Colon Cancer Screening Controversy. Here's What All The Debate Is About.


I joined two other, much smarter, colleagues in calling for the use of behavioral economics and decision psychology to improve the design of the websites people use to purchase health insurance in the U.S. That article came out today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is a taste: In October 2013, the Affordable…
Cinnamon. Buttered popcorn. Strawberry and banana. Yummy tastes and smells that have lingered in my TV room, after my teenage son and his friends finish vaping. E-cigarette companies like Juul are creating flavors designed to lure young customers, following a tradition established by their cigarette-manufacturing predecessors. For a while, the Trump administration appeared poised to…
Politics in the US is discouragingly partisan. National politics has become increasingly partisan since at least the late ’60s, when the passage of civil rights legislation influenced many conservative southern Democrats to join the Republican Party. Even state politics has become more partisan, where even famously nice people in Wisconsin have found themselves battling their neighbors across…
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The Wall Street Journal article linked below discusses why changing behavior may take more than the kind of nudges some behavioral economists have been promoting. As Lehrer points out, this is an idea I have been pushing (but not shoving, of course!) for a while.
Is ‘Nudging’ Really Enough? – WSJ
In a recently published article, a team of researchers showed that a simple graphical cue, showing people which foods are healthy and unhealthy, significantly improve their eating behaviors. Here is a nice summary of the study results, as summarized on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website: With a problem as large as America’s obesity epidemic,…
A quick quiz before we start today’s lesson. What do we call a tree that grows from acorns? What do we call a funny story? What sound does a frog make? What is another word for a cape? What do we call the white part of an egg? On that last question, were you tempted…