Sublime

It is that many of the characteristics of human reasoning which behavioural economics describes as biases are in fact adaptive – beneficial to success – in the large real worlds in which people live, even if they are sometimes misleading in the small worlds created for the purposes of economic modelling and experimental psychology. It is an account

The government (or a well-meaning NGO) should make the option that it thinks is the best for most people the default choice, so that people will need to actively move away from it if they want to.

In a well-functioning democracy, institutions reduce the risks that accompany conformity, in part because they ensure that conformists will see and learn from dissenters, and hence increase the likelihood that more information will emerge, to the benefit of all. A high-level official during World War II attributed the successes of the Allies, and t

Good policy uses incentives to channel behavior toward some desired outcome. Bad policy either ignores incentives, or fails to anticipate how rational individuals might change their behavior to avoid being penalized.

One of the problems is that whereas everyone is in favor of the principle of making the tax code simpler, groups organize to oppose getting rid of the particular tax breaks from which they benefit.

Network centralization made the entire population—both Democrats and Republicans—biased toward the central person’s viewpoint.

Even the most inventive, aggressive, and original legal argument is constructed upon that which came before—prior court cases, constitutions, and existing statutes and regulations.

In his desire to wrest sole control of risk policy from experts, Slovic has challenged the foundation of their expertise: the idea that risk is objective.