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A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

The chokehold that killed George Floyd in Minneapolis continues to be used because, as discussed earlier, the Supreme Court refused to allow lawsuits to enjoin it in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons…

The Louisville police were able to enter [Breonna] Taylor’s home without knocking and announcing, leading to the gunshots that killed her, because the Supreme Court has explicitly allowed officers to obtain a warrant allowing them to enter without knocking and announcing.

The process of training expands the capabilities of the muscles and heart, sure, but it also recalibrates the brain’s horizons…trained ultra-runners have a higher pain tolerance than nonathletes, and even over the course of a single year the pain tolerance of athletes waxes and wanes with training cycles.

In this sense, all training is brain training, even if it doesn’t specifically target the brain.

All sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears–the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose.

The [student loan] program became a profit center for schools and the student loan industry, which put none of their own money at risk as they encouraged students to sign up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt…

The actors who have benefited the most–banks, Sallie Mae, and universities–shaped that system, hiring armies of lobbyists to push for laws that improved their bottom lines while often leaving borrowers in the lurch…

They have fended off attempts at federal regulation that would have prevented many borrowers from getting into financial trouble.

The implication of Pott’s work was far-reaching. If soot, and not some mystical, numinous humor…caused scrotal cancer, then two facts had to be true.

First, external agents, rather than imbalances of internal fluids, had to lie at the root of carcinogenesis…Second, if a foreign substance was truly the cause, then cancer was potentially preventable.

The Saudi and China-related work is part of a larger pattern at McKinsey that’s taken hold in recent years. The firm is increasingly working with authoritarian governments the world over or for the state-owned companies that undergird their power.

What is the point of learning statistics? To summarize large quantities of data. To make better decisions. To answer important social questions….To evaluate the effectiveness of policies, programs, drugs, medical procedures, and other innovations.

And to spot the scoundrels who use these very same powerful tools for nefarious ends.

All told, perhaps the most significant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself, regardless of the individual outcome.

Despite the private disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever that journey led them.

Disunited Nations is about what happens when major powers decide they are better off competing instead of cooperating.

It is a book about what happens when the global Order isn’t just falling apart but when many leaders feel their country will be better off tearing it down.

Under this extraordinary arrangement, the federal government as well as the state of New York, the leading center of the publishing industry, turned over primary responsibility for the enforcement of moral censorship to [Anthony Comstock], employed by an elite private society composed exclusively of Christian men.

System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence–and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps…

For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit.

It isn’t…When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services doesn’t suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women…

Yet for many people, the Internet’s structure was–indeed remains–deeply counterintuitive.

This is because it defies every expectation one has developed from experience of other media industries, which are all predicated on control of the customer…the Internet abdicates control to the individual; that is its special allure, its power to be endlessly surprising, as well as its founding principle.

I hope, rather, that the book generates respect for these men and women, for those who have done something for their families that many of us could hardly find the strength to do.

Respect for this drive that migrants have, a drive which is stronger than the criminal cartels, a drive more powerful than the train engine and a drive more vital than any limb–a leg, for example–of our very body.

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