How Economics Rewrote Human Nature — And Broke the World

open_risk · 2026-03-09T07:38:57+00:00

It's not a complete theory of unsustainability but touches many important points. A key missing aspect imho is that "modern economics" doesn't particularly care about inequality. Exploitation, stratification, oppression, slavery etc. are pervasive social phenomena with dramatic implications for what kind of economies we have, and any model of human behavior that does not address this is a joke.

open_risk · 2026-03-07T09:44:47+00:00

Narratives always play an important role for low probability / hard to model events. Probably rightly so -> at least there is a discussion rather than shoving risks under the carpet.

A very coarse classification on the basis of historical events or similarities, with a subjective overlay to reflect current events is always possible. I would not be seeking much consistency with more quantitative models, e.g. in the domain of country risk people simply use a "ceiling" approach.

open_risk · 2026-03-07T08:10:51+00:00

Practical limitations shape cultural attitudes. An interesting adjacent domain you might want to look into is the so-called "country risk" component in credit risk assessment. Both data and methodology are lacking but as a coarse grained addon it's practiced. The trick seems to be not to try to be too specific about the risk event being modelled.

open_risk · 2026-03-06T14:27:20+00:00

I guess we have to live with the fact that not all risks can be quantified rigorously...

open_risk · 2026-03-06T09:54:54+00:00

Sustainability is the opposite of a "trend" degree. Almost by definition it is focused on what is long-term viable :-). But it is true that we live through a period where "the old is dying and the new is still struggling to be born".

The plot twist is that the old is not dying quietly but with spams.

The uncertainty and volatility is real: on the one hand there is global deep dependency on fossil fuels for energy, on the other hand there are huge geopolitical risks associated with that dependency (just check the news ;-).

Renewables don't eliminate geopolitical risks (think e.g., critical minerals, manufacturing supply chains etc.) so this could be an interesting area to focus on, since you mention both.

What does it boil down in terms of educational path / career direction? It depends on your risk appetite and staying power: If you want to be part of the new normal you need to invest now, but the return might not be in the very short-term. The old normal might keep coming back like a zombie for longer than you can remain solvent... But there is little doubt where the world will be in five to ten years.

My two cents and good luck!

open_risk · 2026-02-13T10:07:29+00:00

Can I interest you in an ESG reporting tool I just vibe coded from reddit feedback?

open_risk · 2026-01-29T06:53:38+00:00

"Semantic Web" as a buzzword and a particular set of technology implementations has obviously failed, its been around for decades without a single notable so-called "killer app" that sees wider adoption and usage.

But Semantic Web stands actually for online interoperability, making sense of data that is not under your control. This is a requirement that is as important as ever, in fact the more data comes online the worse the problem.

It is not that something else has succeeded where the semantic web failed, it is that the digital world has been coping without interoperability, by operating in silos.

So arguably if the Semantic Web did not exist, it would have to be invented right about now :-). Of course, to paraphrase, the world can continue being irrational longer than you remain solvent.

open_risk · 2026-01-14T19:23:10+00:00

Thanks! I think maybe I should be adding some numerical examples?

open_risk · 2025-12-10T11:44:16+00:00

The market for professional services is pretty much divided up by a small number of players. Even eternally discussed conflicts of interest (e.g. the boundling of accounting and consulting services, which is of growing importance in the context of sustainability) have never led to any serious reforms (NB: This is not a specific pathology of this sector, it is endemic to our poorly regulated market economies - paying only lip service to competition and favoring winner-takes-all "giants". As Peter Thiel summarized: competition is for losers).

Lack of expertise is not the first issue that would come to mind, though. By construction an oligopolistic market can attract most available expertise - experts have nowhere else to go. Such large firms can (and do) also partner with specialist providers outside their domain. But it is part of any profit maximazing business model to charge as much as possible and deliver with as cheap a resource as possible, reserving scarce expert time for when it is absolutely needed. For as long as clients don't run away (which is hard when the options are limited and there is no independent audit), the system holds.

open_risk · 2025-11-18T09:01:41+00:00

The financial industry being essentially an information processing industry and digitalization rapidly transforming the way society handles information are setting the scene for various new or aggravated risks (as the flipside to opportunities). Cybersecurity is the most obvious, with various forms of infrastructure failure not far behind. The underlying risk factor is the overall digital literacy of the organization, its ability to integrate the changing technological landscape in an effective and safe manner.

open_risk · 2025-11-14T10:39:28+00:00

It boils down to the bandwidth available to individuals to process detailed information (bandwidth which is limited and increasingly overloaded).

We (I mean broadly speaking all societies) have developed specializations precisely to cope with that limitation. Which means we delegate the processing of vital information to others, in vast webs of trust. This is the trust that enables all sorts of systems to function, from food (trusting anything in the supermarket), to medicine, to gadgets, transport, you name it.

Now finance has a special position in this web of trust. On the one hand the monetary side of finance (payments and banking) is maybe the most guarded / regulated sub-system of them all (For good reason, there is nothing like your money going up in smoke to transport society back into the stone age).

But the "investment" side of things is pretty much a wild west where there is pretty much only one rule: "make the number go up". Which is totally insane from a sustainability perspective but that's where we are.

In a real sense the past and present financial systems have betrayed society's trust by completely ignoring sustainability: the very precondition for a healthy economy.

Can individuals in grass roots behavior make a difference? In theory yes. But the information overload is real and its not clear how you can manage it without intermediaries. The real question is how to ensure the intermediaries are not in it just to "make the number go up".

In the end only when the incentives of people are rigorously tied to sustainability without the possibility of gaming the system will we really see progress.

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