samir kumar singh

“Over the past forty years, researchers in well over a hundred subsequent studies have replicated and expanded on Thaler’s initial work. The early demonstrations of the endowment effect in the lab were quite simple. In one of Jack Knetsch’s early experiments, students signed up for the task of completing a questionnaire. Before filling it out, one group of participants received their payment in the form of a coffee mug. A second group received payment in the form of a big chocolate bar. (A third group was offered a choice between the two as a fresh decision with no prior ownership of either. This group split pretty evenly, favoring the mug 56%–44%.) Knetsch wanted to know whether ownership of the mug or the chocolate bar among the first two groups would change how the participants valued those items. To do that, after completing the questionnaire, he gave the participants in those groups a chance to switch their payment for the other item. In other words, the students with the mug could trade for the chocolate bar, and the students with the chocolate bar could trade for the mug. If there was no effect of ownership, you would expect that the first two groups, after trading when they preferred the other item, would end up with the same proportion of mugs and chocolate bars as those who came to the decision fresh. About half the participants in each group would trade, perhaps slightly more in the group that started with the chocolate bar and slightly fewer in the group starting with the mug. But that’s not what Knetsch found. It turned out that endowment to an item, even for such a brief period of time, had quite a strong effect on how much value they attached to the items. Of those given the mug, 89% declined to trade it for the chocolate bar. Among those given the chocolate, 90% favored the chocolate and only 10% traded it for the mug.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“The concept shares elements with the Seasteading movement, a libertarian group of mega-rich preppers intent on building independent floating cities on the high seas. The Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by anarcho-capitalist (and Google software engineer) Patri Friedman, with funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, to ‘establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems’. Some of the ideas they plan to use include harvesting calcium carbonate from seawater to create 3D-printed ‘artificial coral’ cities of upside-down skyscrapers – ‘seascrapers’ – powered by oceanic geothermal energy. Some of this energy will be used to draw nutrients from deeper waters to the surface to grow seaweeds in farms worked on by ‘the poorest billion people on earth’, welcomed because ‘floating societies will require refugees to survive economically’. These floating utopias will ‘liberate humanity from politicians’ while solving the planet’s big problems, it is claimed. For the more sceptical among us, this smells dystopian, rather.”
― Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World