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.

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

Don't trust, just verify.

The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one.

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.

The gulf between the information we proclaim & the information we know to be true is vast. In other words: we say one thing & do another.

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.