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[...] And supporters of “free markets” don’t argue from morality anyway; they short-circuit any such soft-headed appeals by claiming with the sobriety of the realist that markets simply function better. Everyone knows the catechism: markets are the most efficient, predictable, and stable distributi…

AND SO THE CENTERPIECE of the book, Levitt and Dubner’s stone, is an arrant tautology. Incentives are motivation, and motivation is incentives

the invocation of the greatest liberal economist of them all is meant to certify their imputations of maximized utility

It is like the Augustinian version of theodicy: novelists would far rather live in a universe in which negative reviews have the freedom to exist than in one from which such reviews had been banished.

rather than fall into easy pugilism