• Automation as colonization wave

• “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”, Timothy O’Reilly2002

• The Luck Factor, Wiseman2004

• “OKCupid: The Mathematics Of Beauty”, Rudder2011

• War/​Disaster/​Collapse:

  • “The great wars, the great crash, and steady state growth: Some new evidence about an old stylized fact”, Ben-David & Papell1995; “Do natural disasters promote long-run growth?”, Skidmore & Toya2002

  • “The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns”, Deryugina et al 2014

  • “Are Resettled Oustees from the Sardar Sarovar Dam Project Better off Today than their Former Neighbors who were not Ousted?”, Aiyar & Kaushal2018

  • “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation: Striking Evidence from the London Underground Subway Network”, Larcom et al 2017

  • “Resetting the Urban Network: 117–2012 AD”, Michaels & Rauch2016; “Monks, Gents and Industrialists: The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries”, Heldring et al 2015/​2021 (see the criticisms of perpetuities⁠/ ​waqfs as locking in mistakes)

  • “Lehman’s Lemons: Do Career Disruptions Matter for the Top 5%?”, Fedyk & Hodson2021

  • “Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment”, Arellano-Bover2021

  • Fire:

    • “Razing San Francisco: The 1906 Disaster as a Natural Experiment in Urban Redevelopment”, Siodla2012; “Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement?: The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco”, Pennington2021
    • “Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872”, Hornbeck & Keniston2017 (cf. The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America, Rosen1986)
    • “The Billion Pound Drop: The Blitz and Agglomeration Economics in London”, Dericks & Koster2018

• Decisions:

  • “Making Big Decisions: The Impact of Moves on Marriage among U.S. Army Personnel”, Carter & Wozniak2018
  • “Timing is Everything: Evidence from College Major Decisions”, Patterson et al 2019
  • “Heads Or Tails: The Impact Of A Coin Toss On Major Life Decisions And Subsequent Happiness”, Levitt2020
  • “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, Thompson et al 2017; “Wikipedia Matters”, Hinnosaar et al 2019
  • “The Gift of Moving: Intergenerational Consequences of a Mobility Shock”, Nakamura et al 2022

• creative destruction⁠; the “Porter hypothesis”; the equity premium puzzle

• “Property Is Another Name for Monopoly: Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of Spectrum, Corporations, and Land”, Posner & Weyl2016

• “Exploration in the wild”, Schulz et al 2018 (an interesting paper, although not clearly establishing suboptimal exploration, which uses an extremely large dataset of restaurant orders by individuals from Deliveroo)

• “Evidence for a Conserved Quantity in Human Mobility”, Alessandretti et al 2016 (people visit few physical locations, and while they do continuously explore new locations & shift, there appears to be an equivalent of a Dunbar’s number⁠, suggesting limits to human abilities to easily plan/​remember activities covering more than ~25 locations regularly)

• An amusing fictional example might be the My Little Pony episode “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off”⁠.

• “Eager To Burst His Own Bubble, A Techie Made Apps To Randomize His Life”

• “Neural autopilot and context-sensitivity of habits”, Camerer & Li2021

• See Also: Evolution as Backstop for Reinforcement Learning⁠, Sunk costs⁠, On Having Enough Socks

Further Reading

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