Every form of strength is also a form of weakness, he once wrote. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealt...
But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you mig...
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden peopl...
Fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.
When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and...
What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this litt...
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong...
What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss, he said, was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.
To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinction...
There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand,...
The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.
One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?
He was like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see...
Confirmation bias, he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. Confirmation bias is the most insi...
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?
After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trad...
A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.
Why they studied economics, and they’d explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.