Not long ago, I had the pleasure of reading Fooling Houdini, by Alex Stone. It is a marvelous book, part memoir about how his obsession with magic pulled him away from his career in physics, but also a wonderful explanation of the psychology of how magic works its wonders. Get rid of all those images…
Would you rather work in a stimulating, challenging job or a routine one filled with mundane repetition? Almost everyone would say they prefer the former. But a new study finds that people typically contradict themselves once salaries enter the decision. If the two jobs pay the same, people often opt to put out less effort, not more….
Physicians need to broach discussions about out-of-pocket costs with patients the same way they discuss a treatment’s side effects, public policy professors wrote. “Admittedly, out-of-pocket costs are difficult to predict, but so are many medical outcomes that are nevertheless included in clinical discussions,” Peter Ubel, MD, of Duke University’s School of Public Policy, and colleagues wrote….
Here is a link to an article I co-authored in the New England Journal this week, with Yousuf Zafar and Amy Abernethy. In the article, we urge physicians to talk about out-of-pocket costs with patients, given that these costs can sometimes have a bigger negative impact on their lives than the kind of treatment side…
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. (Click here to view comments)
A recent article in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, my former hometown newspaper, made the kind of statement that is all too common in popular reporting on behavioral economics: “The idea that we humans are not that smart comes from behavioral economics.” Really? Behavioral economics discovered stupidity? Irrationality? The limits of human intelligence? That is…
To almost every claim that the American healthcare system is overpriced, defenders of the United States can point to the comparison problem—it is not fair to compare American surgeons, or hospitals, to our peers in Europe when American surgeons and hospitals are not the same as in those other countries. Our surgeons are better trained,…
In an eye opening article on Aborigines, Michael Finkel paints a colorful picture of the local landscape: The pilot flew low over the bush, the trees thin and straight and widely spaced, like a bad hair transplant. Maybe the Aussie government needs to invest in Tree Club for Men. (Click here to view comments)
In a recent article in the Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley argues that we should dramatically diminish, or even get rid of, high school sports in the United States, because they are throwing off our priorities and sucking up our funding. I began the article with even more than my typical skeptical eye, having written not long ago…
Here is an excellent picture from the New England Journal of Medicine, illustrating which states have chosen to run their own exchanges, which are relying on the federal government, and which are following some kind of hybrid approach. Unsurprisingly, the distribution of states pretty closely mirrors the outcome of the most recent presidential election. (Click…