When was the last time you sat for an hour of pure, unadulterated thinking?
To an economist, the strategy is obvious. Since even a penny is more valuable than nothing, it makes sense for Zelda to accept an offer as low as a penny—and, therefore, it makes sense for Annika to o...
To Borody and a small band of like-minded brethren who believe in the power of poop, we are standing at the threshold of a new era in medicine. Borody sees the benefits of fecal therapy as equivalent...
Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we’ve learned from a lifet...
The theme of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was the innate honesty of mankind. How selfish soever man may be supposed, Smith wrote, there are evidently some principles in his natu...
The takeaway here is simple but powerful: just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a dee...
The same thing happens if health care is distributed in a similar fashion: people consume more of it than if they were charged the sticker price. This means the worried well crowd out the truly sick,...
The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say I don’t know—and then follow up, certainly, with but maybe I can find out. And work as hard as you can to do...
The basic reality, Sandman told the New York Times , is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.
The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.
Stories also appeal to the narcissist in all of us. As a story unspools, with its cast of characters moving through time and making decisions, we inevitably put ourselves in their shoes. Yes, I would...
So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting—though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never tru...
Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.
Según un estudio el hijo típico que no nació en los primeros años tras la legalización del aborto habría tenido un 50% más de probabilidades de vivir en la pobreza que la media; también un 60% más de...
One of the best things about having a blog is that you’ve got a place to run your craziest ideas up the flagpole and see just how quickly they get shot down.
Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.
Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than...
Journalists need experts as badly as experts need journalists.
Human beings aren't the most candid animals on the planet. We'll often say one thing and do another—or, more precisely, we’ll say what we think other people want to hear and then, in private, do what...
How selfish soever man may be supposed, Smith wrote, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though...