Information is the currency of the Internet.

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

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.

there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.

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

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.

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

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

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