but it contains participants who have money and understand housing markets as well as you do.” Adequacy: “Okay, the medical sector is a wildly crazy place where different interventions have orders-of-magnitude differences in cost-effectiveness, but at least there’s no well-known but unused way to save ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each,

hedge-fund

Similarly, the average politician is smarter than the average voter, so by now most voters are just accustomed to a haze of plausible-sounding arguments.

I’m merely emphasizing that to find a rare startup idea that is exploitable in dollars, you will have to scan and keep scanning, not pursue the first “X is

Somehow, someone is going to horribly misuse all the advice that is contained within this book. Nothing I know how to say will prevent this, and all I can do is advise you not to shoot your own foot off; have some common sense; pay more attention to observation than to theory in cases where you’re lucky enough to have both and they happen to

There’s a toolbox of reusable concepts for analyzing systems I would call “inadequate”—the causes of civilizational failure, some of which correspond to local opportunities to do better yourself. I shall, somewhat arbitrarily, sort these concepts into three larger categories: Decisionmakers who are not beneficiaries; Asymmetric information; and

Usually when we find trillion-dollar bills lying on the ground in real life, it’s a symptom of (1) a central-command bottleneck that nobody else is allowed to fix, as with the European Central Bank wrecking Europe, or (2) a system with enough moving parts that at least two parts are simultaneously broken, meaning that single actors cannot defy the

“first-past-the-post”

This fits into a very common pattern of advice I’ve found myself giving, along the lines of, “Don’t assume you can’t do something when it’s very cheap to try testing your ability to do it,” or, “Don’t assume other people will evaluate you lowly when it’s cheap to test that belief.”