In examining the income gap between black and white adults—it is well established that blacks earn significantly less—scholars have found that the gap is virtually eradicated if the blacks’ lower eigh...
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 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. But if you ask the wrong question, you are almost gua...
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...
Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren’t we petrified of them?
Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
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...
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.
But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.
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...
But as we’ve seen lately, such predictions are generally worthless.
Beliefs, things we hold to be true but which may not be easily verified.
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.
Anyway, this is just the latest example of why I never trust statistics I get from people in the field of medicine, ever.
An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
Among the best solutions: using disposable blood-pressure cuffs on incoming patients; infusing hospital equipment with silver ion particles to create an antimicrobial shield; and forbidding doctors to...
Advertising too is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wisdom. Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled...
A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person.