.”

“Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.”

“When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”

“Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?”