ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Friday 23 October
1 · The text
If—
Kipling sets out, line by line, what it takes to keep your head when others lose theirs.
1 min · Rudyard Kipling · Rewards and Fairies · 1910 · public domain
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
2 · One idea · Economics & psychology
Incentives
Federal Express could not get its night shift to hurry.
Every night the packages had to move between planes at one central airport, quickly, or overnight delivery broke. Charlie Munger told the story in a talk on human misjudgement: the company tried moral appeals and much else, without luck.
Then someone looked at how the workers were paid. By the hour. A slow night paid better than a quick one.
The company switched to paying per shift and let the crew go home once every plane was loaded. The problem went away. Nobody had become more virtuous overnight. The question each worker was quietly answering had changed: what am I actually paid for?
In one line. Incentives are the rewards and punishments that drive behaviour. To predict what people will do, look not at what they say or intend but at what they are actually rewarded for. As Munger put it: "show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
Worked example
A call centre rewarded for calls-per-hour will rush customers and resolve nothing, driving repeat calls — the metric is hit while the goal (served, happy customers) is missed. The incentive, not the staff, produced the failure.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
People alive, world
19502.49 billion
20238.09 billion
3.2 times the 1950 level.
The yearly growth rate peaked in the 1960s and has been falling since.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.