Nature & Animals Quote by James Wolfensohn

Wolfensohn’s line lands like a quiet indictment of boom-time blindness: the problem isn’t just that people ignore warnings, it’s that success actively rewires what counts as “evidence.” The “winning horse” metaphor does a lot of work. It frames prosperity as momentum and spectacle, something you ride rather than fully control. When the animal is surging, you don’t want analysis; you want to stay balanced and keep smiling for the crowd. That’s the psychological hook: victory feels like validation, and validation makes dissent sound like jealousy, pessimism, or bad manners.

The outsider/insider split is the real knife. Wolfensohn is describing an asymmetry of persuasion. Insiders in a boom receive constant positive feedback: rising asset prices, headlines, peer reinforcement, incentives. Outsiders have only arguments, and arguments are no match for a lived experience of winning. Subtext: even good-faith warnings often fail because they threaten identity and status, not just forecasts. To tell someone “something is wrong” when everything looks wonderful is to ask them to downgrade their own judgment, their tribe, maybe their paycheck.

Context matters: Wolfensohn spent years at the IMF and World Bank, watching governments and markets treat growth spurts as moral proof. The line reads like post-crisis hindsight distilled into a usable lesson: in euphoric periods, the hardest thing isn’t diagnosing risk; it’s getting the people benefiting from risk to admit the bill exists at all. It’s less economics than human nature, with a suit and a saddle.