The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.

journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom.

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

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.

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.

the story of Feldman’s bagel business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics. Yes, a lot of people steal from him, but the vast majority, even though no one is watching over them, do not.

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

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.

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.