The Psychology of Money: Unmasking the Illusion of Wealth
When Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, he shattered the foundational assumption of classical economics: the idea that humans act as rational utility-maximizers. His Prospect Theory proved mathematically that human cognition is profoundly flawed when evaluating risk and reward. Decades later, EBS (Educational Broadcasting System)—South Korea's premier intellectual public broadcaster and arguably the most rigorous academic media institution in Asia—designed an unprecedented social experiment to map these precise cognitive illusions against the unforgiving mechanics of modern capitalism. Filtering this massive socioeconomic experiment through my academic background in the UK and my extensive analytical experience in the highly volatile South Korean commercial sector, this analysis transcends basic financial commentary. We are stripping down the cognitive illusion of wealth to its raw components. By examining how our paleolithic neurological wi...