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August 17, 2020 - January 27, 2022
just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other.
What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are.
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
the science of economics is primarily a set of tools,
The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.
An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.
There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties.
Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right.
For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it.
If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work,
The Internet has proven particularly fruitful for situations in which a face-to-face encounter with an expert might actually exacerbate the problem of asymmetrical information—situations in which an expert uses his informational advantage to make us feel stupid or rushed or cheap or ignoble.
Though extraordinarily diverse, these crimes all have a common trait: they were sins of information. Most of them involved an expert, or a gang of experts, promoting false information or hiding true information; in each case the experts were trying to keep the information asymmetry as asymmetrical as possible.
So a big part of a real-estate agent’s job, it would seem, is to persuade the homeowner to sell for less than he would like while at the same time letting potential buyers know that a house can be bought for less than its listing price.
The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good.
Listerine’s new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate’s rotten breath. “Can I be happy with him in spite of that?” one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, “Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.” In just seven years, the company’s revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.
