Below you'll find a list of all posts from March, 2022
An urban legend has Amos Tversky, the late cofounder (along with Daniel Kahneman) of behavioral economics, asking a computer scientist what he was working on. The computer man responded, “I study artificial intelligence.” Tversky, a notorious smart aleck, responded, “I study natural stupidity.” Steven Pinker has studied natural stupidity more carefully than almost any other living writer. Trained as a …
Einstein’s theory of relativity advanced Newtonian physics. That did not mean Newton was wrong – only that his theories could be improved upon. In an ambitious new book, the economist Andrew Smithers rejects core “Newtonian” principles of economics, replacing them with radical departures from conventional wisdom. But as I will explain, unlike Einstein, some of Smithers’ theories fail meet the …
We shouldn’t read too much into pop sociology, especially when investing other people’s money. William Strauss and Neil Howe built a following by perpetuating a scholarship that embraces substantive differences among generations: Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen-X and so forth. But that view is mistaken, according to Bobby Duffy. Duffy asks whether our lives are largely shaped by when we were …