Optimism Is the Engine of Capitalism

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There's a good deal of evidence that people and businesses areover confident. But you think they're more over confident than they should be? Over confidence has many virtues, imean, it's nice. Its especially if you're an optimist. To exaggerate the oddof success is a very useful thing for people. It will make them more appealing to others. They will get more resources, and they will take risks. So i call that the engine of capitalism. Really d that that sort of optimism is a collaboration between a human being and a machine.

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You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells Tyler. “I really don’t think of bias that much.” These days, noise might be the concept most on Kahneman’s mind. A forthcoming book, coauthored with Cass Sunstein and “a brilliant Frenchman you haven’t heard of” is about how random variability affects our decision-making. And while we’ve spent a lot of time studying how bias causes error in judgment, Kahneman says, we aren’t thinking nearly enough about the problem of noise.

In November, Kahneman joined Tyler for a live conversation about bias, noise and more, including happiness, memory, the replication crisis in psychology, advice to CEOs about improving decision-making, superforecasters, the influence of Freud, working in a second language, the value of intuition, and why he can’t help you win arguments with a spouse.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded November 12th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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