The Visible Hand Column
TIM COHEN: Eighteen quintillion reasons to laud Jack Bogle
His mathematical imagination allowed him to launch the first index fund
There is a theory that human beings are inherently bad at maths. Of course, some are brilliant, and others are pretty useless. Often people feel bad about their mathematical ability, but they may not be as bad as they think — compared to their peers. But if you were to compare average human decision-making prowess when tasked with a linguistic or logical problem, say, compared to a mathematical problem, the average people more often get the mathematical problem wrong. So goes the theory. The problem is, this is more or less impossible to test, because how do you rate the difficulty of the logical problem compared to the mathematical problem? Yet, I suspect the theory is true, and this is why. Many people know the famous story about the king who considered himself the best chess player in the land and promised any of his subjects that if they could beat him, he would grant them any wish. Of course, a pauper challenged him and won. The pauper demanded a single grain of wheat for the f...
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