Steven Levitt is an American academic at the University of Chicago, where he is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. He also cofounded the university’s Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2003, which the American Economic Association gives each year to American economists under 40 years old who have made substantial contributions to the field of economics. In 2006 Time magazine named him one of the “100 People Who Shape Our World.” In addition to this book, he has coauthored Freakonomics (2005), SuperFreakonomics (2009), and When to Rob a Bank (2015) with Stephen Dubner.

Levitt earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University (1989) and a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1994). As a child, he wanted to be a professional golfer. Later, when he enrolled in his doctoral program at MIT, it was mainly as means of leaving a management consulting job he disliked. He started out focusing on political economics because it seemed to be a stable and popular area of the field. He found it boring, however, and shifted gears to work on the economics of crime, based on his affinity for the television show Cops.