Human Systems and Behavior

Exploring how unrivaled expertise serves as a hedge against systemic failures and crises.

Why small, recurring subscription payments create outsized psychological pain—and the surprising trade-offs that keep us subscribing anyway.

Investigating how honorific waste and spiteful consumption undermine economic utility and efficiency in modern society.

Examining the biological basis of status competition and how it creates a treadmill of perpetual dissatisfaction in consumer behavior.

A series exploring how corporate exploitation of envy drives perpetual consumer demand through status competition and psychological manipulation.

Exploring how companies exploit envy to create perpetual consumer demand through social comparison and status signaling.

Explore how digital abundance creates new forms of scarcity, depleting our cognitive bandwidth and creating modern attention famines.

Discover how abundance provides 'slack' that enables better decision-making and why the poor often make wiser economic choices.

Explore how scarcity creates self-perpetuating cycles of debt and poor decisions, making escape difficult despite best intentions.

Discover how resource constraints reduce cognitive capacity, causing measurable declines in intelligence and decision-making ability.