If I were to give you a budget to choose your perfect house, you would quickly have a clear idea of what to buy. And typically your perfect house will be a bit boring. That’s because, when you can only have one house, it cannot be too weak in any one dimension. It cannot be too small, too far from work, too noisy or too weird. So you’ll opt for a conventional house.
On the other hand, if I were to double your budget and tell you to buy two houses, your whole pattern of decision-making would change. You would now be looking to buy two significantly different properties with complementary strengths — perhaps a small flat in a city and a house in the countryside. Your criteria for the two houses would be wildly different. Neither would be the one you had chosen as a single home.
We know this instinctively in the domain of houses.
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