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.

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.

It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man. But often a small and simple question can help chisel away at the biggest problems.

The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.

journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.

Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

more than we thought. So we’ve

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.

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.