Jennifer Baez

The

global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. 

Fifteen billion people were born in the 19th and 20th centuries. But try to imagine how different the global economy—and the whole world—would be today if just seven of them never existed:

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

Mao Zedong

Gavrilo Princip

Thomas Edison

Bill Gates

Martin Luther King

Another way to put this is that 0.00000000004% of people were

In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they're in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past.

The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency. Which is to say: Those buying $400 in lottery tickets are by and large the same people who say they couldn’t come up with $400 in an

In the era of the institutional marriage, from the nation’s founding until around 1850, the prevalence of individual farming households meant that the main requirements Americans had for their marriage revolved around things like food production, shelter and protection from violence.

In the era of the companionate marriage, from roughly 1850 until

I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money.

If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you