Grassroots civil servants devote substantial effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, rather than working toward organizational goals; introducing uncertainty about the evaluator’s identity improves work performance.

More than 40% of a job’s posted wages are identical across locations within a firm, meaning that a significant minority of firms choose to set the same nominal wage for a job across all their establishments, despite varying local labor market conditions.

Without additional action we should expect to lose an average of at least $800 billion every year to future pandemics. Investing to expand vaccine production so that we could vaccinate 70% of the global population against a new virus within six months would cost $60 billion up front and $5 billion a year and generate an expected net present value of over $400 billion. If the US went it alone it would generate $47 billion in net benefits or $141 per head, just from the first significant pandemic.