The psychology of Money in English

To understand the psychology of the modern consumer and to grasp where they might be heading next, you have to know how they got here. How we all got here. If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2020 you would not recognize the world around you.

When you'll Believe Anything Imagine an alien dispatched to Earth. His job is to keep tabs on our economy. He circles above New York City, trying to size up the economy and how it changed between 2007 and 2009.

Room for Error Some of the best examples of smart financial behavior can be found in an unlikely place: Las Vegas casinos. Not among all players, of course. But a tiny group of blackjack players who practice card counting can teach ordinary people something extraordinarily important about managing money: the importance of room for error.

The Seduction of Pessimism “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.” —Historian Deirdre McCloskey Optimism is the best bet for most people because the world tends to get better for most people most of the time. But pessimism holds a special place in our hearts. Pessimism isn’t just more common than optimism. It also sounds smarter. It’s intellectually captivating, and it’s paid more attention than optimism, which is often viewed as being oblivious to risk.

You & Me The implosion of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s reduced household wealth by $6.2 trillion. The end of the housing bubble cut away more than $8 trillion. It’s hard to overstate how socially devastating financial bubbles can be. They ruin lives.