Top Highlights

• We cannot isolate any purchase from the rest of our emotional landscape. If you feel generally disgusted with life, you become less willing to pay good money for anything, but you are also more willing to sell your own possessions for less. It all becomes mere stuff: the endowment effect disappears. 34If you are sad, you willingly part with the mat...
• The psychologist George Ainslie, who first identified hyperbolic discounting, said that the more prone we are to it, the less feeling we have that we control our futures. When you think how much of modern life depends on delayed gratification—from getting an education to finishing a chapter—you’ll agree how important that feeling of control is. Bel...
• Kaplan’s Law (Ellen, as a genuine grandmother, has the right to make such laws) says that of the three things we work for—money, the interest of the job, and the respect of our peers—any two will do. Just one is not enough. No salary will be enough to compensate for a life of contemptible busywork; accountants may be the butt of popular jokes, but ...
• Of course, we do all have to make a living, so we cannot take too Olympian a view of lucre. Fortunately, we still have the rich to teach us how to make and keep the most of what we have. Most surveys of wealth management reveal that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were both right: the rich are different from you and me—and it is because th...
• only until it isn’t. Don’t bet the ranch on some mysterious high-return investment that appears to be exempt from the laws of probability—the spirit of Ponzi lives on, plausible and well dressed, equally at home on Wall Street as at your country club. Put your savings regularly into low-cost market-tracking mutual funds, mostly equities but includi...