So: what we're looking for is trades that offer large, unlimited upside with small, fixed costs.

This gives us the first rule of thumb for contrarianism: if your society engages in practices which cause harm to others, and offers elaborate reasons as to why this is justifiable, that’s where you might investigate the claims of the fringe weirdos.

The only way to 'solve' an intractable problem is to reject its assumptions. Alexander the Great, faced with the impossible task of untangling the Gordian knot, pulled out his sword and chopped it in half. And so, instead of getting lost in the labyrinthine branches of the possibility tree, we can draw our pruning saws and cut them off at the

As Matt Ridley points out in The Rational Optimist, in human-power terms, that’s the equivalent of having 150 slaves pedalling on bicycles for eight hour shifts. And that’s the average: if you’re an American, you have the equivalent of 660 slaves constantly working to sustain your lifestyle. Only a mighty Emperor could have dreamed of that sort of

I've reluctantly come around to the position of the economist Bryan Caplan, who recommends an amicable divorce. Caplan fulfilled his lifelong dream of living in a beautiful bubble around his 40th birthday. He is now surrounded by people he respects and admires. He never hears a commercial. He forgets about the existence of professional sports for

Money is just one of many precious Currencies of Life: time, health, mental bandwidth, energy, social status, hedonic pleasure, meaning.

The confusion here is that fuck-you money is not synonymous with the amount of money you need to hit financial independence or retire early.

The EMH has to be the only theory that grows stronger with every attack against it. The delicious irony is that no-one has done more to advance it than its most serious empirical critics. Every hole blasted into its hide makes the predictions it generates more robust. It’s like some freaky shoggoth monster that Just. Won’t. Die. To be fair, the

Hedonic adaptation is one of the main driving forces behind lifestyle inflation, but it’s not the only way in which our biology conspires against us. Evolution has also wired us to show off our attractiveness and social standing to our peers, even if it comes at great personal cost.