Freakonomics

if you ask enough questions, strange as they seem at the time, you may eventually learn something worthwhile. The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the qu

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

many people have given him a great deal of credit for damaging an institution that was in grave need of being damaged. This did not come about because Stetson Kennedy was courageous or resolute or unflappable, even though he was all of these. It happened because he understood the raw power of information.

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

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.

It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been g

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.

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.

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out—is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.