South Africa: Sovereign Wealth Funds - and Adventures in the Margin of Error

analysis

One of the hardest things in life is changing your mind; it's embarrassing. But after some soul-searching, I have managed the supreme task of actually changing my mind on at least one thing, and that is whether SA should establish a sovereign wealth fund. That means I'm now on the opposite side of conventional wisdom, and on the same side as (shock, horror) Trade and Industry minister Ebrahim Patel and the EFF. But... I could be wrong about being wrong.

In 2010, New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schultz wrote an unexpectedly popular book about the glory of being mistaken, called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Her thesis, briefly, is that we are schooled from very young to think that people who don't agree with us are either stupid or they have the right information but they don't believe it for some reason.

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