[b]Steven D. Levitt
If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.[/b]
Yes, but only statistically.
One thing we’ve learned is that when people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.
Of course that’s only “human all too human”.
Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.
In other words, as “one of us”.
Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they’re hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.
Unless of course it’s “one of ours”.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Or, more to the point [usually], the other way around.
But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others. This doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them human.
That or [if they’re assholes] both.