Overconfidence

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in this week’s New Yorker about the psychology of overconfidence is pretty much a transcript of the speech he gave at the New Yorker Summit a couple of months ago. Gladwell’s thesis is that the overconfidence of experts caused the current financial crisis.

“I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse.

• 2008 recession
• economics
• finance
• Malcolm Gladwell