Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us: Summary & Key Insights

The economist’s mind is a magnificent tool. It teaches us how to think about trade-offs, about opportunity cost, about the seen and unseen. These are powerful frameworks for deciding how to spend money or how to allocate scarce resources. But what happens when the resource at stake is not money, but your future self? What if the decision is not about efficiency but about purpose? Traditional rational choice theory whispers, calculate the expected value, gather information, and optimize. Yet, as I came to realize, information about who you will be in ten years does not exist today.

When I married or contemplated having children, I could not possibly know what it would feel like to grow older with someone or to see my child’s first smile. Data could not tell me how my own heart would transform. Economists call this ‘missing data,’ but that phrase trivializes the enormity of what’s missing. These aren’t numbers yet to be found; they are experiences that have never existed until you live them.

Thus rational choice approaches life like a mapmaker trying to measure a river that keeps changing its course. Even if the measurement is precise today, it’s obsolete tomorrow. Real rationality, I’ve come to believe, requires humility – the recognition that calculation itself has limits. In those limits lies the domain of imagination and moral judgment.

Wild problems are inescapable. They emerge whenever the question ‘What should I do?’ collides with the deeper question ‘Who do I want to be?’ They are wild because the landscape is unmapped and the territory moves with every step you take. Consider marriage. A spreadsheet might evaluate a partner’s compatibility score, but no model can capture the way love reshapes what matters to you. Parenthood offers another example: before you become a parent, you may imagine the costs in time and money; after you become one, you realize the decision has rewritten your identity entirely.

These problems are not annoyances to be resolved but mirrors that reveal what you value most. When we face them, the question is not ‘How do I win?’ but ‘What kind of person am I becoming through this choice?’ That shift in framing changes everything. Wild problems aren’t about optimization; they are about transformation.