Recently, I heard someone say: “You must fail quickly and cheaply in order to learn and succeed”. These words were uttered by an expert in design thinking when talking about the need to experiment with possible solutions to problems. Design thinking is an iterative process to finding solutions and requires a deep empathy for [...]

My identical twin brother’s son-in-law is a television camera operator and has years of experience filming people and events from all over the world. From videotaping athletes at the Sochi Winter Paralympics to recording Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, he has experienced first-hand what most of us intuitively know – people behave [...]

Distinguished economists, statisticians and mathematicians often have their name associated with some economic theory, concept or tool. Some examples include Giffen goods, the Nash equilibrium, the Phillips curve and the Gini coefficient. Today, I would like to introduce you to another economic concept - Goodhart’s law. This “law” testifies that social or economic performance [...]

Now that I am well and truly back in the office, a belated happy New Year to you and best wishes for 2024! Whenever I am on holidays, as I was in January in Canada, I invariably slip into my alter ego role of philosopher. That said you might be expecting me to write [...]

Making predictions about the future based on past trends is fraught with danger. What lies ahead is rarely a straight-line extrapolation of historical data. Rather, the path to the future bobs and weaves and zigs and zags as unforeseeable factors almost always intervene. This is why managed investment schemes warn investors that “past performance [...]

Marriages and mortgages have something in common - they are both “death pledges”. In a non-secular marriage ceremony, each partner vows to stay with the other ‘until death do us part’. Home buyers who execute a mortgage also commit to a “death pledge”, but not in a literal sense. To explain this, we need [...]