What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that...
We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he...
Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.
The goal of the e-mail is not so much to attract viable users as to repel the non-viable ones, who greatly outnumber them.
The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’...
Morning robberies yield far more than afternoon robberies . . .' - When to Rob a Bank: A Rouge Economist's Guide to the World by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
When someone is heavily invested in his or her opinion, it is inevitably hard to change the person’s mind.
Teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even C.I.A. analysts. But numbers don’t.
When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong. This is not...
El primer secreto a la hora de formular preguntas es determinar si nuestra pregunta es buena. Que no se haya planteado antes no significa que sea buena. La gente inteligente lleva unos cuantos siglos...
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.
Smart people love to make smart-sounding predictions, no matter how wrong they may turn out to be.
Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios.
Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace?
An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
The gap steadily grows over the second and third grades.
The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes. Earning big money in the crack gang wasn’t much more likely than t...
Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?
It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fi...
An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.
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