The Surprising Power of Honest Ignorance

Decision-making is hard because there is a fundamental and unavoidable ignorance about the future. We are especially uncomfortable about outcomes produced by processes that we don’t understand well. We’re much more comfortable with risks that we can quantify, model and forecast. This is called “ambiguity aversion“. We are so uncomfortable with the former (uncertainties) that … Read more

Lessons From the Global Financial Crisis

Why Did So Many People Make So Many Ex Post Bad Decisions? The Causes of the Foreclosure Crisis has a really interesting alternative explanation the global financial crisis of 2008: Maybe it wasn’t about financial industry insiders deceiving investors and homebuyers, financial innovations run amok, securitization that allowed mortgage originators to avoid having skin in the game … Read more