Plant Melons

A reasonably well-studied phenomenon is the decreasing marginal utility of good things happening. Where I live, two strong drivers of how happy I am in the summer are the temperature and the quality of local produce. I also have a garden where I can choose what to plant each year.

Tomatoes are great, but if the temperature goes above 95 and fails to drop at night, the quality of the fruit diminishes. Melons are great, and they become even greater as the temperature goes over 95.

Given this, I can construct a happiness matrix over what I plant and what the summer does.

	Mild summer	Hot summer
Plant tomatoes	+1.5	−2
Plant melons	+0.5	+0.5

Tomatoes correlate my food with my weather: a mild summer gives me good weather and good produce, a hot one gives me neither. Melons anti-correlate them: whatever the weather does, exactly one good thing happens. (The first good thing is worth a full unit and the second only half; misery compounds the other way.)

Given the concavity of happiness it’s clear to me that I should always plant melons as a personal hedge.

U(good food + good weather) + U(bad food + bad weather) < U(good food + bad weather) + U(bad food + good weather)