If you study the words in ads for a real-estate agent’s own home, meanwhile, you see that she indeed emphasizes descriptive terms (especially new, granite, maple, and move-in condition) and avoids emp...
If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying I don’t know is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least f...
If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.
How can this type of data be made to tell a reliable story? By subjecting it to the economist’s favorite trick: regression analysis. No, regression analysis is not some forgotten form of psychiatric t...
He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million? he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn’t much to see—but still, $1 mi...
Each of us develops a moral compass (some stronger than others, to be sure) as we make our way through the world. This is for the most part a wonderful thing. Who wants to live in a world where people...
Digamos, contudo, que fosse possível desenvolver um algoritmo bancário 99% exato. Vamos assumir que o Reino Unido tenha 500 terroristas. O algoritmo identificaria corretamente 495 deles, ou 99%. No en...
Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.
Desde mediados de los años sesenta hasta mediados de los noventa, la actividad ciclónica estuvo moderada por la oscilación atlántica multidecenial, un ciclo climático recurrente, de sesenta a ochenta...
Desde 1985, los estados con altos índices de aborto han experimentado una caída de aproximadamente el 30% en el crimen respecto a los estados con bajo índice de abortos.
Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?
But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson, promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assignment: to visit Chicago’s poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and...
As with most bad behaviors, drunk driving could probably be wiped out entirely if a strong-enough incentive were instituted—random roadblocks, for instance, where drunk drivers are executed on the spo...
As we suggested near the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.
As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Armed with information, experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear. Fear that your children will find you dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack if you do not have angioplasty sur...
Anyway, this is just the latest example of why I never trust statistics I get from people in the field of medicine, ever.
Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion.
And then there’s the tale of an economist on holiday in Las Vegas. He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million? he asked...
An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.