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July 23 - July 28, 2025
the economic approach “does not assume that individuals are motivated solely by selfishness or gain. It is a method of analysis, not an assumption about particular motivations…. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.”
The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.
Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love—yes, your nana told you this too—because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.
Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.
Craig Feied
“The state of current medical practice is so bad right now that there’s not very much worth protecting about the old ways of doing things,” Feied says. “Nobody in medicine wants to admit this but it’s the truth.”
So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.
So although health-care advocates may urge universal screening for all sorts of maladies, the reality is that the system would be overwhelmed by false positives and the sick would be crowded out.
Most giving is, as economists call it, impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.
If John List’s research proves anything, it’s that a question like “Are people innately altruistic?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren’t “good” or “bad.” People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.
recent crashes and old ones, in vehicles large and small, in single-car crashes and pileups, there is no evidence that car seats are better than seat belts in saving the lives of children two and older.
The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector.
The imprecision inherent in climate science means we don’t know with any certainty whether our current path will lead temperatures to rise two degrees or ten degrees. Nor do we really know if even a steep rise means an inconvenience or the end of civilization as we know it.
“Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.”
What’s an externality? It’s what happens when someone takes an action but someone else, without agreeing, pays some or all the costs of that action. An externality is an economic version of taxation without representation.
“We’re trying to predict climate change twenty to thirty years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.”
There’s nothing special about today’s carbon-dioxide level, or today’s sea level, or today’s temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere—it’s just that it’s increasing too fast.”
“The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat—which contributes to global warming.”
“If you believe that the scary stories could be true, or even possible, then you should also admit that relying only on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is not a very good answer,” he says. In other words: it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions. “The scary scenarios could occur even if we make herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, in which case the only real answer is geoengineering.”
A raft of recent studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.
In a 1999 report called “To Err Is Human,” the Institute of Medicine estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year because of preventable hospital errors—more than deaths from motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer—and that one of the leading errors is wound infection. The best medicine for stopping infections? Getting doctors to wash their hands more frequently.
When was the last time you sat for an hour of pure, unadulterated thinking? If you’re like most people, it’s been a while. Is this simply a function of our high-speed era? Perhaps not. The absurdly talented George Bernard Shaw – a world-class writer and a founder of the London School of Economics – noted this thought deficit many years ago. “Few people think more than two or three times a year,” Shaw reportedly said. “I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
Because there is so much emotion attached to healthcare, it can be hard to see that it is, by and large, just like any other part of the economy. But healthcare, under a setup like the U.K.’s, is virtually the only part of the economy where someone can go out and get nearly any service they need and pay close to zero, whether the actual cost of the procedure is $100 or $100,000. What’s wrong with that? When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.
