Fooled by the Winners will change the way you think about the stock market, health care, global warming, diets, lotteries, restaurants, and your siblings. It will reshape your perspective of the past and give you a clearer view of the future. Fooled by the Winners is a book about survivor bias, the cognitive error of focusing on the winners, the successes, and the living. But in many instances, we can learn more from those who have lost, failed, or died. Survivor bias is found in a wide range of fields, lurking quietly beneath the surface, patiently waiting to deceive us. Previous studies of survivor bias have been inaccessible to most, housed in formula-laden statistical journals. But you won’t find any math or technical jargon here. David Lockwood, a former member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, applies the concept of survivor bias to specific, real-world examples―minus the equations. After reading this book, you will understand how survivor bias is often used to deceive us. You will learn how to stop paying for financial services that promise more than they deliver, for health care that doesn’t make us healthier, for diets that don’t make us slimmer, and for advice books that don’t offer good advice. You will also come away with a different view of our past, including our perilous evolutionary journey and how history has often been written by the winners. You will come understand how we are fooled by the winners in warfare, such as the deployment of nuclear weapons and the most famous example of survivor bias―the missing Allied bombers of WWII. You will see how survivor bias clouds of our view of the past and prevents us from gaining a clear view of our future. Through compelling, real-life examples, this book demonstrates the deceptive influence of survivor bias in our daily lives and on our thinking. It shows how to correct for survivor bias, so you are never again fooled by the winners.