Hard Landings and the End of KTC-DTR
Question #1: What’s KTC-DTR? Kick the can down the road.
Question #2: what does “the end of KTC-DTR” mean?
To answer that question, we need to rewind all the way back to around 200,000 years ago when homo sapiens sapiens came on the scene as a species we recognize as very much like ourselves, give or take a few genetic / epigenetic tweaks.
Humans are hard-wired to seek windfalls and feel euphoric greed when happening upon a tree loaded with ripe fruit. We gorge ourselves, happily stripping the tree of its bounty, and then resume our search for the next windfall.
The flip side of the gratifying emotions of euphoric greed–an almost god-like sense that our skill and luck are boundless, and it is our destiny to jump from windfall to windfall--is fear, panic and the intense pain of loss.
Various studies have found that the pain of loss outweighs the euphoria of gains, and this is the foundation of our innate risk-aversion: gains are nice, but we might not recover from (or survive) losses.
Which brings us to the dynamic driving “kick the can down the road.”
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