The Authors of Willpower Answer Your Questions
Last week, we solicited your questions for John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, authors of the new book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength . You responded with a variety of interesting questions, and now Tierney and Baumeister return with some in-depth answers.
Thanks to everyone for participating.
Q. Is willpower a single commodity (so to speak), or is there, as I suspect, a one type of willpower for, say, dieting, another one for academic study, another for this, another for that? -AaronS
A. No, there’s just one single resource (or commodity). There’s one source of mental energy for resisting temptation and performing other acts of self-control, and this willpower is also depleted by making decisions. What you experience may reflect the fact that willpower is limited and so people have to allocate it: they use it at the office to work effectively and diligently, but have messy homes and are short-tempered in the evening. Or people who show wonderful self-control at dealing with personal relationships but can’t seem to meet their deadlines. Read More »
Deforestation, and the Incentivized Eco-Crime of Indonesia
There are books that governments keep officially, and then there are the other books – accounts of what people are actually doing and profiting from that are never mentioned in any legal context. A team of researchers from MIT, the University of Maryland, the London School of Economics and the World Bank cleverly used MODIS satellite imagery to uncover this kind of discrepancy as they investigated deforestation in Indonesia.
The satellite pictures allowed for comparison of legal and illegal logging operations. What they found (and write about in a new paper for NBER) shows how an increasingly decentralized government, coupled with very real monetary incentives for local officials, leads to eco-crime.
Indonesia contains one of the largest pieces of tropical forest in the world, rivaled only by Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s also the third largest producer of greenhouse gases behind the U.S. and China, due largely to its “forest extraction” practices. The paper examines three main forces that affect the decision-making and corruption of bureaucrats and government officials in charge of the logging-heavy jurisdictions of Indonesia. Read More »
Should There Be a Hitchhiking Renaissance?
One of the greatest transportation resources out there is… your backseat. According to a U.S. Department of Transportation report, the average vehicle commuting to and from work has only 1.1 people it. This means that about 80 percent of car capacity goes unused. In a moment when we’re worrying about gas consumption and carbon emissions, Read More »
Wednesday’s Crash
So, we crashed yesterday because reddit picked up our story on Japanese adult adoptions, and it caught internet fire. Which is great! Except that we weren’t ready to handle more than double a normal day’s traffic in a matter of hours.
We’re not the first site to be crashed by reddit, which hails itself as the “Front page of the internet,” and sometimes organizes crashes on purpose. But that wasn’t us, their users liked our story: for a moment on Wednesday, ours was the top story on the site’s Today I Learned page.
Ultimately, this is good news, and gives us a great reason to expand. In the meantime, the problem is being addressed. We apologize for the inconvenience and, as always, thanks for reading. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 