A man walks into a conversation with a statistic the way some people walk into a bar fight: not to learn anything, but to leave with a trophy. He doesn’t say “Hello.” He says, “Mississippi has higher GDP per capita than France and the UK.”
Pause for applause. Somewhere, a spreadsheet blushes.
The trouble is that GDP per capita is the kind of number that makes you feel informed while … Read the rest
Content 18+
Back in Moscow — and also now in Bulgaria, as I continue to work with Russians via Skype and Zoom — it has been my business to have close connections with Russian professionals. Because of that, I know a lot of 50-something guys who were living the good life until they lost their jobs. A lot of them were in the banking industry, some dealt in software, others … Read the rest
Content 21 + Please note that it should not be treated as medical advice. By now, and so indicative of the world we live in, the coronavirus has seized the public imagination more than anything since A.I.D.S and Charles Manson. It has ‘gone viral’ in ways that YouTube never dreamed of. It is, as the concerned media loves to call it now, a … Read the rest
Enough is enough. Let`s stop speaking about 4% a year inflation when the real price growth is 1.6% a month. Let`s stop speaking about safety when the murder rate is 11.31 per 100 000, that is between Surinam, Botswana and Papua New Guinea (where the rate is lower) and Panama, Nicaragua and Costa Rica (where the rate is higher). Just stop it.
(I had the most read post in our … Read the rest
