People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

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

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

In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.