Thesis: By unraveling your life’s secret codes, you can turn your view of the way things work upside down- and discover a totally new way of seeing the world.
Specific Things to Remember:
- Don’t try to look at the forest while standing in the trees. Sometimes “unrelated” factors have the biggest impact.
- Money hardly matters at all with politics – it’s charisma.
- Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
- The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
- Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
- “Experts”- from criminologists to real-estate agents – use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.
- Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
- Financial incentives to “not” do something backfire – people pay for convenience – make sure the cost is painful enough to your specific bracket.
- If you hold the information and don’t share it – you have power. Mystery = power.
- Terms related to a higher real estate sale:
- Granite
- State-of-the-art
- Corian
- Maple
- Gourmet
- Terms related to a lower real estate sale:
- Fantastic
- Spacious
- !
- Charming
- Great Neighborhood
- Abortions = lower crime rate.
- Peer groups matter more than any other parenting choice.
- Factors that strongly correlate with student test scores:
- Highly educated parents
- Parents’ high socioeconomic status
- Mother was 30 or older at birth
- Low birthweight
- Speaking English at home
- Adopted child
- Parents involved in PTA
- Lots of books in the home
- Irish and Jewish names invoke smart children