Best bits from Paul Krugman's "A Conversation With Barry Ritholtz" (24 May 2025) – quotes from Mr Ritholtz, author of How Not to Invest:

• Most people are kind of lousy investors. We make all the same mistakes over and over again. The one thing we learn from history, at least when it comes to finance, is that we learn nothing from history.
• Focus on making fewer errors. You'll be way ahead of yourself.
• The counterfactual is always fascinating. If you're ever trying to think through a problem and the solution is elusive, it's often useful to stop and ask yourself, “if I want to achieve the opposite of my goal, what would I do?” And that kind of gives you a map of what to avoid.
• We very often don't know our own blind spots. And so when you think you're doing the right thing, when you think you have all the bases covered and your risks accounted for, risk is what's left over after everything you can foresee. ... And so we very often fail to learn from history. There are some really easy mistakes to avoid. You just have to have a little bit of humility and a little bit of self-awareness.
• The halo effect: Dunning-Kruger, epistemic trespass, kind of a continuum of mistakes. The halo effect is that when someone is very successful, we kind of imply their skill set, intelligence, acumen, judgment, apply across a wide variety of domains.
• People hate ambiguity and just a legitimate acknowledgement that a lot of the world is kind of random.
• Why do economists use decimal points? To reveal they have a sense of humor.
• You want to avoid "resulting". ... When you have a bad outcome with a good process, that's okay. It's repeatable. And in the fullness of time, that will work in your favor. If you have a bad process and you just have a lucky outcome, that's not repeatable. And if you keep doing that over and over again over the long haul, you're gonna end up losing more than you win.
• Paul Graham ... famously said, “all experts are experts in the way the world used to be.” And what I think he means by that is, you go to college, you go to grad school, you're studying market history, you're studying economic history. What you learn if you're extrapolating forward, built into that is an assumption that the future is gonna look just like the past. Here's the model we've built on historical data. Now let's take it forward. But as we've learned throughout history, very often the future doesn't look like the past.
• Anytime someone tells you don't pay attention to value, look after your wallet because they're coming for it. ... Anybody who does not know you and is offering you financial advice, you just have to ask yourself, what's in it for them? What are they selling? Very often when you figure that out, hey, you know, used car salesmen want to sell you cars. If you ask a barber, "Do I need a haircut?", the barber's gonna tell you yes. So you just have to be a little aware of who's saying what.

And perhaps most important for living a Good Life:

I define wealth as the freedom to do what I want. Yes, we want security. Yes, we want to know that our loved ones are taken care of. But if it means you don't have the time to spend with friends and family, if it means that you're grinding away on something that makes you miserable, well, you have a lot of money. But to me, that doesn't define wealthy. Wealth is agency and the ability to determine how you live your life. And we very often take that for granted. That is much more valuable. Listen. A human being's stock in currency is time, and how you spend your time is, probably, when you're younger you trade your time for money. When you get older you start trading your money for time. You may have a lot of money, but we all have a finite amount of time before we join the choir invisible. Wealth really reflects spending that time well.

_{(cf Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013-10-24), How NOT to Invest (2025-04-03), ...) - ^z - 2025-05-29}