I recently chimed in on a healthy debate on the Harvard Business School website about the role that irrationality played in creating our current economic crisis. I’m including my comment here, but you can click below to see the entire debate. “Two cents from a primary care physician: I am a physician at the University…
Lance Armstrong will soon be competing again in bicycle races around the world, meaning that the casual biking fan will once again show interest in the sport. It also means that doping allegations against Armstrong are likely to resume. If Lance wins some big races — at his age and after so long away from…
Check out this clever takeoff of the Mac/PC ads by my friend Dan Ariely, in which he portrays standard economics as a PC and behavioral economics, my specialty, as an iMac.
If President-elect Obama wants to know the challenges he can expect to contend with in his first 100 days of office, his “honeymoon period,” he need look no further than the state of Michigan. I’m not talking about what he can learn from Michigan about unemployment, where we are #1! I’m not talking about lessons…
Paying Doctors Less Is the Key to Better Coverage Conservatives propose to control healthcare costs by bringing the discipline of the free market to bear upon the healthcare system. Some progressive groups advocate controlling costs with a more interventionist plan. But neither approach, as far as I have seen, adequately confronts one of the biggest…
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in what the World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, described as the planet’s largest brainstorming session. Approximately 700 leading thinkers (and me, too) converged upon Dubai to discuss the greatest economic challenges facing the world, from the current economic crisis to future crises. People from 6 continents…
Here in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, things are getting even uglier, with the other side lobbing misleading verbal attacks while our side tries to remain above the fray. With this kind of negativity and distortion, it is hard to imagine the winning candidate being able to pull the country back together. But…
Despite Barack Obama’s recent surge in the polls, much could change between now and election day. While it looks like this election will be decided by the economy, unexpected events could dramatically change the campaign narrative. Terrorists could conduct an attack inside the US. Obama, despite his two years of steady poise, could say something…
Barack Obama would like the next two debates to be about the economy. John McCain would like them to be about anything but the economy, preferably with plenty of discussion of 60’s radicals and crazy preachers. McCain won’t get his way, of course. We will hear discussions of the bailout, taxes, health care and the…
This Friday, John McCain and Barack Obama will presumably (John McCain willing) square off in the first presidential debate of the season. For people like you, interested enough in politics to be reading this post, the outcome of the debate is already largely determined — your favorite candidate will not only win the debate, but…