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…
Just came across an interesting way to try to motivate people to exert themselves: post calories-burned-counts on the stairs. Would that work for you? For me, it would probably make me look down while walking up, only to trip, fall backwards, crack my head, all the while asking myself: “What the heck is a kcal…
When patients with diabetes come to the doctor’s office, it is important for their clinicians to take a look at their feet. Many, if not most, foot amputations among people with diabetes would be prevented with this simple exam, an exam that will identify problems early enough to prevent them from progressing. But us busy…
The Financial Times, one of the great newspapers of the world, recently published a really nice essay exploring some of the controversies about what role, if any, behavioral economics should play in public policy. I’m going to give you a “teaser” of the article here, and you can always click on the link to read…
Check out this wonderful street art, that seconds as a behavioral intervention to reduce traffic speed: Very cool! (Click here to view comments)
You might think that the difference between a car that has been driven 49,999 miles and one that has been driven 50,001 miles is… 2 miles. But you would miss out on another big difference – in the price a buyer would be willing to pay for those two vehicles. Here’s a graph showing just…
Parole boards are supposed to objectively assess whether inmates eligible for parole deserve to be released from prison before the end of their sentence. They need to determine whether people are reformed, whether they have been behaving themselves in prison, and whether they pose unacceptable risks to society. But it turns out their decisions may…
The U.S. medical malpractice system is broken. It frequently does not punish doctors who need punishing, while levying fines against doctors who did nothing wrong. And this dreadfully inaccurate system still manages to take almost five years, on average, to settle claims. Experts have been promoting a type of reform known as “safe harbor rules,”……
I teach a course on behavioral economics and public policy at Duke University. One of my former students recently emailed me a picture of a bill he received in the mail. It looks like conEdison is trying to remind him to pay his bills electronically, so they don’t have to send him a bill in…
Dick Thaler, an economist who helped create the field of behavioral economics, came up with a wonderful idea a long time ago to promote retirement savings, a plan he calls Save More Tomorrow. Among the many clever aspects of his plan is the idea of automatic escalation of people’s retirement contributions. Think of the idea…