Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

Even if you are planning a birth with an epidural, the evidence suggests that a doula can help make things go much more smoothly.

Education campaigns ... may not be enough, at least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior.

As people do a task, they improve at it.

Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.