As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.