But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance.

When you say “Élan vital!” it feels like you know why your hand moves. You have a little causal diagram in your head that says:But actually you know nothing you didn’t know before. You don’t know, say, whether your hand will generate heat or absorb heat, unless you have observed the fact already; if not, you won’t be able to predict it in advance. Your curiosity feels sated, but it hasn’t been fed. Since you can say “Why? Élan vital!” to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, et cetera.

threshold theory, which holds that above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests.

What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?

The essential lesson to draw from this second principle of city economies is that no location advantage is eternal, no matter how seemingly indestructible. A new technology can undermine a city’s economy overnight.

In the United States, open heart surgery can run as much as $150,000—more than most Indians make in a lifetime. Given the cost, almost no one in India who needed heart surgery actually got it. Shetty saw an opportunity to create a new market for cardiac care. Today NH performs open heart surgeries for $1,000 to $2,000, with mortality and infection rates comparable with those in the United States. By increasing the utilization of its most expensive resources—personnel (especially surgeons) and medical equipment—it drastically reduced the cost of operations. It uses tiered pricing, whereby wealthier patients can pay more to get certain services, such as a private room. But the quality of care is standard across all patients.

This is what sets market-creating innovators apart: the ability to identify opportunities where there seem to be no customers and to create a business model that upends the way things have always been done

So Leftley tried again, changing both the product and the way he reached potential customers—offering them free insurance through their mobile phones. People could sign up without paying any premiums; they simply had to buy a certain number of extra minutes. They could keep earning this insurance by renewing the purchase each month. When a customer buys the required minutes, the telecom company pays his or her premium to both MicroEnsure and the partner insurer. Over time customers are offered additional insurance products, such as “double cover” (for a spouse) and “family cover,” which cost extra—from three cents to $1 per month, with payment collected through their phones. Revenue from the supplemental plans is split among MicroEnsure, the partner insurer, and the phone company.

Founded in 2002, MicroEnsure has registered more than 56 million people in emerging economies for insurance (adding 18 million in 2017 alone), paying out $30 million in claims and radically innovating the insurance business model. It has introduced new forms of protection for customers, including microhealth, political-violence, crop, and mobile insurance.

People can make bad economic choices based on something Thaler dubbed the “endowment effect,” which is the theory that people value things more highly when they own them. In other words, you’d ask for more money for selling something that you own than what you would be willing to pay to buy the same thing.

During our lives we learn that numbers are linear, that the spaces between them are all the same. If you count from one to nine, each number is one more than the previous one. If you ask someone what number is halfway between one and nine, they will say five—but only because they have been taught to. Wake up, sheeple! Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine.