Prisoner’s Dilemma: What Game Are you Playing?
In this classic game theory experiment, you must decide: rat out another for personal benefit, or cooperate? The answer may be more complicated than you think. *** What does it take to make people …
Economics
Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making
Every decision we make carries an opportunity cost. If we don’t budget wisely, we end up wasting time and energy on things that don’t matter. Here’s how to do it right. *** The disregard of tradeoffs …
Jared Diamond: How to Get Rich
We’re constantly asked for examples of the “multiple mental models” approach in practice. Our standard response includes great books like Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against …
Ben Franklin and the Virtues and Ills of Pursuing Luxury
In a letter written in 1784 to his friend Benjamin Vaughan, Ben Franklin has a very interesting cogitation on the aggregate effect of the pursuit of luxuries beyond our needs. Franklin displays a …
Why Fiddling With Prices Doesn’t Work
“The fact is, if you don’t find it reasonable that prices should reflect relative scarcity, then fundamentally you don’t accept the market economy, because this is about as close to …
Incentives Gone Wrong: Cobras, Severed Hands, and Shea Butter
Incentives drive our behavior. Failing to consider incentives can lead to unintended consequences. In this post, we show you how incentives can go wrong and how we can use them to our advantage. *** …
How (Supposedly) Rational People Make Decisions
There are four principles that Gregory Mankiw outlines in his multi-disciplinary economics textbook Principles of Economics. I got the idea for reading an Economics textbook from Charlie Munger, the …
Paul Graham on Free Speech, Suburbia, Getting Rich, and Nerds
“I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win.” *** Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. …
What History Teaches us about The Concentration of Wealth
History is economics in action, at least according to Karl Marx. Whether in a group or as an individual, we vie for food, fuel, raw materials and our place in the hierarchy. Even art is often rooted …
There Are No Called Strikes and Other Lessons You Learn in Business School
Matthew Frederick teams up with Michael Preis to offer some important learnings from the world of business — which isn’t really a discipline in and of itself but rather, as they write in the …
Recognizing Our Flaws is The Beginning of Wisdom
A short post today that packs a punch. The liberating power of humility is one we’ve covered before. In fact, it’s a concept that is core to understanding your Circle of Competence. Now …
The Best Non-Fiction Books of 2015: The Year of the Biography
One of my favorite sources of reading material is Tyler Cowen. He’s consistently finding exceptional things that I’ve never heard of. His 2015 non-fiction list is no exception. If he had …
Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Ahh leisure or as some call it, the art and science of doing nothing. It’s something we all want and yet rarely have. Our modern workplace culture prides itself on filling every one of our …
The Darwin Economy – Why Smith’s Invisible Hand Breaks Down
In The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and The Common Good Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, takes on the debate of who was a …
A Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman
Edge.org asked the likes of Christopher Chabris, Nicholas Epley, Jason Zweig, William Poundstone, Cass Sunstein, Phil Rosenzweig, Richard Thaler & Sendhil Mullainathan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, …
Average Is Over: Why The Skills Required For Great Jobs Are Changing
[quote]”Knowing one’s limits is more important than it used to be.”[/quote] “Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy,” Cowen writes in his latest book Average Is Over. This is an …