Tag: public health
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As a general rule, I'm a fan of changing human behavior by changing the rules we live by. Given how inconsistent people are, it seems to me foolish to rely on good will, abstract principles or our rational perception of our own self-interest. Also, it's pretty hard to know what you've achieved when ... Read More
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Governments have been trying a lot of new tricks lately to get people to eat more healthily, from calorie-count labels to taxes on soda to banning fast-food outlets from whole neighborhoods. This study suggests a simpler approach might work: It found people buy less junk food when they have to pay ... Read More
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Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has nailed the real problem with the deficit-cutting ideas floated the other day by the the co-chairs of President Obama's Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Their trial balloon concentrates on discretionary spending and Social Security, while the real ... Read More
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Low weight at birth is associated with all sorts of health troubles later in life, so it seems a great idea to give nutritional supplements to pregnant women in developing nations, to add some heft to their babies. Yet the results aren't impressive. (The anthropologist Christopher W. Kuzawa notes ... Read More
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Your friends likely have more friends than you do. Please don't take that personally. As the sociologist Scott L. Feld was first to point out, this is simply a mathematical fact about human ties. (Satoshi Kanazawa nicely explains it here.) This "friendship paradox" may have medical uses: According ... Read More
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The looming menace of widespread chronic disease is a lot like the prospect of major climate change.Both future crises are expected on the basis of imperfect projections which don't neatly agree--but which, in the aggregate, suggest that humanity can't afford to do nothing. Both stem from small ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male