Why You Can’t Stop Wanting What You Don’t Need
Flip the Diderot Effect upside down with the Geranium Effect.
6 min readNov 9, 2019
In 1766 Catharine II of Russia offered to buy Denis Diderot’s extensive library and pay him to to serve as her librarian. The influx of $50,000 francs mean that for the first time in his adult life, he was suddenly comfortable.
