This decision yesterday to allow them to use busways allows us to relish in seeing environmentalists feud over which technologies are green enough to have access to priority lanes on the road such as those allocated to buses.
One electric Light Rail vehicle (66m long) carries as many people as 400 electric cars (2.4km long). Which do you want in your bus lanes?
Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
There are trade-offs between equality and efficiency.
In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well-meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates
I caught Sir Paul Nurse’s Attack on Science on cable recently. He was exploring why people were unwilling to accept the word of science.
Sir Paul believes that people should defer to experts. He named two expert consensuses: global warming and GMOs.
In his 2012 Dimbleby Lecture Sir Paul called for a re-opening of the debate about GM crops based on scientific facts and analysis:
“We need to consider what the science has to say about risks and benefits, uncoloured by commercial interests and ideological opinion.
It is not acceptable if we deny the world’s poorest access to ways that could help their food security, if that denial is based on fashion and ill-informed opinion rather than good science.”
Many activists, without blinking an eye, will reject the science of GMOs but will hound from the temple anyone who defies another consensus they agree with.
Sir Paul interviewed James Delingpole. After they agreed that science does not proceed on the basis of consensus, Sir Paul asked Delingpole why he rejected the scientific consensus on global warming but accepted the scientific consensus on cancer.
Delingpole said he did not accept the analogy, but he was otherwise flat-footed. I suggest the following answer:
Medicine proceeds on the basis of double blind trials and other small field experiments. Control and treatment groups are used before any treatment is applied widely. Medicine is not perfect as was the case with the misdiagnosis of the causes of stomach ulcers.
The lag between cause and effect are short as would be the case if you rejected emergency treatment after a car accident or cancer treatment.
Medicine tests the efficacy of invasive treatments, weighs side-effects and encourages adaptation and prevention.
The staying power of self-interest in medicine is well-known: much higher rates of surgery when there is fee for service and much lower rates of surgery if the patient is a doctor’s wife. The efforts of the medical profession to suppress new entry to inflate their own incomes are well-known.
Ken Arrow in the early 1960s famously concluded that virtually all the special features of the medical care industry could “be explained as social adaptations to the existence of uncertainty in the incidence of disease and in the efficacy of treatment”.
Physicians may not agree on the medical condition causing the symptoms the patient presents.
Even if physicians agree on their diagnoses, they often do not agree on the efficacy of alternative responses — for example, surgery or medical management for lower-back pain.
Third, information on diagnosis and likely consequences of treatment are asymmetrically allocated between providers and patients.
The reason patients seek advice and treatment in the first place is that they expect physicians to have vastly superior knowledge about the proper diagnosis and efficacy of treatment.
Like all experts, doctors can advise you of the options open to you.
You must weigh those options in light of the costs and benefits to you and those costs and benefits are known only to you.
An old mate, who was in his thirties, had to consider back surgery that had a 10% chance of leaving him in a wheelchair for life. Experts cannot tell you what to do with those odds. After months of terrible pain and incapacity, his back slowly recovered without the surgery.
Most of the debate over global warming is explained by uncertainty about both the extent and incidence of global warming and the efficacy of prevention versus adaptation.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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