The market was particularly strong in Chicago, which had more than a thousand known brothels.
The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.
The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.
The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong.
The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time, he continues. So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes. The...
The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
The best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.
That is the idea behind a prize-linked savings (PLS) account.
Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.
Some people would argue that we don’t do a very good job. But taking the long view, that is clearly not true. Consider the historical trend in homicide (not including wars), which is both the most rel...
So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn’t want to be persuaded?The first step is to appreciate that your opponent’s opinion is likely based less on fact and lo...
So there is little doubt that financial incentives work well, even if the outcome is undesirable. Consider a 2011 traffic accident in the Chinese city of Foshan. A two-year-old girl, walking through a...
Saber e fazer são duas coisas diferentes, principalmente quando a situação envolve prazer.
Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,
Rising sea levels, for instance, aren’t being driven primarily by glaciers melting, Wood says, no matter how useful that image may be for environmental activists. The truth is far less sexy. It is dri...
Peter Leeson, whose research has covered topics like Gypsy law and pirate economics, did just that.
People aren’t good or bad. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.
Overall, a portfolio of the good to great companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.
One of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.
ONCE YOU STRIP AWAY the religious fervor and scientific complexity, an incredibly simple dilemma lies at the heart of global warming. Economists fondly call it an externality. What’s an externality? I...