I like to bring my kids to the voting booth to show them how it works. I'll let them draw their own conclusions as to how worthwhile it is.
We're surrounded by big problems and people who have been attacking the same big problems for years and years and years and years, and often they're not getting anywhere.
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.
What would you rather do? Fix a small problem well or answer a small problem well or flail around at the big ones and pay a lot of lip service?
I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college.
Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.
I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for my whole adult life.
Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.
If the day's writing has been particularly good or particularly bad, a glass of scotch will be involved.
We took our Catholicism very seriously. We never missed Mass; our father was a lector, and both our parents taught catechism. At 3 in the afternoon on Good Friday, we gathered in the living room for 10 minutes of silence in front of a painting of the Crucifixion.
Statistics on religious affiliation are notoriously slippery: the government isn't allowed to gather such data, and the membership claims of religious organizations aren't entirely reliable.
The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.
The things you think that really change your life a lot, don't.
I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don't want to steal; they don't want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.
People are being incentivized for the wrong things. We've heard about a lot - doctors for procedures rather than creating wellness or maintaining wellness.
'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.
It's amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don't know the answer to a question or a problem and instead charge forward on a 'gut instinct' that turns out to be crap.
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.
When most people think of economists, they think of macro-economists. Macro-economists try to describe or - even harder - predict the movements of a hugely dynamic system. They're like a transplant surgeon trying to simultaneously transplant every failing organ in someone's body.
These are the two sides of Steven Spielberg: the reverent grown-up who knows when to say the right thing and the exuberant kid who loves a good laugh. Both sides are sincere, and both are necessary, for Spielberg knows he can't feel good about himself unless everyone else feels the same way.
