Military Tactics

WWII Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen on military strategy: “Tactics are nine tenths audacity.”

WWII Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen on military strategy: “Tactics are nine tenths audacity.”
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
There’s a fascinating new analysis available, looking at parallels between the politics of health care and the environment. It is led by Theda Skocpol, a social scientist at Harvard (whose writing about health policy and the Tea Party are wonderful). I am reproducing one figure from that report. It shows, in lines, where Congress has…
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…
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…
As we watch the newspaper industry die around us, we should reflect on just how important newspapers have been for American democracy. Thomas Jefferson certainly understood this. “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to…
Upon the death of his wife, Thomas Jefferson went into a deep depression. In crushing words, he described his state of mind to his sister-in-law, in a sentence that could be placed in psychiatric manuals next to a definition of depression: “All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing…