Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller

the world is complicated. Actions we take today can have distant effects, most of them unintended. Ideas spread—sometimes slowly; other times exponentially, like viruses. People respond in unpredictable ways to incentives.

Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

Every day, I track the digital trails that people leave as they make their way across the web. From the buttons or keys we click or tap, I try to understand what we really want, what we will really do, and who we really are.

Allowing us to do many causal experiments is the fourth power of Big Data.

measure are often not exactly what we care about. We can measure how students do on multiple-choice questions.

Firms believe they know how effective their ads are. Economists are skeptical they really do.

The reason for the relationship doesn’t matter. But the relationship itself does.

Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”

It is an unfortunate truth about the world that you will have a much easier time getting new insights about racism, child abuse, or abortion than you will getting a new, profitable insight into how a business is performing. That’s because massive resources are already devoted to looking for even the slightest edge in measuring business performance.