In 1965, six bored schoolboys from a boarding school in Tonga decided to borrow a fishing boat and go on an adventure. They were teenagers. Their provisions, for what turned out to be an open-ocean voyage, amounted to a couple of sacks of bananas, some coconuts and a small gas burner. A storm caught them, […]
The Real Lord of the Flies Read More »
In the 1700s, life insurance in Britain briefly turned into a betting shop. People took out policies on the lives of strangers, of public figures, of prisoners awaiting execution, and then, in effect, wagered on when they would die. It became distasteful enough that Parliament stepped in. The Life Assurance Act of 1774 introduced a
The One Policy You Hope Never Pays Out Read More »
Spare a thought for the guppy. It lives, at best, a couple of years, most of them spent trying very hard not to be eaten. And in that short window it has to make sense of the entire world. Its idea of what’s normal, what’s dangerous, what’s likely to happen next, is assembled from a
Guppy or Greenland Shark? Read More »
In 1947, a tired copywriter named Frances Gerety, the only woman in her agency’s copy department, sat down late one night to write a signature line for a diamond company. By her own account she was exhausted, hadn’t cracked it, put her head on the desk, and asked for a little help from above. Four
A Diamond Is Forever, and Other Fictions Read More »
For about thirty years, the psychologist Ulric Neisser knew exactly where he was when he heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked on 7th December 1941. He was at home, listening to a baseball game on the radio, when the broadcast was interrupted by the news. He could picture it. There was one problem. Nobody
The Baseball Game That Never Happened Read More »
I was on a train recently and opposite me were two old ladies bemoaning the State Pension (or the state of their pensions). One of them said: ‘I paid in for years and now it is just paying me back.’ It took every fibre of my being not to point out that her contributions paid
In 1904, an American woman named Elizabeth Magie patented a board game. She was a follower of the economist Henry George, who believed that the value of land, as opposed to the buildings and work on top of it, ought to be taxed above almost everything else. Magie built her game to prove his point.
The Game That Was Meant to Be a Warning Read More »
Here is a sentence I did not expect to write in a financial planning blog. There is a British start-up whose stated aim is to predict the future, and it appears to be rather good at it. The company is called Cassi. It was co-founded by Dr Keith Dear, a former RAF intelligence officer who
The Machine That Predicts the Future Read More »
On the 1st of August, a new product went live that tells you something important about how markets work, and how they’re now being nudged to work differently. It’s called Truth API. It’s run by Trump Media, and for a fee it gives banks and trading firms the fastest possible access to posts from the
Paying to Read the President First Read More »
In November 2019, in the middle of a general election campaign, a man in a Question Time audience became briefly and permanently famous. The subject was a proposal to raise income tax on the top 5% of earners, meaning those on more than £80,000. The man was cross about it, and said so. He was
Not Even in the Top Fifty Read More »
