Supongamos, no obstante, que se puede desarrollar un algoritmo bancario con un 99 por ciento de precisión. Supongamos que en el Reino Unido hay 500 terroristas. El algoritmo identificaría correctament...
So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.
Poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.
Pero la felicidad se entreveía en una docena de formas más. Parece que ése es el resultado de realizar un trabajo interesante con colegas inteligentes en un entorno hermoso, todo con un sentimiento de...
Pero el simple hecho de que dos cosas guarden correlación no implica que una sea la causa de la otra. Una correlación significa, sencillamente, que existe una relación entre dos factores —llamémoslos...
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born...
Never give in, never give in, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty.
Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.
MODERATOR: Tonight, our guest: Thomas Sargent, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the most-cited economists in the world. Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years? SAR...
Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.
Lo que la mayoría de estas circunstancias catastróficas captan mal es la idea fundamental de la economía: las personas responden a incentivos. Si el precio de un artículo asciende, la demanda de éste...
Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government...
La información es un faro, un garrote, una rama de olivo, en total, un elemento de disuasión, dependiendo de quién la maneje y cómo. La información es tan poderosa que la asunción de información, aun...
La distinción entre una mujer que elige controlar su fertilidad y el gobierno que elige limitar su fertilidad es fundamental y la gente con frecuencia parece perder de vista esta diferencia.
La contratación de un mayor número de efectivos policiales explica aproximadamente el 10% del descenso de la criminalidad en los noventa.
It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase conventional wisdom. He did not consider it a compliment. We associate truth with convenience, he wrote, with what...
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote across many genres, including children’s books. In an essay called Why I Write for Children, he explained the appeal. Children read...
Is it a good idea to pass along a family business to the next generation? (Sure, if your goal is to kill off the business—for the data show it’s generally better to bring in an outside manager.
Gut hunches are routinely passed off as dogma while conventional wisdom flourishes even when there is no data to back it up.
Gun murders are down? Well, you figure, that must be from all those tough new gun laws—until you examine the data and find that most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected b...