Making Sense of Evidence, Markets, and Business
This blog explains how to think more clearly, invest more wisely, and build better businesses – drawing on rigorous academic research, and making it accessible to a general audience.
Was Rachel Reeves British Girls U14 Champion – and does it matter?
“I am – I was – a geek. I played chess. I was the British girls under-14 champion.”
So said Rachel Reeves in ...
Ultra-Processed Evidence
Chris van Tulleken’s “Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop?”, ...
The study that never was
In March 2022, my LinkedIn feed lit up with people sharing this article:
It is by ...
Is addiction really rare in patients treated with narcotics?
The opioid epidemic has seen the over-prescription of opioids as painkillers. An estimated 645,000 people died ...
Inside the ivory tower
In May Contain Lies, I highlight the value of academic research. While it's far from perfect, it can be more ...
Does only 2% of VC funding go to female founders?
A widely quoted statistic is that only 2% of VC funding goes to female founders. For example, this Forbes article ...
An unhealthy obsession with organisational health
Two leading asset management firms drew my attention to the McKinsey Organizational Health Index as a potential ...
Successful companies are successful
I was struck by the Harvard Business Review headline "Companies that Practice 'Conscious Capitalism' Perform 10x ...
Discernment matters even more
In 2015, 2018, and 2020, McKinsey released a trio of papers claiming that diversity has a positive causal impact ...
If at first you don’t succeed, try try again
One of the papers that I cited most prominently in Grow the Pie is "Corporate Sustainability: First Evidence on ...
Want a more innovative conclusion? Innovate the conclusion
'Want a more innovative company? Hire more women'. The title hooked me immediately. I’m an avid follower of the @TEDTalks Twitter page, but I don’t have time to watch every talk. But when I saw one with the title ‘Want a more innovative company? Hire more women’, I wanted to hit play instantly.
You couldn’t even make it up
Confirmation bias leads us to make up excuses to dismiss facts we don’t like. If our favourite politician gets elected and the economy tanks, we’d argue it would have done worse had she not been in charge. Or we’d protest that we need to wait another year before we can truly evaluate her performance.
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