The Weekend Edition

Leonard Cohen (1934-2016). The Canadian songwriter, performer, poet and novelist “passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor,” his son Adam said in a statement, according to Rolling Stone. Obits in Cohen’s hometown Montreal Gazette and in the inimitable style of the New York Times. We know everyone will want us to play Hallelujah, but the darker cynicism of Everybody Knows has always been more our style.

As spry as he was until the end, we’re betting Leonard would agree with this one: Want to feel younger? Act younger in a meaningful way. Your mindset has a lot to do with how you age. “How old we feel—our subjective age—can influence how we age. Where age is concerned, the pages torn off a calendar do not tell the whole story. … subjective age correlates with certain physiological markers of aging, such as grip strength, walking speed, lung capacity, and even the levels of C-reactive protein in the blood, an indication of inflammation in the body. The younger you feel you are, the better are these indicators of age and health: You walk faster, have better grip strength and lung capacity, and less inflammation.” Why You Can’t Help But Act Your Age by Anil Ananthaswamy for Nautilus is a tour de force, combining the best of science and health writing with some simple, practical facts that could change how you view getting older, whether you’re reading this in your 20s or your 70s.

The only thing that bothers us more than incompetence is when the incompetent in question thinks s/he is actually quite brilliant. Ars Technica’s Chris Lee feels our pain — and found a scientific paper that explains why the most incompetent among us are often the most confident in their own genius. Is there a solution? It turns out that — as with addiction — the first step to recovery is for the incompetent to admit they have a problem. Read Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesomein Ars or go check out the original paper, whose author makes an appearance in Lee’s piece. We’d suggest you do both, starting with the Ars piece.

Cry me a river: We no longer live in the era of the “imperial CEO,” but rather one that NYU law professor Marcel Kahn calls the “embattled CEO,” James Surowiecki writes for The New Yorker. The trend shift started in the US more than 30 years ago, but accelerated in the early 00’s with The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which required greater disclosure to investors and increased the independence of corporate boards. Moving from the “old days” when boards were often loyal to CEOs, “today, they’re more loyal to the company,” corporate governance expert Charles Elson says. Kahn adds that “big shareholders and boards of directors have more power, and are more willing to use it. And C.E.O.s have been the net losers.”

The trend has also been exacerbated by the rise of activist investors and the rise of the “social-media era,” as “damaging stories travel fast, and boards take public relations very seriously.” Surowiecki notes that “one recent study of C.E.O. tenure found that the percentage of forced turnover tripled between 1970 and 2006, and another study concluded that boards of directors now “aggressively fire C.E.O.s for poor industry-adjusted performance.” In addition, the average duration of a C.E.O.’s tenure has fallen.” He says the rise in CEO pay is the precisely the reason behind them being more vulnerable to sacking now. “If you’re paid tremendous amounts of money to make things go right, people naturally feel that you should be held accountable when things go wrong,” Elson notes. Surowiecki, says that “this is really poetic justice at work… C.E.O.s have remade American companies as lean, mean machines that put shareholder value above all else. To do that, they’ve insisted on greater accountability for performance and have broken implicit social contracts, such as the promise of lifetime employment. It’s only fitting that they’re victims of the same logic.”

Rise of the Robots, part 666: On first glance, it is a “banal” office park “indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America’s suburban landscape. Inside, it’s a whole different story. A different reality, in fact. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. War machines, 75 feet tall, patrol the parking lot.” And it’s neither virtual reality (VR) nor augmented reality (AR), but “mixed reality.” And it alternately thrills and scares the hell out of us. Even though it’s in Forbes, you should read “Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive USD 4.5 bn Startup Changing Computing Forever.”

Then again, we live in Egypt. It’s easy as pie to blithely declare that when the robots take our jobs, “There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that,” as Elon Musk said earlier this week. But when you live in an emerging market? We can’t even figure out who is qualified to receive benefits under the karama and takafol social welfare programs — let alone how we might finance a universal basic income for 100 mn people.

Much has been written about how we are / are not Venezuela, particularly after we shared that fantastic Planet Money podcast on how the oil exporting giant has become a failed economy marked by hyperinflation and despair. The root causes of our woes and Venezuela’s are at once similar and completely different, but the human toll of economic collapse is universal. We got a last-minute reprieve from a slow walk to the electric chair a week ago yesterday. This stunning piece by the New Yorker is at once a reminder of what could have been — and of what could still be if we don’t get this right. For all of you reading this in government or in business: It’s hard to imagine a time in our nation’s history when the decisions you make at work each and every day have — collectively — the power to decide the fate of the country as a whole.

You may be a victim of discrimination and not even know it. A pediatrician is convinced that society — schools and offices in particular — is discriminating against night owls: “She believes that morning people need to do more to recognize and respect the biology of non-morning people—who may simply not be built to operate on traditional schedules. This week in the medical journal Pediatrics, Owens and colleagues found that even among people who sleep the same number of hours, there are behavioral, emotional, and cognitive differences between people who are “night owls” and people who are “morning larks.” This is what she and some sleep experts have lately begun calling a person’s chronotype: the idea that people are “programmed” or “wired” to sleep later or earlier in any 24-hour period.” The Atlantic has a fascinating look at the topic.

No, your Toblerone isn’t madroob. It’s not some crazy import substitute decreed by the Trade and Industry Ministry (bless them — we don’t want Tarek Kabil’s job, and we certainly wouldn’t want to walk a mile in finance minister Amr El Garhy’s shoes). No, if your Toblerone is strangely spaced out, that’s the “new and improved” chocolate bar that’s allowing Mondelez to keep prices the same, but sell you just a little bit less chocolate… The BBC has more.

Meet the man who invented podcasts. Christopher Lydon recorded the first podcast in 2003 because mainstream media now flocking to the medium wouldn’t listen to him: “Podcasting was born out of the despair around the Iraq war. It was a political response to a giant breakdown in the American conversation, in the world conversation. I went to New York to demonstrate and the New York Times didn’t even cover it. Podcasting was about people speaking up in a time of traditional media oblivion.” Podcasting “is different to radio — institutionally as well as functionally,” he tells the Guardian in a profile. Lydon hosts the Open Source podcast. While you’re there, check out the newspaper’s list of 50 podcasts you need to hear, which is rather surprisingly not a bad place to start if you’re new to the medium.

Now this is how you fight a modern day border dispute, ladies and gentlemen — not with rifles, RPGs, armor and close air support, but with whiskey and schnapps.

Is coincidence really random? Mathematician Joseph Mazur tells Vox’s Phil Edwards that with every incredible story you hear —like someone winning the lottery four times, for example— what you get is the “outer shell” only and “you have to understand what is behind that shell,” and this can teach us about coincidences in our lives. “It’s all about the hidden variables,” Mazur says. To give an example, Mazur dissects the story of an American woman who, while in Paris, “randomly” ended up buying specific book she used to own as a child. He mathematized the story and came up with specific values to the probabilities that theses “miracle” scenarios could happen (runtime 06:13).

If it looks like a pyramid scheme… This is to help you tell those distant relatives or random high school acquaintances who pop up in your life unannounced to ask if you if you’ve heard of that “new thing” called “Qnet” and how it could make you a tonne of money. John Oliver on Last Week Tonight explains the indistinguishable difference between multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes and they’re both a waste of money and time (runtime 31:57).

Your trading strategy, modelled using cows: Mathematical models of herding cows can teach us about investment strategy, Tracy Alloway discusses on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast with co-host Lorcan Roche-Kelly. Alloway and Roche-Kelly talk to mathematical modelers who wrote a paper titled “A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows” examining why cows synchronize their behavior and why they stop. They extrapolated their findings to humans and behaviour in financial markets (runtime 31:08).

The start of a different kind of episode: Gimlet’s StartUp podcast is back to following startups build their businesses, but they’re taking a “hard right turn into a very different kind of story for the next several episodes.” StartUp is following former American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, “who built a widely recognized business, lost it all, and is now starting over—from scratch.” Charney was ousted from his business at American Apparel, which he says was an illegal move, and then the company filed for bankruptcy ruining him financially. He is now trying to rebuild a completely new garment manufacturer. In this episode, co-host Lisa Chow follows Charney as he tries to re-establish old relations with manufacturers to make labels for his new business. The episode also includes previews of three new Gimlet shows that will be launched during the week (runtime 44:40). The new episodes include a true-crime show, a new twist on news as the first draft of history, and its first scripted fiction series (a psychological drama starring Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer.) Details here.

Meet the designer disrupting the “attention economy”: Co-founder of advocacy group Time Well Spent Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” was profiled by The Atlantic’s Bianca Bosker. As social media has trained and conditioned users for constant, unnecessary interruptions, with many checking their phones as frequently as 150 times a day, the likes of Harris — who is trying to “bring moral integrity to the tech world” — are essential. Another Silicon Valley veteran Bosker spoke to “compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established: keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives.” The solution to engaging in almost toxic, habit-forming norm? Not necessarily entirely unplugging, but “ethical design prototype products…[that] help us set boundaries”, such as an inbox that asks how much time we want to dedicate to email, then gently reminds us once we’ve exceeded our quota.

Getting on that slipperiest of slippery slopes: Caleb Cain examines the case against democracy in a piece for The New Yorker. Crain says “democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals” and worry about voters’ ignorance and their impact on governance. What’s good about democracy? Crain, citing Amartya Sen, notes that the case has been made that “democracies never have famines … they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.”

What if there’s an alternative to democracy? The origins of the arguments against a fully democratic system can be traced back to some of Plato’s writings and more recent notions by John Stuart Mill. Cain posits the question: “So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often?”

David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown, posited the idea coined “epistocracy,” a term that jams together the Greek work for “knowledge” and the one for “rule.” Crain quotes Estlund, who resisted the idea, in saying “it’s an idea that ‘advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist.’” Philosophically, Estlund only saw three valid objections to the idea: “First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment… Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so… The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others… The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, ‘You might be right, but who made you boss?’”

By the end of Estlund’s analysis, Crain says there are only two practical arguments left standing against epistocracy. “The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority.” Contrasting that view, Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan “argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest.” Crain notes that Brennan is reluctant to say how an epistocracy would function in real life.

Why tech giants are turning to remote working developers: Websites like freelancer.com used to only contain job listings from small and medium sized companies, but now, Google and NASA have joined the ranks because they “understand the importance of [the] cost-effectiveness of remote working,” writes Andrada Fociteam for ZDNet. Ukrainian software developer Anton Bredikhin developed a demo smartwatch app for NASA astronauts to use on the International Space Station and was reimbursed USD 2,500 for his project. For techies based in Eastern Europe, a region with fewer cool tech projects available, lower living costs than Western Europe or the US, remote working can feel like hitting the jackpot, Bredikhin says. "If you’re an experienced developer with a good past record, you can definitely make twice as much as you would make in a regular tech job in the Ukraine," he adds.

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

• The best Egypt tourism video we’ve seen in forever (Youtube)
• CIB’s new credit and debit card limits on foreign transactions (CIB statement, pdf)
• The Simpsons on Donald Trump (Handover from the Trump Administration to President Lisa Simpson or the Trumptastic Voyage)
• Link to our special issue last Friday on the float of the pound and fuel price increases (Enterprise)
• Table of new fuel prices (Arabic)(JPG image sent by Oil Ministry)

The (other) gender gap: Wall Street veteran and co-founder of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women, Sallie Krawcheck spoke with Sheelah Kolhatkar at The New Yorker TechFest on the gender investing gap and her previous experiences working in “an industry that does a lot more to service men than women.” Krawcheck’s experiences at Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which she implies were sexist work environments, inspired her to move on to actively help women take control of their financial lives, shattering myths that women are less risk-averse compared to men or less talented at maths. She says Ellevest “isn’t just a company, [but] a movement—to make women aware of this gap, and to give them a means in their control to close this gap” (runtime 30:31).

Spanish parents of students in state schools have launched a month-long weekend homework strike, according to the Guardian, with some parents telling the newspaper “the current amount of homework leaves little or no time for children to relax, pursue other interests, play or be with family.” Other parents speaking to the newspaper from the UK and Romania said they felt the same way. A Spanish parent speaking to The Telegraph said she joined the campaign as she believes the type of homework assigned is inefficient and widens the gap between social classes.