History

When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities. 

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Reading Time: 6 minutes Part 1: When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities.  Part 2: Avoiding Perverse Incentives  More than a century ago, the French colonialists decided to modernize the French Indochina, especially its capital, Hanoi. Large areas of Hanoi were cleared to accommodate French-style districts with boulevards, bridges, palaces, villas and gardens. This major infrastructure project was supposed to transform Hanoi from a cramped and narrow city into a symbol of France’s “civilising” mission in Indochina.  A sign of cleanliness and civilization was …

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What Can We Learn from Sun Tzu on the Art of War

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Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the better discoveries of the last few months was Jonathan Clements’ books. From Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God to Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, from An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland to A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? these books are tremendous efforts of introducing slices of history to laypeople. And the language is often witty:  The Russians were not particularly impressed with Finland. Since they already had trees, lakes and snow of …

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