The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Gordon Gekko famously quipped “ greed is good ” in his iconic Wall Street 80's movie. The phrase came in the middle of an era of deregulation and liberalization. A phase where "shoot for the fences" was the name of the game. Financial markets then became more of a cumulative distillation of the collective psychological state of its participants. And now, just as then, greed-dominated markets engender euphoria, happiness and (even if only fleeting and paper-based) great wealth. Fear-induced markets are the mirror image of the former, degenerating into panics, wealth destruction and (in some tragic cases) even death .  Fear is connected to the negative. It’s why policemen shoot first and find out later. It's how some autocrats gain power over a very fearful electorate. Why politics have become so toxic as of late, and why the youngest generation these days is  despairing and gloomy  (where 60% of them "experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness"...

We can't predict the future. Chaos always reigns. The unpredictable compounding of events is inevitable, and we can always count on surprises occurring , which is why it pays to build our lives (and invest) with the certainty that something will inevitably go wrong. Accounting for the certitude that something you planned for will not go as planned should prod you to hedge yourself via diversification --or even better, redundancies. Of course, building redundancies takes resources. That insurance policy doesn't pay for itself. You sacrifice current income (and/or effort) to build that safety net in case SHTF.  And although it could very well be that you'll never use it, it's not stupid to build it. An example: Nature, in its infinite iteration game called evolution, gave us two kidneys. I am pretty sure it's not free (evolutionarily speaking) to carry an extra filter behind your belly just in case one clogs with crap you throw at your body. If evolution settles on an...

I've been told that I am a negative person. And of course, I don't think I am. My motivated reasoning kicks in and immediately tells me that I can't be that negative . But then I stop to think about it and realize that I might be,  after all . Always looking at the phone for the news-break --which are generally negative. Sharing the latest story about a potential pandemic , or about locust swarms blanketing africa , or about the potential WWIII-triggering assassination of an Iranian Commander . Or about the Puerto Rico earth-quake . Reflecting upon that, I've settled upon a couple of ideas. Yes, I pay more attention to the negative stuff. And I share it as soon as I can (at least the significant parts). But I don't think that makes me negative . I think that makes me human. I am, just like everyone else, equipped with a bunch of mental quirks that make me (and you) gravitate towards anything threatening around you. When we are reminded of all the progress that ...

The human brain is a marvelous adaptation. More than that. It's our super weapon. If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows . No wonder why it's such an energy suck : with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen. Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking. But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after gener...

As inhabitants of this universe, we have always evolved within a time continuum. Entropy is inexorable . Time inevitably advances in a single direction. As a consequence, our development as living beings in this planet has always been ruled by the perception of causality. One event happens, and it influences a subsequent event. A linkage between past and present can be drawn. And it can be drawn because this trial-and-error mechanism called evolution settled in our brains after thousands of iterations --in a masterfully choreographed case of survivorship bias -- this form of knowledge acquisition. The linkages have a mundane name: rules. Or what evolutionary psychologists like to fancily call  heuristics . And they have a simple reason to exist: so the brain processes information in the most energy-efficient manner . These have always been the rules of engagement --and we can't consciously process reality any other way. They shaped --nay,  created--  us E...

Our mind is a surreptitious and tyrannical ruler. We may have a sense of self consciousness (some of us a very  inflated one), but so many vestigial processes rule our brains' functioning that we fail to fathom how little room we actually have to exercise our freedom. No organ in our body has been more shaped by the "trial-and-error" process of evolution than our brain. Our irrationality, biases, fears, addictions, and phobias are all somehow anchored in an ancient and obscure vestige behavior that allowed our ancestors thrive past through harsh conditions. Don't know about that gag reflex that prevents you from drinking perfectly  safe purified sewage/toilet water? There's a reason we innately find excrement and fetid matter gross. Couple thousand generations ago our brains had to incorporate this preservation mechanism to avoid dysentery, cholera, and many more nasty digestive-born diseases. Ever heard of trypophobia , that irrational repulsive reflex t...