Ben Hunt PhD's Blog

By Ben Hunt – As much as I dislike the chickens on our farm, I love my bees. Do they sting? Of course, they sting. The swarm is a wild animal. But after a few painful years, I’m no longer a ham-handed goofball with my hives, and a morning...

In 1872, noted horseracing aficionado and San Francisco rich guy Leland Stanford (yes, of university fame) commissioned noted photographer and San Francisco smart guy Eadweard Muybridge to apply his path breaking technology of stop-action...

On December 30, the Washington Post published a story claiming that Russian hackers had “penetrated the US electric grid” through an “attack” on Burlington Electric, a Vermont utility. In a statement that night Vermont Gov...

I’ve written a lot about The Common Knowledge Game – here, here, and here – because it’s the game of markets, i.e., it’s the central contribution of game theory to understanding how markets work. I’ve also written a lot about...

The other week I was driving in downtown Los Angeles, late for an appointment. The road I needed to turn onto was just past the freeway overpass, but I got confused and turned onto the freeway on-ramp.

If you’ve ever played a team sport, you’ve experienced a game that was a mismatch on paper. Now usually that game goes according to form. The better team scores early and often, and the inferior team doesn’t sniff a win.

The central idea of "Essence of Decision" is this: the dominant academic theory to explain the world’s events is a high-level, rational expectations model based on formal economics, a theory that ignores the impact of bureaucratic imperatives and institutional politics...

Magical thinking is a term of art in both clinical psychology and cultural anthropology, and it refers to the common belief among both children and “primitive” societies (yes, intentional quotation marks there to show my arched eyebrow at...

Every successful institution, from a marriage to a superhero to a firm to a nation, needs an origin story. The origin story of arguably the most successful hedge fund institution of the modern world—Bridgewater Associates—is that of...

In 2008, the $10 trillion asset class of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) was entirely based on the Common Knowledge that it was impossible to have a nationwide decline in U.S. home prices. When that Narrative failed, the entire inverted pyramid came crashing...