Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Don't trust, just verify.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don’t mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.