Tom Holland, in his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, have pointed out just how much modern norms owe to Christianity, even if they’re not explicitly Christian.

Some investors will sell Chevron because Exxon looks cheaper, or vice versa, but nobody was deciding between investing in Uber or buying shares of Medallion Financial, a tiny bank that specialized in lending money to taxi drivers.

Since bubbles are temporary phenomena with powerful long-term effects, you should fear missing out. Financial FOMO at its worst is the desire to make easy money at the expense of less well-informed people. But at its best, FOMO is the nagging suspicion that someone is building the future, and it could be you.

In the case of fracking, the negative emotional reactions associated with fossil fuels have often outweighed geopolitical considerations about energy autarky, leading to fracking bans in Vermont, New York, Maryland, and Washington.

The product, it allowed, can “do just about everything a vacuum tube can do, and some unique things which a vacuum tube cannot do.” 212 This descriptor is in the running for understatement of the century.

After the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, whose major technological innovations—atomic bombs, nuclear energy, rockets, semiconductors—were largely physical, progress became increasingly confined to the virtual.

So there’s a vicious cycle wherein aging populations make housing more expensive, which slows family formation

Fields ranging from physics and neurobiology to cognitive psychology and quantitative finance have recently experienced a reproducibility crisis, wherein their findings have been impossible to replicate.

When cost is no object, as is the case in a bubble, innovators experiment with new technologies that aren’t cost-effective but which have unique characteristics that can lead to cost reductions down the line.