Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?s...
Los rumiantes del mundo son responsables, aproximadamente, de un 50 por ciento más de gas de efecto invernadero que todo el sector de los transportes.
Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios. Todos los días hay páginas de periódicos e informativos de televisión que llenar, y un experto que aporte una...
Look around the world and you’ll find overwhelming evidence of the herd mentality at work.
Lo que realmente importa para un candidato político no es cuánto gasta, sino quién es.
La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.
La Ley de Especies en Peligro generó un incentivo similarmente perverso. Cuando los terratenientes temen que su propiedad sea un hábitat atractivo para un animal en peligro de extinción, o incluso un...
Just how are the black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers’ education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools att...
It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know. That’s a shame, for unti...
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent—all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not...
If asked how we'd behave in a situation that pits a private benefit against the greater good, most of us won't admit to favoring the private benefit. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether...
Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they’re hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.
Here’s a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—at least highly motivated, and...
For until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.
Figure out what people really care about, not what they say they care about.
Few people think more than two or three times a year, Shaw reportedly said. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
Enter, therefore, a new and ingenious variant of Ultimatum, this one called Dictator. Once again, a small pool of money is divided between two people. But in this case, only one person gets to make a...
Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other. Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; do...
Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This dispar...