Economics & Markets

If you actually weakened insider trading laws, companies would probably end up being more honest and revealing more secrets.

A private tech company remotely shut down a major oil refinery just to follow foreign rules, totally ignoring the local courts.

Global trade and wars are basically just physical reactions to the fact that the Earth is a ball and not a flat map.

Policies meant to boost 'tourism' actually did a better job of cleaning up water pollution than actual environmental laws did.

Sustainable shoppers are actually creating more trash by replacing perfectly good stuff with new 'green' versions.

Where a central banker was born and where they went to school can tell you exactly how they’ll vote on interest rates.

It's mathematically impossible to make AI safety filters that can't be tricked just by changing how you word things.

People pick 'impossible' career goals so that when they fail, they can blame the goal instead of their own talent.

Right before a job gets fully automated, the human experts in that field actually see a weird, temporary spike in their pay.

Overconfident investors actually think the stock market is scarier than the cautious ones do.

Don't expect AI to kill off high bank fees—there's a math limit to how low those costs can actually go.

Data centers in Canada are moving to provinces with the 'dirtiest' power because the green ones are locking them out.

How much risk you're willing to take with money might depend on how much it rained where your ancestors lived hundreds of years ago.

Only about 4% to 7% of those big 'green hydrogen' projects people announce actually ever get finished on time.

Creating official markets to trade company data actually makes businesses come up with worse ideas.

Making a credible promise of peace can actually make war more likely by making you look like you're less willing to fight.

Building big concrete walls to stop the sea often backfires, making communities even more likely to lose everything later on.

Public health models should probably treat being good-looking the same way they treat air pollution or a virus.

If we want to fix the massive shortage of care workers, we need to start explicitly recruiting men for those jobs.

You’ll never fix AI safety by making it 'ethical'—the only way is to legally stop AI from being allowed to make any final calls.

Democracies should have an 'immune system' that automatically gives citizens extra rights if a leader starts acting like a dictator.

Private equity firms were actually lowballing how much their companies were worth until new laws forced them to be honest.

We should stop treating the Presidency like a political job and start governing it like high-risk nuclear infrastructure.

People in nursing homes are actually much more likely to die in the weeks right after a scheduled inspection.

Most pollution makes the flu worse, but ground-level ozone might actually protect you from getting infected.

Huge industrial disasters usually happen because both companies and the government made the 'smart' choice to hide bad news.

Whether a woman can get a business loan depends a lot on how 'strict' the social rules are in her country.

Living around nature is only good for your health once your country is actually wealthy enough to support you.

If you raise the price of a fan subscription, the top creators actually end up streaming less often.

Tech giants are spending $660 billion a year on AI—this either leads to a massive economic boom or a total bankruptcy crisis.

The chlorine we use to clean water can accidentally turn normal chemicals into new ones that are 10 million times more toxic.

Instead of charging money, we could give things out more fairly just by making the 'right' to use them expire really fast.

Government pay surveys are totally missing the real wage gap in tech because they ignore the stock options people get.

Prison inmates actually managed to hack the Argentine President’s house just by tricking a soldier with a digital scam.

All that 'green' activism from shareholders hasn't actually lowered global carbon emissions at all.

That huge 'explosion' in corporate profits everyone is talking about might just be a math error caused by new technology.

In cultures where 'saving face' is a big deal, companies are way more likely to lie about their environmental record while actually doing a terrible job.

AI researchers moving to big companies are now making about $1.5 million a year more than their friends who stayed in colleges.

The world’s legal system isn't falling apart—it’s being hijacked by dictators who use 'human rights' as a weapon.

The way Chinese characters are built like a web might actually be a better way to understand how AI 'thinks' than English is.

We’re trying to save sharks by banning fancy soup, but the real problem is the massive global appetite for cheap shark meat.

Trying to put strict safety rules on AI might actually stop it from ever being truly helpful, because real intelligence needs the freedom to be itself.

Religious groups don't just have more kids because of their faith—they do it because they build 'friend networks' that make raising kids a lot cheaper.

The reason we can’t find many skeletons from the smallpox outbreaks in the Americas is because so many people died so fast that there was no one left to bury them.

If you want people to support fixing inequality, they’d rather see fair starting wages than high taxes on the rich.

That legal rule that lets states ignore federal monopoly laws is actually a huge win for local democracy, not just a loophole for corruption.

Going digital and getting 'smart' with data doesn't actually help local governments collect any more tax money.

China's Two-Child Policy accidentally tanked women's wages because they became desperate for specific 'mom-friendly' jobs.

Weirdly enough, giving solar power to developing countries can actually cause their total carbon emissions to skyrocket.

If a mutual fund manager is married to a big-shot executive, they make way more money—but only when they're trading in their spouse’s industry.