Year: 2006

Why your boss is overpaid.

The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid–and it’s for your benefit, not his. We work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we’ll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this “tournament theory.”

The second, and more counterintuitive, prediction of tournament theory is that the more luck is involved in work, the larger the pay gaps should be between the winners and the losers. If Jack’s promotion is 90% luck and 10% effort, Jack may be inclined to goof off–unless, of course, the rewards for promotion are absolutely astronomical. And they sometimes are.

Finally, tournament theory also helps to explain why insiders, not outsiders, get cushy jobs. You thought it was all about the old-boy network, but in fact, the logical reason for promoting insiders is clear: These jobs are designed to keep your workforce motivated.

Where does dust come from? Inside the house, it’s mostly from our skin. Short of vacuuming the carpet regularly, there’s little you can do about it.

Why we all sell code with bugs.

All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Don’t we all start out with the belief that software only gets better as we work on it? Nobody on our team intentionally creates new bugs. Yet we have done accidentally.

Timeline of trends and events from 1750 to 2100 (yes, that’s next century).

The Mathematical Structure of Terrorism. The frequency distribution of terrorist attacks — be it in Iraq, Columbia, Afghanistan or anywhere in the world — is the same. The frequency distribution of the size of terrorist groups is the same as well.