Freakonomics

hopes (each race fields a slate of 43 cars), a few bad crashes might. So Nascar has reduced a danger incentive but imposed a financial incentive, thus maintaining the delicate and masterful balance it has cultivated: it has enough crashes to satisfy its fans but not too many to destroy the sport—or its drivers.

more than we thought. So we’ve

team would load up the car and go home,” says Gary Nelson, who runs Nascar’s research and development center.

Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.

We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon.

The neighborhood’s median income was about $15,000 a year, well less than half the U.S. average. During the years that Venkatesh lived with J. T.’s gang, foot soldiers often asked his help in landing what they called “a good job”: working as a janitor at the University of Chicago.

The answer lies in finding the right data, and the secret to finding the right data usually means finding the right person—which is more easily said than done.

journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.

It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false—noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking—is a nice place to start asking questions.