Sublime

But it can also go the other way. What economics has missed is that adding an incentive—a fine or a bonus—may be subtracting something else, the individual’s sense of responsibility, or obligation, or intrinsic pleasure.

Sometimes old-fashioned beats cutting-edge.

Nature’s laws do not change very much. So long as the store of human knowledge continues to expand, as it has since Gutenberg’s printing press, we will slowly come to a better understanding of nature’s signals, if never all its secrets. And yet if science and technology are the heroes of this book, there is the risk in the age of Big Data about bec

future. One of the main lessons of behavioral economics is that small changes to the environment we live in matter.

Why the Future Shocks Us

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

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