Undisclosed Income

Levitt is a sought-after corporate speaker who regularly gets paid to entertain investment banks, financial services firms and union-busting "human resource" outfits like the Society for Human Resource Management. Levitt produced timely research defending the online gambling industry, without disclosing that he worked to develop analytical tools for at least one online gambling company.

In 2009, Levitt started an opaque business consulting company called the Greatest Good. In 2011, Levitt charged $3,000 per hour for web-based business consulting.

Smoking Gun Quotes

"I almost always believe in free markets as the solution to problems"

—Freakonomics Blog; January 23, 2012

"I would privatize prison industry. As long as the government is in charge of prison industries, it will be difficult if not impossible to avoid decisions being made with political rather than economic justifications"

—From a 1999 paper presented at the prison labor symposium hosted by a private-prison consulting firm

"Fertility declines [due to legalized abortion] for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared with 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent."

—From a 2001 paper arguing that an increase in abortions among black women in the 1970s was the reason for lower crime rates in the 1990s

"Any religion . . . has its heretics, and global warming is no exception."

—From a section in SuperFreakonomics "that debunked" global warming science