Category Archives: Work and Life

My thoughts on corporate life, work-life balance or the lack thereof and so on.

Columns, Corporate Life, Humor, Philosophy, Quantitative Finance, The Wilmott Magazine

Philosophy of Money

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Money is a strange thing. It is quite unlike any other “thing” that we know. Its value manifests itself only in a social context where we have pre-agreed conventions as to what it should be. In this sense, money is not a thing at all, but a meta-thing, which is why you are happy when your boss gives you a letter stating that you got a fat bonus even though you never actually see the physical thing. Well, if it is not physical, it is metaphysical, and we can certainly talk about the philosophy of money.

The first indication of the meta-ness of money comes from the fact that it has a value only when we assign it a value. It doesn’t possess an intrinsic value that, for instance, water does. If you are thirsty, you find that water has enormous intrinsic value. Of course, if you have money, you can buy water (or Perrier, if you want to be sophisticated), and quench your thirst.

But we may find ourselves in situations where we may not be able to buy things with money. Stranded in a desert, for instance, dying of thirst, we may not be able to buy water despite our sky-high credit limits or the hundreds of dollars we may have in our wallet. One reason for this inability of ours is obvious – we may be alone. The basic transactional value of money evaporates when we have nobody to transact with.

The second dimension of the meta-ness of money is economical. It is illustrated in the well-worn supply-and-demand principle, assuming transactional liquidity (which is a term I just cooked up to sound erudite, I confess). I mean to say, even if we have willing sellers of water in the desert, they may see that we are dying for it and jack up the price – just because we are willing and able to pay. This apparent ripping off on the part of the devious vendors of water (perfectly legal, by the way) is possible only if the commodity in question is in plentiful supply. We need commodity liquidity, as it were.

It is when the liquidity dries up that the fun begins. The last drop of water in a desert has infinite intrinsic value. This effect may look similar to the afore-mentioned supply-and-demand phenomenon, but it really is different. The intrinsic value dominates everything else, much like the strong force over short distances in particle physics. And this domination is the flipside of the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics.

The thing that looks a bit bizarre about money is that it seems to run counter to the law of diminishing marginal utility. The more money you have, the more you want it. Now, why is that? It is especially strange given its lack of intrinsic value. Great financial minds could not figure it out, but came up with pithy and memorable statements like, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Although that particular genius was only fictional, he does epitomize much of the thinking in the modern corporate and financial world. Good or bad, let’s assume that greed is an essential part of human nature and look at what we can do with it. Note that I want to do something “with” it, not “about” it – an important distinction. I, intrepid columnist that I am, want to show you how to use other people’s greed to make more money.

Photo by 401(K) 2013

Life and Death, Philosophy

How to Live Your Life

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I think the whole philosophical school of ethics serves but one purpose — to tell use how to live our lives. Most religions do it too, at some level, and define what morality is. These prescriptions and teachings always bothered me a little. Why should I let anybody else decide for me what is good and what is not? And, by the same token, how can I tell you these things?

Despite such reservations, I decided to write this post on how to live your life — after all, this is my blog, and I can post anything I want. So today, I will talk about how to lead a good life. The first thing to do is to define what “good” is. What do we mean when we call something good? We clearly refer to different attributes by the same word when we apply it to different persons or objects, which is why a good girl is very different from a good lay. One “good” refers to morality while the other, to performance in some sense. When applied to something already nebulous such as life, “good” can mean practically anything. In that sense, defining the word good in the context of life is the same as defining how to lead a good life. Let’s try a few potential definitions of a good life.

Let’s first think of life as a race — a race to amass material wealth because this view enjoys a certain currency in these troubled times that we live in. This view, it must be said, is only a passing fad, no matter how entrenched it looks right now. It was only about fifty years ago that a whole hippie generation rebelled against another entrenched drive for material comforts of the previous generation. In the hazy years that followed, the materialistic view bounced back with a vengeance and took us all hostage. After its culmination in the obscenities of the Madoffs and the Stanfords, and the countless, less harmful parasites of their kind, we are perhaps at the beginning stages of another pendulum swing. This post is perhaps a reflection of this swing.

The trouble with a race-like, competitive or combative view of life is that the victory always seems empty to the victors and bitter to the vanquished. It really is not about winning at all, which is why the Olympian sprinter who busted up his knee halfway through the race hobbled on with his dad’s help (and why it moved those who watched the race). The same reason why we read and quote the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was never about winning. And there is a deep reason behind why a fitting paradigm of life cannot be that a race, which is that life is ultimately an unwinnable race. If the purpose of life is to live a little longer (as evolutionary biology teaches us), we will all fail when we die. With the trials and tribulations of life volleying and thundering all around us, we still ride on, without reasoning why, on to our certain end. Faced with such a complete and inevitable defeat, our life just cannot be about winning.

We might then think that it is some kind of glory that we are or should be after. If a life leads to glory during or after death, it perhaps is (or was) a good life. Glory doesn’t have to be a public, popular glory as that of a politician or a celebrity; it could be a small personal glory, as in the good memories we leave behind in those dear to us.

What will make a life worthy of being remembered? Where does the glory come from? For wherever it is, that is what would make a life a good life. I think the answer lies in the quality with which we do the little things in life. The perfection in big things will then follow. How do you paint a perfect picture? Easy, just be perfect first and then paint anything. And how do you live a perfect life? Easy again. Just be perfect in everything, especially the little things, that you do. For life is nothing but the series of little things that you do now, now and now.

Image By Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Melesse using CommonsHelper., Public Domain

Corporate Life, Work and Life

Systems and People

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One of my friends found my post on Bill Gates and his philanthropic efforts less than persuasive. He said Bill just couldn’t be a good guy. It may be true, I just have no way of knowing it. I am in a benevolent and optimistic mood in the last few years, so I tend to see the rosy side of things. My friend’s objection was that Gates would squeeze blood out of a stone, if he could, while what he probably meant was that Microsoft was as ruthless a corporation as they came. Therein lies the crux of the problem with our modern era of greed and excess. We see the figureheads standing in front of the soulless corporate entities and attribute the evils of the latter to them. True, the figureheads may not all be innocent of greed and excesses, but the true evil lies in the social structure that came with the mega corporates, which is what I wanted to talk about in this note. What is this “system”?

It is a complex and uneasy topic. And this little analysis of mine is likely to draw flak because it is going to point right back at us. Because we are all part of the system. So let me spell it out right away. It is our greed (yes, yours and mine) that fuels the paychecks of those fat cats at the helm of large companies because they can and do exploit our unreasonable dreams of riches and creature comforts. It is our little unkindnesses and indifferences that snowball into the unstoppable soullessness of giant corporations. We all had our little roles to play, and nobody is innocent. There, I have said it.

Before I accuse you and me of being part of the system (a possibly evil one), I have to clarify what I mean by “the system.” Let’s start with an example. We buy a coffee from Starbucks, for, say five bucks. We know that only a couple of cents of the money we pay will actually go to the farmer in Africa who produced the most important ingredient — the coffee. Now, Starbucks would tell you that it is not just the coffee that they are selling, it is the experience, the location, and of course, high-quality coffee. All true. But where does the rest of the money go? A large part of it will end up in the top executives’ compensation. And why do we find it normal and tolerate it? Of the many reasons, the primary one is simple — we do it because we can afford to. And because we want to feel and show that we can pay five bucks for a cup of coffee. A bit of vanity, a bit of extravagance — some of the vices we don’t like to see in ourselves, but the soulless giants cynically manipulate.

The trouble with the system, as with most things in life, is that it is not all white or black. Look at Starbucks again. Its top brass is likely to be enjoying obscene levels of rewards from our foibles and the remote coffee farmers’ helplessness. But they also employ local kids, pay rent to local landlords, and generally contribute to the local economy. Local benefits at the expense of remote pains and personal failings that we’d rather not see. But the remote pains that we distance ourselves from are real, and we unwittingly add to them.

The system that brings about such inequities is much more pervasive that you can imagine. If you are a banking professional, you might see that at least part of the blame for the coffee farmers’ unhappiness lies with the commodities trading system. But it is not something that stands on its own, with no relation to anything else. When you get your salary through a bank, the money in the account may be used for proprietary trading, resulting in huge profits and price volatilities (in food prices in the third world, for instance). But you prefer to leave it in the bank because of the conveniences of credit/debit cards, automatic bill payments etc., and perhaps for the half a percent interest you get. You certainly don’t want to harm the poor farmers. But does the purity of your intentions absolve you of the hardships caused on your behalf?

The thing is, even you see this involvement of yours, decide to pull all your money out of the bank, and keep it under your mattress, it doesn’t make a goddamn difference. The system is so big that your participation or lack thereof makes no difference at all, which is why it is called a system. I feel that the only way you can make a difference is to use the system to your advantage, and then share the benefits later on. This is why I appreciated Bill Gates’s efforts. Nobody took more advantage of the system than he did, but nobody has more to share either.

Corporate Life, Work and Life

Latter-day Robin Hoods

The other day, I was watching Bill Gates on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — my favorite TV show. Gates touched upon his plans to spend billions of his own dollars on vaccines, education and other humanitarian projects through his foundation. Clearly passionate about his philanthropic efforts, Gates showed a milder side that wasn’t visible ten years ago during the corporate battles of the Microsoft kind.

Perhaps Gates is a naturally passionate guy, whether he is writing tiny operating systems that would fit in floppies or behemoth ones that would fit nowhere, whether in technical innovation or marketing wizardry, whether greedily amassing billions or, as now, spending it kindly. But attributing his philanthropy to his natural passion for everything he does is unfair, and diminishes its value. After all, he could have been spending (or at least, trying to spend) his money on himself just as passionately. That’s why I think of him as a modern-day Robin Hood, despite my geeky dislike for anything Microsoft-related, which is perhaps only a geek covenant now, rather than a practical ideology.

Robin Hood’s romantic idea of stealing from the rich and giving it to the poor had a critical flaw. He was an outlaw. The trouble with being an outlaw is that the full might of the legal system can be brought to bear on you quite independently of the morality of your activity. In Gate’s case, it would be like embezzling billions from Microsoft coffers and distributing it to the homeless, for instance. What he did, instead, was to make money in the stock market (which, of course, is embezzlement of a legal kind) and then give it to the poor. In other words, he stayed within the system and found a way to turn it around to his humanitarian purpose. If that is what he wanted to all along, kudos to him!

But what is this “system” that we have to work from within? That’s an involved topic for another day. Stay tuned!

Work and Life

Happy New Year!

Here’s wishing you a Happy 2010… May your resolutions hold up longer than those of the years past. And may you find peace, happiness, good health and prosperity.

I started this new year with Avatar. And its no-so-subtle anti-neo-con messages fill me with a bit of optimism despite all the carnage all around us. May be there will be a bit more patience and understanding this year. A bit more sharing and caring. A bit less avarice and grabbing. May be all is not lost yet. Or is it just that this frog is getting used to the world slowly boiling me alive?

My resolution this year is to do a lot more light writing. Blogging and column-writing, that is. And to spend more time with the kids. Having just finished my second book, I feel I will have more time, and won’t have to shoo them away. May be I can now patiently listen to all their silliness. Like my dad used to listen to mine.

Life and Death, Work and Life

Giving What We Can

I found this charity initiative that I believe will make a real difference. It is called “Giving What We Can.” In fact, it is not a charity website, but a portal with a few recommended organizations listed — those that are efficient and focus on the extremely poor. Sure, it tries to lay a guilt trip on you, but it really does give you hard-to-find information.

While going through it, I suddenly realized what was bothering me about the “normal” charity activities. Most of these activities operate locally, not globally, and therefore end up helping the slightly worse-off. In a world where the richest 20% command 80% of all the income, local charity only means the top 5% giving to the next 10% — the extremely wealthy helping out the very wealthy. This kind of charity never reaches the really poor, who desperately need help.

Living in this highly skewed world, it is hard to see how rich we really are, because we always benchmark ourselves against our friends and neighbors. For instance, as a “poor” graduate student in the early nineties, I used to make about $12,000 a year. It turns out that I was still better off than 90% of the world’s population. It is not surprising — my stipend was more than the official salary of the President of India (Rs.10,000 a month) at that time!

Coming from a rather poor place in India, I know what real poverty is. It has always been too close to home. I have seen a primary school classmate of mine drop out to become a child laborer carrying mud. And heard stories of starving cousins. To me, poverty is not a hypothetical condition allegedly taking place in some dim distant land, but a grim reality that I happened to escape thanks to a few lucky breaks.

So the local charity drives bother me a bit. When I see those school children with their tin cans and round stickers, I feel uncomfortable, not because I cannot spare a dollar or two, but because I know it doesn’t really help anything — except perhaps the teacher’s KPIs. And the twenty-year-olds with their laminated name badges and certificates of authenticity also make me uncomfortable because, certifiable bean-counter that I am, I wonder how much it costs to hire and outfit them. And who benefits?

Similar bean-counting questions haunted me the last time I sponsored a table at a local charity dinner at $200 a plate — $100 to the hotel, $50 to the entertainers, and so on. Who is the real beneficiary? Some of us turn to local churches and spiritual organizations to share and help others. But I cannot but suspect that it only helps the middlemen, not the extremely poor we mean to direct our aid to.

These nagging doubts made me limit my charity activities to my own meager personal drives — two dollars to the hawker center cleaning aunties and uncles, gas pump attendants, those old folks selling three tissue packs a dollar, and the Susannah singer. And handsome tips after the rare taxi rides. And generous donations to that old gentleman who prowls CBD and strikes up a conversation with, “Excuse me sir, but do you speak English?” You know, the next time he asks me that, I’m going to say, “No, I don’t. But here’s your five bucks anyway!”

But seriously. Take a look at this website. I think you will find it worth your time.

Corporate Life, Life and Death, Philosophy

Midlife Crisis

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In one of my recent posts, an astute friend of mine detected a tinge of midlife crisis. He was right, of course. At some point, typically around midlife, a lot of us find it boring. The whole thing. How could it not be boring? We repeat the same mundane things over and over at all levels. True, at times we manage to convince ourselves that the mundane things are not mundane, but important, and overlay a higher purpose over our existence. Faith helps. So do human bondages. But, no matter how we look at it, we are all pushing our own personal rocks to a mountaintop, only to to see it roll down at the end of the day — knowing that it invariably will. Our own individual Sisyphuses, cursed with the ultimate futility and absurdity of it all. And, as if to top it off, our knowledge of it!

Why did Camus say we went through the Sisyphus life? Ah, yes, because we got into the habit of living before acquiring the faculty of thinking. By midlife, perhaps, our thinking catches up with our innate existential urges, and manifests itself as a crisis. Most of us survive it, and as Camus himself pointed out, Sisyphus was probably a happy man, despite having to eternally push the rock up the slope. So let’s exercise our thinking faculty assuming it is not too dangerous.

Most of us have a daily life that is some variation of the terse French description — metro, boulot, dodo. We commute to work, make some money for ourselves (and more for somebody else), eat the same lunch, sit through the same meetings, rush back home, watch TV and hit the sack. Throw in a gym session and an overseas trip once in a while, and that’s about it. This is the boring not merely because it really is, but also because this is what everybody does!

Imagine that — countless millions of us, born somewhere at some point in time, working hard to acquire some money, or knowledge, or fame, or glory, or love — any one of the thousands of variations of Sisyphus’s rock — only to see it all tumble down to nothingness an another point in time. If this isn’t absurd, what is?

If I were to leave this post at this point, I can see my readers looking for the “Unsubscribe” button en masse. To do anything useful with this depressing idea of futile rock-pushing rat-race, we need to see beyond it. Or have faith, if we can — that there is a purpose, and a justification for everything, and that we are not meant to know this elusive purpose.

Since you are reading this blog, you probably don’t subscribe to the faith school. Let’s then look for the answer elsewhere. With your permission I will start with something Japanese. Admittedly, my exposure to the Japanese culture comes from Samurai movies and a couple of short trips to Japan, but lack of expertise has never stopped me from expressing my views on a subject. Why do you think the Japanese take such elaborate care and pride in something as silly as pouring tea?

Well, I think they are saying something much deeper. It is not that pouring tea is important. The point is nothing is important. Everything is just another manifestation of the Sisyphus rock. When nothing is important, nothing is unimportant either. Now, that is something profound. Pouring tea is no less (or more) important than writing books on quantitative finance, or listening to that old man attempting the Susannah song on his mouth-organ on Market Street. When you know that all rocks will come tumbling down just as soon as you reach the pinnacle of your existence, it doesn’t matter what rock you carry with you to the top. As long as you carry it well. And happily.

So I try to write this blog post as well as I possibly can.

Life and Death

Candle that Burns Bright

A classmate of mine from IIT passed away a few days ago. When I heard the shocking news, I wanted to write something about him. What came to mind were a couple of disjointed memories, and I thought I would share them here. For fear of causing more pain to those close to him, I will keep all the identifying references to a bare minimum.

We used to call him PJ — an acronym for a mildly insulting expression, which probably had its origin in our academic envy. PJ was academically brilliant, and graduated at the top of a class filled with almost pathologically competitive and bright IITians. This intensity that he brought to bear on the less superhuman is part of my first memory.

Troubled by this intensity, we once formed a delegation to appeal to PJ’s better nature. I don’t remember who initiated it, or even who was there in the delegation. But it certainly feels like something that Lux or Rat would do; or Kutty, perhaps, if we could get him to do anything at all. Anyway, we approached PJ and requested that he take it easy. “What is the big deal, man? Slow and steady wins the race, you know.” PJ’s response was an eye-opener. “Sure,” he said, “but fast and steady is better!”

I’m sure this fast and furious pace of PJ’s brilliance brought him many well-deserved accolades later in a lifetime perhaps best measured in terms of its quality rather than quantity, impact rather than longevity. But PJ was never an all-work-and-no-play fellow. I remember once when the MardiGras girls came to the Mandak dining hall (“mess”) to eat. Studying them with that hapless fervor that only a fellow IITian can fully appreciate, we discussed this development with PJ. He said, “Yes, we want to mess with them!”

IIT happened to us at an age when friendships came easy and the bonds forged stayed strong. With PJ gone and the connections a bit weaker, I feel a bit of unraveling. And the melancholy words that ring in my mind remind me — ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

PJ was a brilliant man. I hope his brilliance would be source of strength and courage to those close to him. You know what they say, a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. With one of our brightest candles flaming out, what I feel is a sense of some darkness descending somewhere far.

Photo by armin_vogel cc

Quantitative Finance, Work and Life

How to Make Money

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After my musings on God and atheism, which some may have found useless, let’s look at a supremely practical problem — how to make money. Loads of it. Apparently, it is one of the most frequently searched phrases in Google, and the results usually attempt to separate you from your cash rather than help you make more of it.

To be fair, this post won’t give you any get-rich-quick, sure-fire schemes or strategies. What it will tell you is why and how some people make money, and hopefully uncover some new insights. You may be able to put some of these insights to work and make yourself rich — if that’s where you think your happiness lies.

By now, it is clear to most people that they cannot become filthy rich by working for somebody else. In fact, that statement is not quite true. CEOs and top executives all work for the shareholders of the companies that employ them, but are filthy rich. At least, some of them are. But, in general, it is true that you cannot make serious money working in a company, statistically speaking.

Working for yourself — if you are very lucky and extremely talented — you may make a bundle. When we hear the word “rich,” the people that come to mind tend to be (a) entrepreneurs/industrialists/software moguls — like Bill Gates, Richard Branson etc., (b) celebrities — actors, writers etc., (c) investment professionals — Warren Buffet, for instance, and (d) fraudsters of the Madoff school.

There is a common thread that runs across all these categories of rich people, and the endeavors that make them their money. It is the notion of scalability. To understand it well, let’s look at why there is a limit to how much money you can make as a professional. Let’s say you are a very successful, highly-skilled professional — say a brain surgeon. You charge $10k a surgery, and perform one a day. So you make about $2.5 million a year. Serious money, no doubt. How do you scale it up though? By working twice as long and charging more, may be you can make $5 million or $10 million. But there is a limit you won’t be able to go beyond.

The limit comes about because the fundamental economic transaction involves selling your time. Although your time may be highly-skilled and expensive, you have only 24 hours in a day to sell. That is your limit.

Now take the example of, say, John Grisham. He spends his time researching and writing his best-selling books. In that sense, he sells his time as well. But the big difference is that he sells it to many people.

We can see a similar pattern in software products like Windows XP, performances by artists, sports events, movies and so on. One performance or accomplishment is sold countless times. With a slight stretch of imagination, we can say that entrepreneurs are also selling their time (that they spend setting up their businesses) multiple times (to customers, clients, passengers etc.) This is the only way to address the scalability issue that comes about due to the paucity of time.

Investment professionals (bankers) do it too. They develop new products and ideas that they can sell to the masses. In addition, they make use of a different angle that we discussed in the Philosophy of Money. They focus on the investment value of money to make oodles of it. It not so much that they take your money as deposits, lend it out as loans, and earn the spread. Those simple times are gone for good. The banks make use of the fact that investors demand the highest possible return for the lowest possible risk. Any opportunity to push this risk-reward envelope is a profit potential. When they make money for you , they demand their compensation and you are happy to pay it.

Put it that way, investment sounds like a positive concept, which it is, in our current mode of thinking. We can easily make it a negative thing by portraying the demand for the investment value of money as greed. It then follows that all of us are greedy, and that it is our greed that fuels the insane compensation packages of top-level executives. Greed also fuels fraud – ponzi and pyramid schemes.

There is a thin blurry line between the schemes that thrive on other people’s greed and confidence jobs. If you can come up with a scheme that makes money for others, and stay legal (if not moral), then you will make money. You can see that even education, traditionally considered a higher pursuit, is indeed an investment against future earnings. Viewed in that light, you will understand the correlation between the tuition fees at various schools and the salaries their graduates command.

Columns, Corporate Life, Physics, Quantitative Finance, The Wilmott Magazine

Modeling the Models

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Mathematical finance is built on a couple of assumptions. The most fundamental of them is the one on market efficiency. It states that the market prices every asset fairly, and the prices contain all the information available in the market. In other words, you cannot glean any more information by doing any research or technical analysis, or indeed any modeling. If this assumption doesn’t pan out, then the quant edifice we build on top of it will crumble. Some may even say that it did crumble in 2008.

We know that this assumption is not quite right. If it was, there wouldn’t be any transient arbitrage opportunities. But even at a more fundamental level, the assumption has shaky justification. The reason that the market is efficient is that the practitioners take advantage of every little arbitrage opportunity. In other words, the markets are efficient because they are not so efficient at some transient level.

Mark Joshi, in his well-respected book, “The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance,” points out that Warren Buffet made a bundle of money by refusing to accept the assumption of market efficiency. In fact, the weak form of market efficiency comes about because there are thousands of Buffet wannabes who keep their eyes glued to the ticker tapes, waiting for that elusive mispricing to show up.

Given that the quant careers, and literally trillions of dollars, are built on the strength of this assumption, we have to ask this fundamental question. Is it wise to trust this assumption? Are there limits to it?

Let’s take an analogy from physics. I have this glass of water on my desk now. Still water, in the absence of any turbulence, has a flat surface. We all know why – gravity and surface tension and all that. But we also know that the molecules in water are in random motion, in accordance with the same Brownian process that we readily adopted in our quant world. One possible random configuration is that half the molecules move, say, to the left, and the other half to the right (so that the net momentum is zero).

If that happens, the glass on my desk will break and it will make a terrible mess. But we haven’t heard of such spontaneous messes (from someone other than our kids, that is.)

The question then is, can we accept the assumption on the predictability of the surface of water although we know that the underlying motion is irregular and random? (I am trying to make a rather contrived analogy to the assumption on market efficiency despite the transient irregularities.) The answer is a definite yes. Of course, we take the flatness of liquid surfaces for granted in everything from the useless lift-pumps and siphons of our grade school physics books all the way to dams and hydro-electric projects.

So what am I quibbling about? Why do I harp on the possibility of uncertain foundations? I have two reasons. One is the question of scale. In our example of surface flatness vs. random motion, we looked at a very large collection, where, through the central limit theorem and statistical mechanics, we expect nothing but regular behavior. If I was studying, for instance, how an individual virus propagates through the blood stream, I shouldn’t make any assumptions on the regularity in the behavior of water molecules. This matter of scale applies to quantitative finance as well. Are we operating at the right scale to ignore the shakiness of the market efficiency assumption?

The second reason for mistrusting the pricing models is a far more insidious one. Let me see if I can present it rather dramatically using my example of the tumbler of water. Suppose we make a model for the flatness of the water surface, and the tiny ripples on it as perturbations or something. Then we proceed to use this model to extract tiny amounts of energy from the ripples.

The fact that we are using the model impacts the flatness or the nature of the ripples, affecting the underlying assumptions of the model. Now, imagine that a large number of people are using the same model to extract as much energy as they can from this glass of water. My hunch is that it will create large scale oscillations, perhaps generating configurations that do indeed break the glass and make a mess. Discounting the fact that this hunch has its root more in the financial mess that spontaneously materialized rather than any solid physics argument, we can still see that large fluctuations do indeed seem to increase the energy that can be extracted. Similarly, large fluctuations (and the black swans) may indeed be a side effect of modeling.