I got an unusual email message a little while ago. It was from someone I had never met before, and it wasn’t obvious to me, at first, why this person was contacting me. The email began like this: “I am an engineer and I work in a company of public passenger transport in Buenos Aires….
The world is complicated. It’s hard to know what the federal government should do about a whole range of problems. That’s why most people take a shortcut, and judge policies based on their opinion of the people who support or oppose those policies. If you like someone, and he supports a policy, then you are…
Thanks to Josh Grey for the image.
I love behavioral science. I love public policy. And I am obsessed with music. So you can see why I think the nudge pictured below may be the coolest thing on the planet! It encourages drivers to drive at an appropriate speed, so they can hear music created by their passage over the road: I…
Here is a public service advertisement, promoting vaccines. (Thanks to Michelle Meyer for making me aware of it.) It harkens back to a day when vaccines weren’t yet available for diseases like polio: Do you think it will work?
Here is data from the CDC, on the percent of Americans without health insurance. It shows that Obamacare, for all its strengths and weaknesses, is definitely addressing one major problem in the US:
The MacOS has a new self control app called, straightforwardly, SelfControl. The app has an ominous icon, which looks like a cross between a poker game gone wrong and the warning symbol on a bottle of poisonous chemicals: The app gives users the ability to temporarily block websites, which they know they are wasting too…
Here is the opening of an article I recently published in JAMA, available now online, in which I raise concerns about misguided congressional efforts to promote the use of high-value healthcare services, without doing anything to reduce the use of low value ones. Health care systems around the world are under pressure to restrain health…
The United States Medicare program is forbidden, by law, from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies. This was part of a negotiation that was reached at the time that the government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, created Medicare Part D, to cover prescription benefits for Medicare recipients. The pharmaceutical industry was quite worried that government…