That's Interesting
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An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision
24th March, 2025Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in her new Smarthistory video. Throughout its fifteen minutes, she and her colleague Steven Zucker explain as much as possible of this jam-packed triptych — not that even a lifetime would be long enough to understand it fully.
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Paper Airplane Designs
20th March, 2025A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials and printable folding plans. Find the best paper airplanes that fly the furthest and stay aloft the longest. Learn how to make paper airplanes that will impress your friends.
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Boomer’s Guide to Higher Interest Rates: Part III – What Happens When You Can Earn 5% on Your Bank Deposits
16th March, 2025The third in a series of follow-ups, this article talks about what the world could look like when everyone can earn a reasonable risk-free rate – let’s call it 5% plus or minus 50 basis points – on their personal cash balances.
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Boomer’s Guide to Higher Interest Rates: Part II – What Happens When Equilibrium Approaches?
16th March, 2025This follow-up article shares some of the themes, expectations and lessons learned from other periods where the risk-free rate of interest was material and the cost of capital wasn’t super cheap.
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Boomer’s Guide to Higher Interest Rates: Part I – Dealing with an Increasing Interest Rate Environment
16th March, 2025No cycle is precisely like the previous one, so this article is not a perfect recipe to successfully navigate increased rates, but hopefully some of the thoughts will help accept, adjust, and be better prepared for what may come next.
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Do good decision-makers in the Fund Management industry use intuitive decision-making?
13th March, 2025Many studies have examined the Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM) field and several have explored fields such as fire-fighting and sport. Few have examined the financial sector, and none have looked into how the most senior and accomplished decision-makers in the fund management industry use pattern matching and intuition in their investment process. This study investigates how the best-performing fund managers use NDM, or ‘pattern recognition’, to make decisions. Good performers seem to oscillate between using ‘intuition’ and a more analytical approach. Furthermore, this study explores how social and organisational factors support or prevent decision-makers from acting on gut feel.
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
09th March, 2025In a different world (tumult of the ’70s), a pamphlet was published by one of the better-known economic historians of the ancient and medieval world that summarized why people make irrational decisions and how some countries recover and grow and yet others fail. It was written by the late Carlo Cipolla, an economic historian from Berkeley. The title (unlikely to be acceptable these days) was “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”, where he divided people into four brutal Forrest Gump type categories: “the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid.” In an economic sense, the classification is based on whether they and others gain or lose from their actions. The “helpless” gain little or nothing, though others may profit from their actions; the intelligent gain from what they do, but so do others; the bandits gain when others lose; finally, the “stupid” gain nothing or suffer losses as they harm the rest. Cipolla’s conclusion was that while “bandits” are not good, their actions follow self-interest logic that allows others to understand their motives and defend against. In his view, “stupid” are the most dangerous, as they are irrational and unpredictable, suffering from losses for no gain for themselves, and thus impoverish societies. He argues there is an even distribution of “stupid”, while the composition of “intelligent” and “bandit” varies between societies. It is this shifting balance that determines recovery (intelligent offset bandits) or collapse. However, in times of stress, “bandits” might unite with “stupid” (believing erroneously that they control them) to benefit from upheavals. The same applies to “intelligent”, as they also think that they are in control, but unlike bandits, they want to build a new order. A similar and more conventional concept was later developed by Acemoglu and North, discussing evolution of “extractive vs inclusive” institutions and transitions between two states.
Revolutions: When, Why and How?
13 February 2025
Viktor Shvets
Macquarie Global Strategy
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From Realized to Expected: The Passive Investing Impact
20th February, 2025Equity markets are now largely dominated by passive investments, this study introduces the Indexing Inclusion Ratio (IXI) as a measure of passive ownership to assess its increasing impact on U.S. equity markets. The findings reveal that high-indexed stocks highly outperform their low-indexed counterparts, primarily due to the influx of passive capital flows rather than fundamental value.
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Limited accountability and awareness of corporate emissions target outcomes
17th February, 2025Firms are increasingly announcing targets to reduce their carbon emissions, but it is unclear whether firms are held accountable for these targets. This article examines emissions targets that ended in 2020 to investigate the final target outcomes, the transparency of target outcomes and potential consequences for missed emissions targets.
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Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans
30th January, 2025Collective cognition is often mentioned as one of the advantages of group living. But which factors actually facilitate group smarts? This paper compared how individuals and groups of either ants or people tackle an identical geometrical puzzle. It found that when ants work in groups, their performances rise significantly whereas groups of people do not show such improvement and, when their communication is restricted, even display deteriorated performances.
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