Best of #econtwitter - Week of November 23, 2025: good tweets

Dec 22, 2025

Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.

Good tweets

^this 2017 Tyler Cowen post on “Loving winning vs. hating losing” haunts me:

Loving winning and hating losing are two fairly distinct motivations. For instance, a fairly joyless person may nonetheless be motivated by the humiliation of a loss, or a non-envious, non-spiteful type could receive great pleasure from being number one, while not minding if someone later climbs higher yet.
If you both love winning and hate losing that is especially useful in one-on-one, zero-sum competitions, such as chess and tennis, and also in most team sports and perhaps securities trading as well. Such people are more motivated, and motivated from more sides of their being, and if one of the emotions flags a bit the other is there to step in and maintain the pace and focus.
In venture capital, I suspect that hatred of losing may be a disadvantage. No matter how successful you may be, most of your individual investments will lose money and hatred of losing may make you too risk-averse. It might be better to have the ability to simply forget your losses and put them behind you.
For academics, it is more important to love gains than to hate losses. Provided they don’t embarrass you, your forgotten articles just aren’t that big a deal and everybody has them, including Nobel Laureates. A single key piece can make your career, however.
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