The Weekend Edition

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We publish the Enterprise Morning Edition in English and Arabic from Sunday through Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and political news that will move markets each day. What you’re reading now is our Weekend Edition, which is light on news and heavy on stories to read, videos to watch, and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers). The Weekend Edition comes out each Friday between 9:00am and 9:30am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now. We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

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This weekend’s edition comes to you this morning powered by obscenely overpriced Starbucks coffee. We’re still on our break, making the best out of this long weekend. It’s this time of the year when we look to binge-watch films that were nominated for Oscars, after the nominations came out during the week, in a futile attempt to feel relevant and in touch with our friends and family who had enough time to watch most of the films that made the cut. Also, we thought we’d let you know that applications to Flat6Labs Cairo are open to entrepreneurs now. We will be back to our normal publishing schedule on Sunday morning.

Oxfam’s headlining stats on global inequality are clickbait, with little more to offer. The anti-poverty charity published a blogpost during the week with the uber-sensationalist headline “Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world.” The well-meaning report goes on to show “how our broken economies are funneling wealth to a rich elite at the expense of the poorest in society, the majority of whom are women. The richest are accumulating wealth at such an astonishing rate that the world could see its first tn’aire in just 25 years. To put this figure in perspective – you would need to spend [USD 1 mn] every day for 2738 years to spend [USD 1 tn].” Aside from how they are ignoring interest income which would be earned by that hypothetical tn’aire, Oxfam’s logic is fundamentally awry. The claim is “pretty obscene, on its face,” Felix Salmon writes, “except, when you look closer, it doesn’t really tell you very much.” Salmon explains: “If you look at the numbers that the statistic is based on, from Forbes and Credit Suisse, you’ll see that the equality here is that the eight richest people in the world have a combined net worth of roughly [USD 426 bn], or 0.16% of all the world’s wealth. Is it really true that the bottom 50% of the world’s population accounts for only 0.16% of the wealth on the planet? Well, not really. The bottom 50% comprises five different deciles. Of those deciles, the fourth has 0.17% of the world’s wealth, and the fifth has 0.32%. Those are both very small numbers—but they’re both bigger than 0.16%. So something funny is going on here—and that something funny is debt. When Oxfam looks at net worth, it adds up your assets, and then subtracts your liabilities. And when your liabilities are bigger than your assets, that means you have negative net worth. According to Oxfam’s methodology, the bottom 10% of the world’s population has a net worth of one [tn] negative USD—an almost inconceivably large sum.” Even with Oxfam trying to adjust for that, they ignored the debts of the populations occupying the second and third and fourth and fifth deciles of the global population, which are naturally larger than those owed by people in the bottom decile because “as your wealth goes up, after all, your assets rise (by definition), but so do your liabilities.” This is not the first time Oxfam tries to argue using that faulty logic. Economist Tim Harford followed Oxfam’s 2014 headline argument that the richest 85 people in the world controlled as much wealth as the combined fortunes of the poorest half of the global population, and dismantled it fully. Harford noted that, using the same token, his then-newborn baby “controls more wealth than the poorest one and a half bn people on the planet” and, following that same unsound logic, “he’s also richer than an indebted graduate of Harvard Business School.” Salmon hammers down the same point: “consider this: Would you rather have USD 75,000 in the bank and no debt and no degree, or USD 75,000 in the bank and USD 75,000 in student loans and a four-year college degree? As far as the Oxfam methodology is concerned, the difference is enormous: The person with USD 75,000 and no debt is in the top 10% of the world’s wealth distribution, while the person with the college degree is in the bottom 10%. And yet there’s a right answer to the question: You’re much better off with USD 75,000 in debt and a college degree than you are with no debt at all.” Salmon recommends a change in the methodology to just comparing a wealth ranking based on assets, not net worth. Does this mean we’re dismissing Oxfam’s concerns? Absolutely not. Global inequality is a serious challenge, but treating it facetiously with sensationalist headlines does more harm than good. One take we recommend on the issue, going beyond clickbait, is Branko Milanovic’s book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, in which he uses vast datasets to explain “the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.” The book is available to buy on Amazon.

Impact investing and how it trumps aid in alleviating poverty: In “Why Bill Clinton helped a 33-year-old build a USD 1 bn firm,” the BBC looks at impact investing through the story of Andy Kuper, considered by many to be a trailblazer in the field. The business behind Kuper’s firm LeapFrog Investments (and the answer to the eponymous question) is investing in, helping run, and expanding companies in emerging markets and poverty stricken nations with an eye towards socially impactful companies. LeapFrog has been primarily focused on insurance and healthcare funds, so that populations would not be blighted by ill-health. There is a school of thought emerging that this capitalism with a cause type play, dubbed impact investing, is a much more efficient and effective method of alleviating poverty in developing countries, and is increasingly being seen as a diametric opposite of the inefficient aid and NGO system, which has done little. Can one make money out of this? After a very slow start (hampered in part by the global financial crisis), LeapFrog today has funds of over USD 1 bn. It currently invests in 16 companies across 22 countries in Africa and Asia that have a combined 100,000 employees and serve 91 mn people. Companies that LeapFrog invests in include All Life, a South African insurance firm that gives low cost coverage to people with HIV, Kenyan pharmacy chain Goodlife, and India’s Mahindra Insurance Brokers. Leapfrog helps the firms see revenues grow by an average 43% per year, said Kuper. It counts Goldman Sachs, Axa, JP Morgan, AIG, Swiss Re, and the European Investment Bank among its institutional investors. Bill Clinton unveiled the company during his keynote speech at the annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative foundation. So, yeah, this may be worth looking into.

Luna, we love you, but you have to know that we’ve been with many moons before you … and it’s complicated: New research suggests that there were many moons before the one lighting our night skies currently.The origin of the moon is one of the great mysteries of our universe. Recently, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed that the single rock we see in the sky every night could actually be “an amalgam of the many moons that came before it,” writes Alan Burdick for The New Yorker. “The single-impact hypothesis, sometimes known as the Big Splash or the Big Splat,” has been the most prevalent scenario for the moon’s creation since the 1980s. It “supposes that the moon formed when a planet-size object, often called Theia, crashed into Earth” some 20-100 mn years after it was created, sending “a huge mass of debris into orbit.” A few things about the Big Splat though don’t quite add up. The lead researcher on the many moons project, Raluca Rufu, suggests that given the frequency of collisions almost 5 bn years ago, it seems unlikely that something “large enough to set Earth and the moon on their current courses-would occur but not be followed by another.” In fact, there were so many others that it seems plausible that the moon was not only the product of multiple collisions, but that there could have been several moons over time, and that they (and our own) were a number of smaller moonlets that fused together over mns of years. Earlier research also seems to fit in better with Rufu’s proposed theory. Rocks brought back from the moon with the Apollo missions of 1969-72 contained samples that also served to debunk the Big Splat. The rocks not only contained oxygen with the same isotopic properties as those found on earth, “but also titanium, tungsten, and aluminum, among others,” meaning that the moon is made up of more earth than we first thought possible, and that could not have been the product of a single impact. “Not only is the chemistry of the [single-impact theory] flawed, but also its physics,” writes TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger. “It’s possible to develop a model in which a single collision produces enough material to form the moon, but in those models the speed and angle of impact produces a debris cloud that dissipates or falls back to earth, rather than forming an orbiting mass.” Simulations conducted by Rufu and her colleagues showed how a series of hits from objects roughly one-tenth the size of the moon could produce molten moonlets, “made entirely of earth matter,” that would orbit at a high enough altitude that would allow them to eventually coalesce into one. There is still more work to be done, Rufu admits. Robin Canup, an astrophysicist and longtime believer in the Big Splat seems to think so too. While he says that the new research persuaded him that the many moons theory is “maybe worth considering,” some samples from the moon could cause a drastic shift in direction. “If we didn’t have the rocks, we would have convinced ourselves 30 years ago that we’d solved the origin,” he said (View Rufu’s full research paper here).

… Back on earth, we’re looking at creative modern flats designed for overcrowded cities instead of the monstrosities we’re surrounded by here in Cairo: Apartment buildings are an effective means to relieve housing shortages in our cities, to use land more economically and to avoid long commutes to suburbia, but, unfortunately, most modern ones are ugly. Architecture and design critic Michael Webb explains to Anna Baddeley of 1843, The Economist’s sister magazine, that “risk-averse, profit-hungry developers conspire to produce blocks and towers packed with ‘claustrophobic cells [that] open off double-loaded corridors. Light and air come from one side only, and balconies are usually vestigial.’” Baddeley says a brief survey of the finest modernist and brutalist buildings is “a depressing reminder of our current paucity of imagination,” but it is not all that bad. Webb gathered 30 examples of recent developments from around the world that are “creative responses to the deceptively simple challenge of fitting a lot of people into a small space.” Webb’s list includes a range of luxury flats to social housing and from low-rise buildings to high-rises, and Baddeley picked five to highlight. First is Zaha Hadid’s CityLife in central Milan, whose curvy design was a nod to that of ocean liners. There is also The Interlace of Singapore, which Baddeley describes as “at once outrageous and awe-inspiring” and something that would result from “two giants playing Jenga.” Pictured above is the 25 Verde condominium in Turin, a block that incorporates 150 trees. It is part of a “growing trend for architects to ‘build’ live trees into their creations. As well as being pleasing aesthetically, trees muffle noise pollution and provide shade and privacy.” One of the more impressive buildings in Webb’s selection is Adjaye Associates’ Sugar Hill in Harlem, a 13-storey, mixed-use development, commissioned by non-profit Broadway Housing Communities. Baddeley also gives a nod to the V_Itaim in Sao Paulo, which devised an “ingenious, and beautiful, solution” to the lack-of-privacy problem apartment dwellers often face by adding shutters “made from perforated freijo wood can be slid and folded across the windows, shielding residents from nosy onlookers and providing shade, as well as adding an ever-changing pattern to the concrete façade.”

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK – The Wehrmacht: If you are into war documentaries (and never admit to us if you are not) then this should be a treat, and a long treat at that. The German ZDF Network-produced series takes us deep into the inner workings of the German army in the lead up to and all way until after the Second World War. What distinguishes it from the sea of WW2 documentaries out there is that it focuses on recently revealed documents and information obtained from Trent Park operation archives. Wehrmacht officers captured during the war were held in the Trench Park manor and were given the freedom to move around, and more importantly, to converse among each other. With British intelligence listening to every revealing conversation, the officers unwittingly gave up a treasure trove of historical information on what the German military class — long held in high esteem in Germany and seen as being unwillingly dragged into Hitler’s war — actually thought; and who they believed was culpable. Among the bombs (pun intended) dropped in the documentary, was the revelation that the German army had been organizing and planning remilitarization long before Hitler showed up on the scene. It also gives an unveiled testimony of the many senior officers in their ranks that knew and participated in the atrocities committed by the Nazis. We have the full series in one extremely long video, which you can find here (runtime 03:51:28).

What will be the top 10 moments in 2017? The Economist believes 2017 will come with a number of major stories throughout the year and, of course, they flagged the rise of US President Donald Trump to power as the main event. They put together a video on what the newspaper believes will be the standout moments expected during the year. One thing The Economist anticipates is the launch of “personalized medicine,” which uses a precision approach to customize treatment to individuals’ needs using their genes. More audacious, the world could see the first attempt at a human head transplant surgery, planned by Italian neurosurgeon Dr Sergio Canavero. In October the record for land speed is set to be broken by the Bloodhound Supersonic team, who will attempt to drive a car at the fastest speed ever recorded, breaking the 20-year old record of 1,227.99 km/h. Politically, The Economist flags the fall of Daesh as one event to look forward to during the year. In Europe, the results of the French presidential elections are expected in mid-May, which would probably signal if Europe can continue to move forward in a unified, liberal, and progressive way. The newspaper also expects the centenary of the Russian revolution to create an awkward moment for President Vladimir Putin as he squares off the legacy of Lenin with his regime’s aversion to any dissent. China’s Communist Party’s 19th National Congress is also taking place during the year, and the newspaper says it could give President Xi Jinping to take on ever more power (runtime 31:02).

Japanese national Shigeru Miyamoto, who Vox notes has “been called ‘the father of modern video games’ — and for good reason,” first released the Donkey Kong video game in 1981, at a time when the video game market in North America witnessed plummeting sales. Witnessing the success of Donkey Kong in the midst of such a chaotic market, Miyamoto went on to work on sequels to the original Donkey Kong game, in addition to other wildly popular projects, including The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Ocarina of Time, and, perhaps the world’s most famous video game, Super Mario Bros. It takes a particular form of creativity and a rather rare sense of vision to be the brains behind such an impressive arsenal of products. So how does he do it? For starters, Miyamoto says he generally likes to stay away from trends and does not believe in buying into the “that’s just the way it’s done” type of logic, such as the general notion that in-app purchases are the best or easiest way to get money out of users. That philosophy persists even in the order in which Miyamoto approaches the tasks embedded in producing a video game; whereas many developers focus on the programming first and then attach a storyline for bonus attention-grabbing points, Miyamoto is a firm believer that the story of the game is integral to pulling in the players and making them form an attachment to the game (watch, runtime 05:55).

It’s all about trust in the workplace: In the chaotic whirlpool we call life, having a job is just one of those things everyone kind of has to do, whether we like it or not. Some of us manage to find a career path that simultaneously excites us, actually has employment opportunities, and will give us enough cash to satisfy our capitalistic whims. Others are not quite as lucky, and find themselves morphing into disengaged zombie employees. Employers often work hard to counteract the zombie effect by empowering and challenging their employees to stoke the fire of engagement. “High engagement –– defined largely as having a strong connection with one’s work and colleagues, feeling like a real contributor, and enjoying ample chances to learn –– consistently leads to positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations,” Paul Zak writes for the Harvard Business Review. While employers recognize the importance of promoting engagement in their organizations, but the “how” seems elusive to many. Sure, pizza Mondays and dress-down Thursdays can be a good way to spice up an otherwise monotonous work week and throw your employees a temporary happiness bone, but the culture of trust (or lack thereof) in a workplace is what really makes a world of a difference. According to Zak’s research, high-trust organizations foster greater productivity and collaboration, keep chronic stress at bay, and usually see lower employee turnover rates. To understand how an organization can foster trust in the workplace –– and what it is, exactly, that makes humans trust one another in the first place –– Zak takes what many behavioral psychologists would denounce as a highly reductionist approach by examining the neuroscience of trust. Through a series of studies, Zak found that oxytocin, a brain chemical that is often associated with feelings of love and connection, plays a key role in trust and trustworthiness. The researcher then extrapolated his lab findings into the real world to identify eight specific management behaviors that foster trust, including recognizing excellence, giving people control over how to carry out tasks, allowing them to choose the particular project(s) they would most like to work on, sharing information and promoting transparency, and intentionally building personal relationships. In a nutshell: “It’s not about being easy on your employees or expecting less from them. High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them.”

How economic policy works under the lunacy of Daesh: There are some everyday considerations the scum at Daesh have to face in order to manage life in Daesh-land. Some of that “mundane” stuff that economists in particular tend to occupy themselves with is what kind of financial system does Daesh run in areas it controls. Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast delved into their monetary policy with Graeme Wood, the author of a book about the monetary system and how it fits into Daesh ideology. In short, those lunatics really like gold. All the basic things you’d expect are there: no proper banking channels, no fiat currency, and no interest. They mint gold coins as currency, but that doesn’t mean they actually use them widely, local currencies Iraqi dinars and Syrian pounds are still used along with some USD. “They are subject to the same pressures, the same inflows and outflows of capital … the rules of economics don’t cease to apply just because you want to live back in the seventh century” Wood says. The episode also discussed how Daesh uses the internet to promote its ideology and to recruit (runtime 27:36).

Lots of people around the world might be afraid that a certain someone now has access to America’s nuclear weapons launch codes. Using their impeccable timing, BBC’s The Inquiry podcast’s most recent episode asks “How Do You Launch A Nuclear Missile?” In the episode, host Ruth Alexander looks into not just how close Mr Trump’s fingers are to “the button,” but also how close leaders of other nuclear powers globally are to actually launching nuclear attacks. Alexander looks into the cases of the US, UK, Russia, and China (runtime 23:15).

Is it ever “ok” to kill animals at a zoo? In his piece for The New Yorker, Killing Animals at the Zoo, Ian Parker explores the ethical questions surrounding the practice of euthanizing excess zoo animals, which became a global issue after the death and public dissection of the young, healthy giraffe named by many as “Marius,” at the Copenhagen zoo made international headlines two years ago. The “cull and breed” policy is quite a commonplace practice at many European (and even American) zoos, it turns out. Animals are allowed to mate and breed freely, and the excess offspring is euthanized, or “culled,” around the age when they would have separated from their families in the wild. Culling remains both legal and ethically, at least from a conservationist standpoint, acceptable. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria estimates that members cull some 3-5k animals a year. Critics within the community believe that zoos don’t need more bad press and that culling, especially so publicly, is bad news for everyone. “A modern zoo hopes to tell a story of refuge and empathy. So a giraffe’s dismemberment observed by unsmiling children suggested a counter narrative, and one that carried a particular risk of public-relations contagion,” writes Parker. So why does the practice still exist and how is it justified? The academics and experts who favor the practice have many reasons to offer to, primarily centered around conservation and the genetic aptitude of their captive species. Contraceptives, the Europeans argue, present potential medical risks that could be carried down for generations, and so does preventing the animals from mating when they need to. “Because zoos must deprive animals of many natural behaviors, it’s important to allow them to mate and raise infants,” argues Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director and posterchild of its culling policies. The Copenhagen Zoo alone euthanizes 20-30 animals each year, including lions, tigers, and zebras, and “we cannot look all around the world every time we have a surplus animal of any kind…It happens everyday,” said Holst.

To buy a gun in Japan, you have to attend a class, take a written exam, and pass a shooting range test with at least 95% accuracy, writes Harry Low for BBC. It doesn’t stop there, mental health and “substance” tests are also required, followed by a background check on criminal records and links to extremist groups. Fresh cartridges can only be purchased by returning the last cartridge, the gun and ammo must be stored separately under lock and key, and the entire licensing process must be repeated every three years when the license expires. Additionally, the police have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons. Japan is the “first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world and laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don’t play a part in civilian society,” said Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence. Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world. In 2014 there were just six gun deaths, compared to 33,599 in the US. Japanese police officers rarely use guns, instead opting for martial arts, as they are all expected to be black belt judokas and spend more time practicing kendo than learning how to use firearms. “One bullet shell was unaccounted for – one shell had fallen behind one of the targets – and nobody was allowed to leave the facilities until they found the shell,” said journalist Jake Adelstein, who attended one of the police’s shooting practice sessions. The public are onboard as well: “there is no clamor in Japan for gun regulations to be relaxed. ‘A lot of it stems from this post-war sentiment of pacifism that the war was horrible and we can never have that again,’” journalist Anthony Berteaux tells Low. To compare Japan’s setup with that of America, check out Vox’s explainer on the United States’ “completely unique” gun problem. You can also go back to see Jim Jefferies’ profanity-laden tirade against gun policy in the US, which we included when discussing gun deaths in context of access medical research.

Scientists have been trying to make sense of “the voices in our heads” for a long time, writes Jerome Groopman for The New Yorker, but our probes into the mind’s inner workings have barely begun to scratch the surface. People talk to themselves for a great number of reasons, Durham University psychology professor Charles Fernyhough argues in his latest book, the Voice Within. People use “inner speech to remind themselves of tasks, to talk themselves through or out of certain situations, to relive memorable moments. The phenomena has a role to serve in functions of “memory, sports performance, religious revelation, psychotherapy, and literary fiction.” A body of scientific work already exists to prove that inner speech has also been valuable in treating various anxiety-related disorders. Indeed, some of the greatest writers in history, including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Hilary Mantel, have admitted that inner speech was part of the creative process that led to the production of their monumental body of work. 70% of 91 writers attending the Edinburgh book fair also admitted to using inner speech to write. But Fernyhough notes though that those with creative tendencies are more prone to psychiatric disorders. Where do we draw the fine line? While there are many cognitive benefits to inner speech, too much of it could be the sign for a psychiatric disorder. What do we make of those who have “auditory hallucinations and verbal promptings from voices that are not theirs but those of loved ones, long-departed mentors, unidentified influencers, their conscience, or even God?” Mainstream psychology could readily diagnose the likes of Joan of Arc or Margery Kempe, and perhaps many others, with schizophrenia or epilepsy, but there are many who would disagree. Advocates of a global initiative known as the Hearing Voices Movement “want [hearing voices] to be seen as a normal variation in human nature. Their arguments are in part about who controls the interpretation of such experience” and their goal is to promote tolerance in order to better understand what they experience without the added pressure of a doctor-patient dynamic. Critics of the movement argue that the approach carries a risk that those with true mental illnesses will not receive the necessary treatment.

One thing that had stopped us from learning more about our brains is that babies tend to jitter: A cognitive scientist, Rachel Saxe of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used fMRI on her one-month-old baby to learn about the human brain by imaging brain activity. Saxe quickly figured out that the biggest obstacle she faces is keeping her baby still. This explains why the piece, written by Courtney Humphries for Quanta Magazine, is filled with color from how Saxe lies next to her baby in an attempt to keep her still during the scanning of her brain as she watches some videos. One question for the study: “Do babies’ brains work like miniature versions of adult brains, or are they completely different?” Two years after the study using data from nine babies, the paper came out this month in Nature Communications. For instance, we have a part of the brain for “theory of mind” which is concerned with thinking about what others are thinking. How did we get there? Do specific parts for specific tasks or perceptions or thoughts emerge as we grow up or have they always been there since we were born? The study showed similarities in visual perception in adults and babies, as well as significant differences. The researchers found that looking at faces or scenes generated brain activity in the same parts in babies’ brains as adults’. “That shows that the [visual] cortex “is already starting to have a bias in its function,” [Ben Deen, first author of the Nature Communications study] said, rather than being totally undifferentiated. Are babies born with this ability? “We can’t strictly say that anything is innate,” she said. “We can say it develops very early.”” One big difference, nevertheless, is that babies’ brains seem to be more multipurpose, meaning that no particular area is responsible for processing one kind of input. … Delving more into where consciousness comes from: Researchers at Harvard Medical School believe they have discovered the neural network from which consciousness stems, Philip Perry writes for Big Think. Consciousness is defined as the ongoing process of arousal and awareness by classical neurology, but the origin of consciousness has long eluded the greatest scientific minds. We’ve known for some time that the brainstem regulates arousal, what neurosurgeon Richard M. Bergland called the “spark plug of consciousness.” Researcher Michael D. Fox recruited 36 patients with brainstem lesions. 12 of them were in a coma and the remaining 24 conscious. The unconscious patients all showed damage to the area of the brainstem in question. But Fox also found the brainstem to connect to two points in the cortex which are being implicated in a neural network for the very first time. In a follow-up segment, researchers examined the brains of 45 patients in a coma or vegetative state with a functional MRI (fMRI). They found that all three regions in the patients were out of commission. While further studies are needed to validate and verify the results, this could be a leap forward in neurology, medicine, and even philosophy.

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past, fairly short, week were:

• The World Economic Forum’s Inclusive Growth and Development Index, which ranked Egypt 73rd of 79 countries (WEF).
• Bloomberg’s Global Risk Briefing for 2016 with Egypt labelled as the world’s 12th riskiest market for investors (Bloomberg).
• The Hollywood Reporter’s review of “The Nile Hilton Incident” from Sundance (Hollywood Reporter).
• The odd mix of gurgling and gagging one language centre claims to be the correct way to pronounce “slap” (Facebook).
• Five points on how Turkey is turning from a parliamentary democracy to Erdogan-land (DW).

Bernie Madoff, the convicted fraudster behind the biggest Ponzi scheme in US history, as Akin Oyedele describes him for Business Insider, has hogged the market for hot chocolate in his prison in Butner, North Carolina. Madoff looks like he found his natural environment with reports he is already exploiting markets within prison. Steve Fishman, a reporter in contact with Madoff, says he “continued applying his business instincts in prison. At one point, he cornered the hot chocolate market. He bought up every package of Swiss Miss from the commissary and sold it for a profit in the prison yard. He monopolized hot chocolate! He made it so that if you wanted any, you had to go through Bernie.”

Our inner economics geeks really like this: There are some economics terms we should all be using more often, economist Noah Smith believes. Seeing the Edge Foundation asking scientists “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?” Smith wished something similar existed for economics. His suggestions do not include vague and overused terms like equilibrium, rational, and efficient. Instead, he wishes we all knew about and used words like “endogeneity” more often. Smith also believes the public should focus more “on the margin” instead of looking at big overall effects on average. “Aggregate” and “conditional versus unconditional” also make his list. Wanting us all to speak with marbles in our mouth, Smith says, tongue-in-cheek, “as long as this doesn’t happen endogenously, the marginal increase in the aggregate present discounted value of our public discourse would have a high conditional probability of being positive.”

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