Edouard Chazal

Volkswagen and the Future of Honesty

The market is giving its own answer to the question “Is honesty for suckers?” Its response is: “No, honesty is for those who want to maximize value over the long term.” Of course, some corporations will get away with cheating. But the risk is always there that they will be caught. And often – especially for corporations whose brands’ reputation is a major asset – the risk just isn’t worth taking.

Honesty maximizes value over the long term, even if by “value” we mean only the monetary return to shareholders. It is even more obviously true if value includes the sense of satisfaction that all those involved take from their work. Several studies have shown that members of the generation that has come of age in the new millennium are more interested in having an impact on the world than in earning money for its own sake. This is the generation that has spawned “effective altruism,” which encourages giving money away, as long as it is done efficiently.

→ Project Syndicate

Should You Ever Use a Pie Chart?

The genesis of the Pie Chart :

Some scholars believe the pie chart may have been inspired by the use of circles in representing concepts in philosophy and mathematics. Playfair’s brother John was a highly regarded Enlightenment mathematician and scientist. It is likely that through John, William saw a divided circle used to display the component parts of a category. Mathematicians and philosophers used this type of illustration as far back as the 14th Century.

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Today’s leading data visualization experts like Edward Tufte and Stephen Few dislike pie chart. Tufte writes that “A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart”, and in a long screed against the pie, Few admonishes data visualizers to “save the pies for dessert.”

→ Priceonomics

Beware of the Liquidity Delusion

Martin Wolf on liquidity :

If relaxed regulatory requirements encourage banks to provide liquidity in good times, only to run away when unable to fund themselves, we end up in the worst of all worlds. Overconfidence in fair-weather liquidity should be discouraged. Investors ought to worry, instead, since the risk that nobody will be on the other side of their trades is a real one.

→ The Financial Times

Bros Funding Bros : What’s Wrong with Venture Capital

A VC on VCs :

From the foundations and NGOs that are eradicating poverty and taking care of the world’s worst off, to companies like Facebook, Google and Apple that are inventing the future while looking after our best off, they have all explicitly decided to become less consensus driven and less homogeneous. They have found this increases creativity and drives business results. In turn, they are doing the ambitious, groundbreaking work that we used to do. And even though they have more work to do, when you compare the complexion of these leaders to the leaders within our industry, we look like total laggards.

→ The Information

Why Free Markets Make Fools of Us

Although investors were being phished, they “had no reason to be suspicious. They had been told of the wonders of free markets.” But free markets were not so wondrous, because they put the producers of the new, complex, risky securities at a big advantage over the producers of the older, simpler, safer ones. After all, the new securities promised higher returns while disguising the risk of default:

As long as a significant part of the bond-buying public was willing to swallow the myth whole, the investment bankers had an incentive to produce those rotten avocados, and to extract from the agencies the high ratings that would be the cover-up.

On modern advertising and one of my favorite, beloved Ogilvy’s ad :

Akerlof and Shiller think that the idea of phishing also helps to explain modern advertising, especially when we focus on the crucial role of narrative in human thinking. Clever marketers offer simple, attractive stories about their products, and get those stories to stick in the human mind. Consider a famous advertisement for Rolls-Royce, displaying an elegant young mother in the driver’s seat, turned slightly toward her elegant children, who are walking toward the car from outside the entrance to an elegant grocery store. The headline of the copy: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” Advertisements of this kind tell an appealing story about what life would be like with the product.

→ The New York Review Of Books