Tag: Fads

In politics, business and finance, as on the seas, the hero is the person who tackles a problem, rather than the person whose actions prevent the problem arising.

The chicken game, which frequently ends in tragedy or folly, is a game for movie-going teenagers, not grown-ups.

Perhaps the most difficult of investment lessons is that inaction is often the best action.

If very rich people are to pay much lower tax rates than the doctors who care for them or the teachers who made their careers possible, there needs to be a compelling demonstration of widespread economic benefits.

Academics and think-tanks need to be reminded that generating publicity is not a legitimate research objective. The study of business is afflicted by confusion between the results of a survey of what people think about the world and a survey of what the world is really like.

An adult with normal habits who lives far from the equator will usually be asleep during several hundred daylight hours, almost all of these in the morning.

The search for “sharp prediction” – the mantra of the modern scientific economist who seeks to replicate the successes of physics for social science – is doomed to failure.

The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad.

The imperative requirement is for processes that both require and allow elected politicians to make choices and implement them.

That investment style of being in touch with the market but distant from it has impressive antecedents and performance.