The High Ground: Ideas Don’t Exist Independently of the Lives they’re Meant to Serve.

Communism is the perfect analogy here: beautiful in abstraction, hostile to human nature in practice. It promises harmony on paper, then collapses the moment it meets incentives, desire, envy, ambition, and variance.

Same dynamic in finance.

If you take the average person’s portfolio and tell them, “You can make 30%,” it sounds incredible—until you transl…