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The Power of Free
ByadminThe Atlantic recently reproduced a figure showing just how much people like things when they are free. Specifically, they looked at health interventions and show that people are more likely to take up these interventions, or products, when they don’t cost anything. And certainly, free is better than expensive, but free is also a whole…
A Drug to Treat Cancer and Heart Disease (Miracle Cure or Media Hype?)
ByadminIn a recent New York Times article, physician-author Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote about a clinical trial that he characterized as “beautiful,” for potentially illuminating a surprising connection between heart disease and cancer. Mukherjee is a justifiably acclaimed writer, who publishes regularly in The New Yorkerand The New York Times, and who won a Pulitzer for his bestselling book The Emperor of All Maladies. But…
The Availability Heuristic
ByadminAs 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…
Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy: in One Stunning Picture
ByadminLet me be clear: how long people live in any country of the world is determined by lots of things, not just by the quality of their healthcare system. Nevertheless, one of the things medical care is supposed to do is help us live longer and healthier lives. So you would think that a country…
The Cost of New Cancer Drugs (In One Picture)
Byadmin“Specialty drugs” – that’s what they’re called. Not the pills of old, these pharmaceuticals are often given intravenously or through injection. Often more biologic in their synthesis than chemical, they are expensive to produce and often target narrow disease processes, meaning the number of patients likely to benefit from them is much much smaller than,…
Advertising Bad Food to Good Kids
ByadminWhatever you think about the proper role of the government in nudging adult Americans into healthier habits, you ought to be open to the idea that we, as a society, should be doing something to reduce obesity among children. As I wrote about in Free Market Madness, once people become obese, biology conspires against them…

