There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties.

Information is the currency of the Internet.

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.

journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.

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.

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.

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

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 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.