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Steven D. Levitt Biography
Steven Levitt is a much-heralded young scholar, who studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing—and whose conclusions regularly turn conventional wisdom on its head.
In April 2005 his first book, Freakonomics (coauthored with Stephen Dubner), came out and is now a New York Times bestseller. In the book, Levitt sets out to explore the hidden side of…well, everything—the inner-workings of a crack gang, the truth about real-estate agents, the myths of campaign finance, the tell-tale marks of a cheating schoolteacher, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan and much more. Along with Dubner, Levitt has also started a blog available at www.freakonomics.com, where they discuss their book among other things.
Levitt is known as a prolific author of research papers on various topics that are not all closely connected to traditional economics. He is an empirical researcher whose interests also span politics, sociology and law. Some usual subjects for Levitt are crime, abortion and sports. For example, his An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances (2000) analyzes a hand-written “accounting” of a criminal gang, and draws conclusions about the income distribution between gang members.
In 2003, Levitt was awarded the esteemed John Bates Clark Medal, as the most influential economist in America under the age of 40. The award is often considered a precursor to the Nobel Prize.
Levitt graduated from Harvard University in 1989, received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1994 and is currently (2005) the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the director of the Initiative on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago.
A 37-year old self-effacing mid-western father of four, Levitt has an enormous curiosity and is set on course by personal experiences and the incongruities he sees in everyday life. He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found and devises ways to measure an effect that veteran economists have declared un-measurable. He has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.