Money and Emotional Intelligence
Moneyball Book Review Analysis #1
On July 26, 2025, Forbes published a book review written by John Tamny of my book, The Moneyball Method. That review was also published on July 18, 2025, at RealClearMarkets.com. And beginning at the beginning, here is a quote from its first paragraph:
Were he still with us, Munger might admit that when it comes to money, it takes a lot of intelligence or at least a lot of emotional intelligence to be “consistently not stupid.”
For “intelligence” I’ll use broadly integrated knowledge or an expert quantity of knowledge of a given subject. And for “emotional intelligence,” it is your healthy reactions to rapidly changing events or important subjects. Of course, the context here is decisions that include money or circumstances that affect your financial well-being.
Essentially, intelligence is acquired through your perception of reality, applied consistently - and emotions are the psychological responses to your immediate experiences. In the Charlie Munger quote from the book review, to be “consistently not stupid” is to have emotional reactions that are rational. Furthermore, to be rational is to apply reason to all circumstances, to be committed to the reality of nature and to choose values, goals and actions that respect both.
Masterfully, what Tamny does in the first paragraph of his book review is nail an important theme of The Moneyball Method described in Chapter Eight:
Not only does character develop with the ideas you discover and put into action, when your career, health, relationships and wealth are grounded in rational goals, they achieve the only moral purpose that matters. That is because reality is certain, everyone has heroic potential and we must make judgments in favor of what is good. Wealth creates time for all of them.
Ultimately, Moneyball answers the question, “to make money for what?” And the “what” must come first - meaning the values and goals that drive actions using money as the tool. Believe it or not, that is radical. And to get it backwards not intelligent.
The next brief essay in this series will address a quote from the third paragraph of the Forbes review:
It was while at these institutions that Shupe happened on the myriad fallacies associated with “best practices” on the matter of wealth management. Sensing customers were being misled by accepted wisdom, he turned his own “principles into practice.”
To learn more, please click the link below:
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/