Sublime

Girls in Kenya know perfectly well that unprotected sex leads to pregnancy. But if they think that the prospective father will feel obliged to take care of them once they give birth to his child, getting pregnant may not be such a bad thing after all. In fact, for the girls who cannot afford a school uniform and therefore cannot stay in school, hav

Imposing negative interest rates is strip-mining the capital stock.

Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, published a paper in 1984 called “The 2 Sigma Problem.”1 In this paper, Bloom reported that the average student tutored one-to-one performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a conventional classroom environment. This means that the average tutored student scored higher than 98 per

John Carlin, “If the World’s Greatest Chef Cooked for a Living, He’d Starve,” Guardian, December 11, 2006, http://observer.theguardian.com/foodmonthly/futureoffood/story/0,,1969713,00.html

Economics is, at best, four loosely related disciplines: applied logic, statistical analysis, social theorizing, and historical analysis.

Small incentives, like giving dal for vaccines, are another way to nudge people, by giving them a reason to act today, rather than indefinitely postpone.

Ad testing.

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.