100 little ideas

Morgan Housel compiled a list of ideas “that help explain how the world works.” Here are some examples:

• Compassion Fade — People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups because the smaller the group, the easier it is to identify individual victims.

• Ringelmann Effect — Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”

• Cobra Effect — Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.

—MF