There’s something about folk stories behind names that makes the world feel richer. Names, after all, aren’t just labels—they’re little windows into the past, into the way people once understood the world. And when the official explanation is dry, people fill in the gaps with something better.
Making good decisions isn’t easy, especially when it’s hard to know what information to trust. In an ideal world, we could trust the information we hear from friends and from the news. But the media likes to cover the rare and shocking, not the common and routine. A plane crash halfway around the world (a highly uncommon occurance) can seem as likely as a car accident down the street. This distortion skews our perspective, creating a big gap between what we think is likely and what actually is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a smart way of knowing what really matters—he calls it “Skin in the Game.” In his book by the same name, Taleb explains that people with something at stake usually offer the best information. It’s simple: when you stand to lose, you’re going to think carefully. But when you’re insulated from the consequences, it’s easy to toss around advice or make bold predictions because they sound good, not because they’re giong to work.
In economics we learn that as prices rise, demand falls. This happens because we assume that rational customers are looking to buy things that provide the most value for the least expense. But there’s a class of goods that don’t behave this way: Velben goods.
Veblen goods defy classical economics. Named after Thorstein Veblen, an American economist, these products become more desirable as they become more expensive. These goods are more desired not from the needs they fulfill but from their ability to signal status, exclusivity, and wealth.
Animals can fake their evolutionary fitness in a number of ways. Humans do it too. While this may seem like we’re corrupting our gene pool it might not be so bad.
I saw the following question on Facebook:
“I’m getting married, and my husband and I are looking at what our married name should be. My last name is Lipsky. It was changed by my ancestors from the original ‘Lipszyc’ when they immigrated to the US in the early 1900s. I’m starting to really connect with my heritage. Should I keep the current name or switch back to the previous name?”
Note: You can watch the speech I gave based on this material here.
I remember the first time it happened to me. It was the first year of business school and we were working on an economics problem set. My friend Yugin had just arrived from Korea and she was correcting an answer for her economics homework.
She asked me “What’s the English word for after you erase something?”
I thought this was a philosophical question like, “What’s left of an image after you remove it?” Something like the way Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by William de Kooning to push the boundaries of art.
So I answered, “When you erase something there’s nothing left. You’ve erased it.”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking. Those little pink things that come off the eraser. What do you call that?”
“Hmmm … eraser shavings maybe. We don’t have a word for that in English.”
“Huh,” she said, “that’s odd. We have a word for that in Korean.”
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