After recent events, one might wonder if the macroeconomy is the domain of any economist.
And while it sounds bad to hear that Americans underpay their taxes by nearly one-fifth, the tax economist Joel Slemrod estimates that the U.S. is easily within the upper tier of worldwide compliance...
Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion. A story, meanwhile, fills out the picture. It uses data, statistical or otherwise, to portray a sense of magnitude; without data, we have no id...
Ante cualquier incentivo, cualquier situación, la gente deshonesta tratará de obtener un beneficio sin importar los medios a emplear.
Anyway, this is just the latest example of why I never trust statistics I get from people in the field of medicine, ever.
As the Inuits say, Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.
But if there is one thing we’ve learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any inte...
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.
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...
Households that got the once-and-done letter were twice as likely to become first-time donors as people who got a regular solicitation letter. By fund-raising standards, this was a colossal gain. Thes...
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...
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.
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...
In Levitt’s view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instanc...
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...
Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, a...
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...
It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising in...
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...
It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)
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