Hello! Welcome to this week’s list of five (or less!) interesting links. If you want to revisit earlier weeks, all previous issues are available here.

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The ‘Marathon Man’ approach to bank supervision — Daniel Davis’ argument here is narrowly confined to banking supervision, but it’s really applicable to any field. Complex systems and models may yield better outcomes, but the more people become involved, the less the system or model is understood. The lack of understanding then leads to underperformance of the model, and from there to limited adoption. To me, another good example is Agile approaches in large corporations. In theory they would yield better outcomes, but in practice they rarely do. (FT Alphaville - free with registration)

Make America procreate again: among the MAGA fertility fanatics — MAGA proponents’ obsession with fertility and pro-natalism is perhaps one of their less visible yet more disturbing features. It aligns predictably with their generic misogyny. Thankfully, judging by this reporting from a pro-natalist conference, their ideas are confined to a fringe, and their policy proposals remain underdeveloped. (The Economist $)

The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up — Good to know: giving up on hard-to-achieve goals is actually better for our well-being. A science-backed counterpoint to the relentless self-optimisation culture pioneered by the Victorians that we discussed a few weeks back. (Nautilus)

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