No miracle, just our brain

There's No Reason for It, It's Just Our Policy.

On June 1, 2009 the town of McAllen, Texas rose to brief prominence on the American political stage. With the highest (bar Miami) per-beneficiary costs in the entire US Medicare program, it was featured in an essay in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, then seized upon by President Obama: "This is what we have to fix." Behind the headlines were decades of documentation of clinical practice and ana...

East Asian Economic Performance: Miracle or Just a Pleasant Surprise?

P UBLICATION of the East Asian Miracle (EAM, World Bank, 1993) appears, to borrow a phrase, to have generated more heat than light. The EAM analysed reasons for the economic success of the eight high performing Asian economies (HPAEs) — Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The hope, at least of ‘neutral’ observers, was that we would be able t...

The Miracle of Compound Interest: Does our Intuition Fail?

We use a randomized experiment to explore the accuracy of people’s intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to guess how a given amount of savings translates into spending power during retirement. The other half of the sample is asked to guess how much savings are needed to finance a given amount of spending during retirement. From an economic point of view, bo...

Personalised medicine: not just in our genes

interactions. This list was created by exploring the basic biomedical research literature (272 studies: candidate gene and genome-wide association studies) for " repurposed " or " effect modification " randomised trials—that is, studies that genotyped stored samples of participants in placebo controlled trials of cardiovascular drugs and thus enabled a test of the interaction between genotype a...

Bonus? No, just an onus.