Justin Singer: Person

Evans says that the problem with the new-money players is that they’re money-smart but culturally anemic. The 10-digit successes have come so fast for them that there’s been no time—and, for most of them, no inclination—to pursue character-broadening hobbies like lepidoptery or oenology, or interests in Flemish paintings, Gregorian literature, the opera, learning new languages. No time to break Everest records for the Explorers Club or hunt black rhinos in Tanzania.

As the patio cools, Nozad, 43, scans the bar. The Rosewood is morphing into the night. The tech set has scuttled their iPads, settling in for cocktails, as a few coiffed call girls work the crowd—perhaps the surest sign yet that money again flows freely in techland. Nozad wants the L-shaped couch just at the corner of the entrance. “I’m afraid my friends might not find me,” he tells a buxom waitress.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

Every bubble has two components: an underlying trend that prevails in reality and a misconception relating to that trend. A boom-bust process is set in motion when a trend and a misconception positively reinforce each other. The process is liable to be tested by negative feedback along the way. If the trend is strong enough to survive the test, both the trend and the misconception will be further reinforced. Eventually, market expectations become so far removed from reality that people are forced to recognize that a misconception is involved. A twilight period ensues during which doubts grow and more people loose faith, but the prevailing trend is sustained by inertia. As Chuck Prince, former head of Citigroup said: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” Eventually a point is reached when the trend is reversed; it then becomes self-reinforcing in the opposite direction.

[O]nly 35 percent of small businesses survive in the U.S. When surveyed, however, 81 percent of entrepreneurs assessed their odds of success at 70 percent, and 33 percent of them went so far as to put their chances at 100 percent. So what? In a Canadian study Kahneman cites, 47 percent of inventors participating in the Inventor’s Assistance Program, in which they paid for objective evaluations of their invention on 37 criteria, “continued development efforts even after being told that their project was hopeless, and on average these persistent (or obstinate) individuals doubled their initial losses before giving up.” Failure may not be an option in the mind of an entrepreneur, but it is all too frequent in reality.

Are you some overeducated Brooklynite “arty but not in a pretentious way” wheel watcher who hates her job and devotes an inordinate amount of time writing “witty” commentary on celebrities and writers in an attempt to divert attention from the slow death of whatever emotional life you once had? Fear not. Gawker will mock anyone who doesn’t exist in precisely your proportions.