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In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom.
a person using a computer experiences “cognitive drift” if more than one second elapses between clicking the mouse and seeing new data on the screen. If ten seconds pass, the person’s mind is somewhere else entirely.
Consider the evidence from a series of widespread doctor strikes in Los Angeles, Israel, and Colombia. It turns out that the death rate dropped significantly in those places, anywhere from 18 percent to 50 percent, when the doctors stopped working!
Our claim is that children who grew up watching a lot of TV, even the most innocuous family-friendly shows, were more likely to engage in crime when they got older.
It suggests that when a person comes into some money honestly and believes that another person has done the same, she neither gives away what she earned nor takes what doesn’t belong to her.
Scholars long before John List pointed out that behavioral experiments in a college lab are “the science of just those sophomores who volunteer to participate in research and who also keep their appointment with the investigator.” Moreover, such volunteers tend to be “scientific do-gooders” who “typically have…[a] higher need for approval and lower authoritarianism than non-volunteers.”
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.
In 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. In certain kinds of crashes—rear-enders, for instance—car seats actually perform slightly worse.
“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.”
When people aren’t compelled to pay the full cost of their actions, they have little incentive to change their behavior.
It would cost $50 million less to stop global warming than what Al Gore’s foundation is paying just to increase public awareness about global warming.
