Capital, considered.

On the evening of October 15, 1962, while most Americans were still unaware that the world was drifting toward nuclear confrontation, a CIA analyst named John J. Ford gave an informal presentation at the home of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The audience included Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and other senior figures of the Kennedy administration. The subject was not missiles, bombers, or Cuba.

There are roughly six hundred Stradivarius instruments left in the world, objects so singular in their construction and effect that they stand at the intersection of art, science, and myth. Individual violins command tens of millions, and their voice has resisted reproduction with a persistence that borders on the absurd. This resistance is not due to any lack of effort.

On most Saturday mornings, my family follows a familiar routine, almost a ritual: coffee, the library, brunch. One morning we were in the used bookstore in the basement of Lexington’s downtown library. My daughter was in the children’s section holding two books, Little House on the Prairie and Madeline. She wanted both, and I heard myself saying, “This or that; you can’t have both.”

Picture a riverbank in late spring. Two figures stand at the water’s edge, each intent on the same objective: fish. The first wades in immediately. He is shin-deep in the current by sunrise, swiping at silver flashes, occasionally closing his fist around something that wriggles. By noon, he has a small pile of trout on the bank; enough to eat and perhaps share with his closest family. He looks, to any reasonable passerby, like a man who knows what he is doing.

Planning dinner for a household is a test of coordination. Ingredients must be available, likes and dislikes remembered, dietary restrictions respected, time managed, and budgets followed. And this is a simplified case. Even at the scale of just a single family, ingredients can go missing or stale, schedules collide, and minor miscalculations make for a stressful supper time. 

Now imagine attempting the same task for an entire city.

A farmer who plants in April will know by October whether he chose wisely. But October’s knowledge is too late to revise April’s decision. The seed is spent, the soil has been worked, and the season has moved on. He can harvest what has grown, learn from the result, and try again next year, but nothing allows him to go back.

A six-foot-tall person decides to cross a river whose average depth is five feet five. The margin looks adequate. Mid-crossing, the river deepens without warning, footing disappears, and the person drowns. The story is usually told as a warning about averages, which is fair as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.

If wealth were an absolute measure, two people with identical balance sheets would yield matching internal states. They never do. Wealth is not like height or temperature; it is closer to pressure, a force created by the relationship between two things rather than the magnitude of one.

Friedrich Hayek revived this obscure word from Greek antiquity, dusted it off, and tried to set it to work. It never found its way into the economics lexicon and has largely disappeared from modern discourse. The irony is almost perfect: a word meant to describe emergence could not manage to emerge. Yet Hayek was right; our common words, “market” and “economy,” are too thin and misleading for the reality they attempt to describe.

A clock can lose a single second each day and hardly be noticed. It ticks on, imperceptibly out of step with the truth. The error is so small that it feels irrelevant until the days accumulate into weeks, the weeks into months, and eventually the loss is no longer measured in seconds but in hours..

This dialogue was inspired by the recursive brilliance of Douglas Hofstadter and the whimsical logic of Lewis Carroll. It’s part satire, part philosophy, and, like the market, a little bit absurd.

There’s no shortage of articles and hot takes comparing Roth and Traditional retirement accounts. Most of them walk you through marginal tax rates, retirement income projections, and maybe offer a simple calculator to “optimize” your contributions. But here’s the thing: optimizing the unknowable is a fool’s errand.