Endnotes

Below are selected sources and further comment on things in the dialogue. I’ve avoided giving links to things that readers can easily find for themselves.

Chapter 1: An Irrational Aversion

The NUMSA press release that we discuss is entitled Statement on the Status of Engineering/Metals Sector Wage Negotiations and Demands of Workers, 5 June 2014, and can be accessed at https://www.politicsweb.co.za/news/well-go-on-strike-on-july-1-if-our-demands-our-not-met-numsa. Obviously this press release predates the rest of the dialogue by more than a decade.

For wage growth in China, South Korea, and Japan, I use PPP GDP per capita in constant 2021 USD. China’s grew at 8.5% from 1991 to 2011, South Korea’s at 8.7% from 1972 to 1992, Japan’s at 7.5% from 1950 to 1970. The numbers are from the World Bank and The Maddison Project Database, via Gapminder. You can access the data series here: https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd001/.

Jacques says “wages can grow by inflation plus GDP growth”, but it would be more accurate to say “inflation plus productivity growth”. If more workers join the labour force then GDP will grow, but that wouldn’t be a reason for wages to grow by more than inflation.

Asset managers routinely engage with portfolio companies on governance matters such as CEO pay. For example, in Coronation’s 2024 Stewardship Report, they say:

we engaged with Standard Bank to request that its long-term incentive (LTI) plan incorporate a deferred delivery period after vesting at the end of year three, extending over years three to five.

Such engagement can happen over email or in meetings. See, for example, the Delivery Hero case study on page 54 of the same report.

Jacques’ description of his engagement with a bank on CEO pay (“We met with their remco chair twice last year…”), and their response (“They say employees are getting the same share of profits”), are typical, but not based on any real meeting.

The single figure remuneration for the Standard Bank CEO is disclosed as R106m on page 33 of the 2025 remuneration report. FirstRand’s CEO earned R78m, Capitec’s R105m, and Nedbank’s R49m. Absa’s CEO started work during the year, but you could conservatively say he earned R30m for the 6.5 months he was there (ignoring buyout awards and a long-term incentive award).

Chapter 2: Wisdom Quite Shut Out

Say someone has a life insurance policy that will pay out R1m if she dies during the next year. If her premium for this cover is R600, then the underwriter thinks her probability of death is less than 600/1,000,000. Or less than 1 in 1,666 (Jacques rounds this to 1,700 in the dialogue). According to an infographic published by Sanlam entitled Risk & Savings 2025 Claims Stats, only 11% of death and funeral claims are due to unnatural causes, and only 36% of these are due to crime. So 11% × 36% ≈ 4% of deaths are due to crime, which means our theoretical policyholder’s chance of being murdered is 1 in 42,000. This is of course much lower than the 1 in 10,000 that appears in the dialogue, but it’s only a back of the envelope calculation after all. You can access the Sanlam infographic here: https://www.sanlamadvice.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/04054345/Infographic-SLS-25-Claims-May-2026.pdf.

Cape Town gets 3,094 hours of sunshine per year. London gets 1,675.

Chapter 3: Not All Industrial Policy Is Bad

Only Absa discloses meaningful numbers on the pay differential between employees. On page 30 of their 2025 remuneration report, you can see that the lowest-paid full-time employee earned R250,000 for the year; and that the average pay for the bottom 5% of employees (1,225 people) was R268k per employee. My figure of R300k for Standard Bank’s lowest-paid 5,000 employees is a guess based on those numbers.

The story of the high-speed cable between New York and Chicago is told in Flash Boys (2014, 304 pages) by Michael Lewis. You can read about mmWave technology here: https://www.ceragon.com/mmwave.

You can read about Henry VII’s scheme to bring woollen manufacturing to England in A Plan of the English Commerce by Daniel Defoe, from page 126. Here is an extract:

To a prince of such penetration as he [Henry VII] was, it could not but occur after he came to the Crown, that certainly England was much in the wrong, to let their wool go out of the country thus unmanufactured, and to let strangers be made rich by the working of it.[...]in pursuit of these observations, he immediately set about the work, applied himself to the finding out proper instruments for the carrying it on, and set the manufacture of wool on foot in several parts of his country.

You can access Defoe’s book here: https://archive.org/details/planofenglishcom00defo/page/126/mode/2up.

The discussion of South Korea’s exchange controls and state-led industrial policy is from the prologue and from chapter 5 of Bad Samaritans (see Further Reading). The story about Japan’s protection of Toyota is from chapter 1 of the same book.

You can read about Singapore’s public housing on the Ministry of National Development’s website: https://www.mnd.gov.sg/our-work/housing-a-nation/public-housing.

Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography is The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (1998, 680 pages).

DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You can read about their past innovations here: https://www.darpa.mil/about/innovation-timeline. GPS was actually a broader Department of Defense project.

Here is an excellent interview on industrial policy with Harvard economist Dani Rodrik called Doing Industrial Policy Right: https://drodrik.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum7106/files/2025-08/FT%20-%20Doing%20Industrial%20Policy%20Right.pdf.

Matt Levine is the author of a Bloomberg newsletter called Money Stuff.

Chapter 4: I Suppose I’m a Neoliberal

In Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens writes about Dotheboys Hall, a grim boarding school run (only) for profit.

If you have an FT subscription, you can read more about Sweden’s recent experience with privatised schooling in Are Sweden’s private schools failing the test?, 10 September 2026, available here: https://www.ft.com/content/be6a9dce-2cda-447a-b78a-83486e46e8bb. In Sweden, private schools receive the same amount of money from the state, per pupil, as government schools. If they run things more efficiently they can pay a dividend. From the article, it appears the private schools are not more efficient and that quality has declined.

The Department of Basic Education Annual Report 2022/23 shows, in table 35 on page 198, that 94% of learners are enrolled in public schools. Luke rounds this to 95% in the dialogue.

The 2026 Background Report from The Reading Panel, by Sipumelele Lucwaba, discusses the results of the Funda Uphumelele National Survey. One of the findings is that “only about 30% of learners in Grades 1-3 are performing at grade level in their home language.” In grade three, 5% of learners can’t read a single word. The report is available here: https://www.readingpanel.co.za/_files/ugd/0429e7_c272dcf559264fe380ce191296abdf20.pdf. To say “70% of grade-threes can’t read”, as Jacques does in the dialogue, is an exaggeration.

In How Asia Works (see Further Reading), on page xxiii from the introduction, Studwell writes that Korean literacy in 1950 was lower than in present-day Ethiopia. Also, in 1960, 45% of Taiwanese were illiterate. He contrasts this with very high levels of education in the Philippines and Cuba which never led to economic growth, because important policy choices were flunked. In 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (see Further Reading), Chang devotes a whole chapter to the weak link between education and economic growth.

The show Luke is referring to is called Naked Attraction. According to Wikipedia both men and women choose partners based on, erm… limited pictorial information. Luke’s point about Thatcher is undermined by the fact that versions of the show have appeared in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Spain.

Chapter 5: An Infinite Tariff

See Further Reading for more on Bad Samaritans and How Asia Works. Ha-Joon Chang actually worked at Cambridge for 32 years, not 30 as stated by Luke. On page 224 of How Asia Works you can find Studwell’s “patsy” comment. On page 79, he states that no economy in the world has developed to the first rank through free trade policies (except for “offshore port financial havens” like Hong Kong and Singapore). Chang counts the Netherlands as another exception, but Studwell disputes this.

The tariff rates are from Economics and World History by Paul Bairoch, table 3.3 on page 40. The US had a weighted average tariff rate of 35-45% in 1820, 40-50% in 1875, and 44% in 1913. The UK’s weighted average was 45-55% in 1820.

Chapter 6: A Vile Whig

The scene with Adam Fergusson is of course from The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.

I assume readers are familiar with Lewis, Chesterton, and Pascal. Peter Kreeft is a Catholic philosopher and the co-author of Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

The first US income tax was signed into law by Lincoln in 1861, but this was a temporary Civil War measure. It was repealed in 1871, and only re-introduced after a constitutional amendment in 1913.

Chapter 7: Libertarian Paradise

Jacques says Eskom neglected to build new power stations in the ’90s, which is not entirely accurate. Eskom wanted to build new capacity, but government blocked it. Partly because it wanted private providers of electricity to step in.

The research on Sri Lankan hospitals can be found in Quality of inpatient care in public and private hospitals in Sri Lanka, March 2015. “Quality in the public sector is better than in the private sector in many areas, despite spending being substantially less.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25759454/.

Medical aids spent R239bn on 9.13m beneficiaries in 2025. Government healthcare spend was R272bn over that period, on 53m people. Per person, that’s R26k for private and R5k for public. The private figures are from the Council for Medical Schemes Annual Report 2024/25: https://static.pmg.org.za/CMS_-_Council_for_Medical_Schemes_Annual_Report_2024-2025.pdf. The public figures are from National Treasury’s 2024 Budget Review (table 5.8): https://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/National%20Budget/2024/review/Chapter%205.pdf. Public sector spend was 3.8% of GDP in that year, not 4% as stated in the dialogue. I guessed that the private number was higher because of an older population, but no: the age gap is small. The public sector actually has a higher disease burden due to TB and HIV. Private is more expensive per unit, but the big difference is the volume of care: there are roughly four times as many doctors and hospital beds in the private sector (per person).

You can read about the history of US food regulation in A Century of Ensuring Safe Foods and Cosmetics, FDA Consumer Magazine Centennial Edition, January-February 2006: https://www.fda.gov/media/110464/download.

The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th-Century United States by David Cutler and Grant Miller, May 2004, investigates the reduction in mortality due to public investment in water infrastructure, and attributes the eradication of typhoid fever in the US to these investments. You can access it here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10511/w10511.pdf.

The Federation of State Medical Boards, under the History section of their website, says “State licensing laws enacted in the late 19th century established medical boards to license and discipline physicians within each state and territory.” https://www.fsmb.org/about-fsmb/history/.

Banking Panics of the Gilded Age 1863-1913 gives an overview of the many bank runs that occurred during this period: https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking-panics-of-the-gilded-age.

In the US, insider trading only became illegal in 1909: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021688861/.

The Jungle (1906, 335 pages) by Upton Sinclair is set in Chicago in the early 1900s. It describes how meat packers used chemicals to disguise rotten meat, how food was contaminated with rat droppings, and how workers – including children – were exploited. The Jungle is fiction, but Sinclair did extensive research on the industry before writing it.

Here is the famous invisible hand passage, from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

You could read this passage as an argument in favour of import tariffs! Smith also uses the invisible hand image in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The rich [...] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

I must admit I don’t find Smith’s version of trickle-down economics any more convincing than Reagan’s. Joseph Stiglitz has often said: “Adam Smith’s invisible hand often seems invisible because it’s not actually there.”

You can read about opposition to the Factory Act by free traders in Lecture VII of Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century by A.V. Dicey: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/vandewetering-lectures-on-the-relation-between-law-and-public-opinion-lf-ed.

In Thing 1 from 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (see Further Reading), you can read about opposition to regulations for factory emissions (“if people want to drive in more polluting cars or if factories find more polluting production methods more profitable, why should the government prevent them from making such choices?”).

Economics in One Lesson (see Further Reading) was written by Henry Hazlitt and first published in 1946 by Harper & Brothers. I’m quoting from the 2008 version published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The quotes I use are from page 19 (“It is true that a particular group…”), page 59 (“A mere recital of the economic policies…”), and page 157 (“It tears apart the whole fabric…”).

GDP per capita in 2025 was $99k for Singapore, $95k for Norway, and $90k for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true.

You can read more about the impact of federal policies on the housing market in Did Housing Policies Cause the Postwar Boom in Homeownership?, by Matthew Chambers, Carlos Garriga & Donald E. Schlagenhauf, February 2013. It is available here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18821.

You can read more about Reagan’s import quotas on Japanese cars here: https://americancompass.org/the-import-quota-that-remade-the-auto-industry/.

Chapter 8: Four Million Man-Years

According to the Forbes real-time billionaire list, Brin’s net worth was $285bn on 5 August 2026. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report (at the time of writing) puts the median annual wage for the US at $65,000. Hence 4.4 million man-years. The BLS report is here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.nr0.htm.

The Discourses on Salt and Iron is a debate that happened in 81 BC, just after Wu of Han’s reign. The most relevant section is here: https://ctext.org/yan-tie-lun/ci-quan/zh.

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (see Further Reading) contains many examples of how US society is splitting along income lines. As does Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015, 386 pages) by Robert D. Putnam.

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich by Warren Buffett is available here if you have a New York Times subscription: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html. In the article, he actually says his tax rate was lower than any of the 20 other people in his office.

The US Census Bureau publishes Poverty in the United States. You can access the 2024 edition here: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html.

The US Department of Agriculture publishes statistics on food security in the US: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.

The quotes which Rand emails are from:

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, chapter 2.

Milton Friedman, Created Equal, an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series.

Von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, page 122.

Rand gets the Bastiat quote wrong. Bastiat actually said, on page 11 of L’État, that “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Rand also gets the Sowell quote wrong. This statement is widely attributed to Thomas Sowell, but it doesn’t look like he actually said it.

Chapter 9: What’s a Fair Share?

You can read about the distribution of personal income tax in 2025 Tax Statistics, published by National Treasury and SARS. Table A2.1.1 on page 76 shows that the top 402,000 individual taxpayers account for 47% of all income tax and for 28% of taxable income. Note, however, that taxable income excludes dividends and pension fund contributions in that stat. https://www.sars.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2025taxstats/2025-Tax-Statistics-PDF-.pdf.

On whether capital taxation affects savings (“the research bears me out on this”): this is discussed in chapter 5 of The Triumph of Injustice (see Further Reading), where the authors conclude that there is no observable correlation between capital tax and capital formation over the past hundred years.

On redistribution in SA (“I read somewhere that no country does more redistribution than SA”): see Redistribution without Inclusion? Inequality in South Africa Since the End of Apartheid by Chatterjee, Czajka, and Gethin, September 2024. Also The Distributional Impact of Fiscal Policy in South Africa by Inchauste, Lustig, Maboshe, Purfield, and Woolard. Both papers say that SA has a progressive, redistributionist tax system, but that we are still one of the most unequal countries in the world. They are available here: https://amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/ChatterjeeCzajkaGethin2023.pdf and here https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/9cf37c9e-2637-54ea-847a-f42ddb9c7941/content.

The lifetime tax model built by Claude (and checked by me) is available on my author website. Of course there are a lot of assumptions. Tax modelling is a whole field in itself, with plenty of live academic debates. For example, some argue that charitable deductions by the rich should be counted as a form of tax.

“The Norwegian Parliament has decided that the tax lists are to be made public. This is because the society must be able to control the tax assessment process in general, and for individuals and groups of taxpayers.” https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/.

Gabriel Zucman’s testimony to the US Senate Committee on the Budget in March 2021 is worth reading. It has many interesting perspectives on the history of US tax policy. For example, the top 0.1% paid an overall tax rate of around 55% until 1960, but by 2021 they were paying less than 25%. He also discusses the effect and purpose of the 90% marginal rate in the 1950s. His testimony can be found here: https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Gabriel%20Zucman%20-%20Testimony%20-%20US%20Senate%20Budget%20Committee%20Hearing.pdf.

Chapter 10: Champagne and Water

Table 2.1.1 of Poverty Trends in South Africa: An examination of absolute poverty between 2006 and 2023 by Stats SA shows that 66.7% of the population lives below the Upper Bound Poverty Line. Table 1.4.1 shows that the Upper Bound Poverty Line is at R2,635. As Luke explains in chapter 11, if a household of four people has one breadwinner earning R12,000 per month, then the four people in that household are each living on R3,000 per month. The report is available here: https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/Report-03-10-06/Report-03-10-062023.pdf.

The idea that a monkey throwing darts at a list of stocks can outperform the average manager is in A Random Walk Down Wall Street (1973, 432 pages) by Burton G. Malkiel. It isn’t as damning as it sounds: by definition, half of investors underperform the average. After you account for fees, more than half will underperform.

J. Michael Pearson was the CEO of Valeant Pharmaceuticals from 2008 to 2016. Instead of developing new drugs, the firm bought up existing drugs and raised prices.

Hold philanthropists accountable when their projects fail by Raj Patel, an article that appeared in the FT on 15 October 2026, discusses the failings of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. This is a project funded largely by the Gates Foundation. “Markets can discipline companies that misallocate capital and voters can dismiss unpopular governments — but foundations answer to neither.” The article is available here: https://www.ft.com/content/fff4d860-5652-427a-b99d-19ce370d2dc3.

The parable of the ten men in a bar is available here: https://thewealthnavigator.com.au/the-parable-of-10-men-in-a-bar/.

Chapter 11: Not Against the Laws of Physics

Jacques multiplies R3,000 by 20 to get Luke’s maximum allowed income (“it’s fine if the top earners bring home twenty times the average”). But of course R3,000 is neither the average nor the median income. The actual median income per person would be lower, and the average would be higher. Seeing as Luke’s multiple is just a rule of thumb based on a convenient round number, I didn’t think it necessary to make any adjustments for this.

“Technical progress is the most essential characteristic of economic growth.” This is from Explaining the Economic Performance of Nations by Angus Maddison, page 124. Studwell also uses this quote in How Asia Works.

There is an active debate about whether, and to what extent, manufacturing is the way forward for Africa. In How I Became a Manufacturing Skeptic, May 2026, Dani Rodrik argues that poor countries will struggle to catch up with China in manufacturing, and that economic growth is more likely to come from efficiencies in services. The article is here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/services-not-manufacturing-best-hope-for-developing-countries-by-dani-rodrik-2026-05. Joe Studwell pushes back in a blog post The end of manufacturing thang, July 2026. He argues that labour in Africa is cheap and flexible enough to make local manufacturing viable. He says “last year Chinese firms invested US$12.5bn in manufacturing plants in Africa. The main driver was better margins than they could achieve at home. Someone needs to tell these people that manufacturing is not going to work in Africa.” The post is available here: https://joestudwell.com/2026/07/14/the-end-of-manufacturing-thang/.

On SA’s previous housing schemes (“We must have had thirty different housing schemes…”) – these have had some success. In table 70.2 of the Department of Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation’s Development Indicators Report 2024, you can see that the Department of Human Settlements has built a total of 3.4 million houses. https://www.dpme.gov.za/publications/Development%20Indicators%20Docs/Development%20Indicators%202024.pdf. But SA still has two million households without a house.

Chapter 12: Armies of Bureaucrats

The Indonesia versus Zaire story is in chapter 8 of Bad Samaritans (see Further Reading). Mobutu ruled from 1965 to 1997. Suharto ruled from 1966 to 1998. Zaire’s GDP per capita went from $1,790 to $1,006 (both in 2021 PPP). Indonesia’s went from $1,660 to $6,066. According to Chang, Mobutu is estimated to have stolen 4.5 times his country’s 1961 GDP; Suharto 5.2 times his country’s 1961 GDP.

Chapter 13: Outrage

My rough estimate of Old Mutual’s pre-tax profit from funeral policies is R1.1bn in 2025. This is the R1.7bn Results from Operations made by the Mass Foundation cluster, minus the R600m profit from Old Mutual Finance which is included in that division. See page 57 of their 2025 results booklet: https://www.oldmutual.com/investor-relations/2025-annual-results.

I estimate funeral premiums for 2025 as the average of opening and closing premiums in force: R42.8bn (“around R40bn” in the dialogue). For context, this would be enough money to pay out R71k for every South African who died in 2025 (ignoring any admin costs).

The value of all claims paid out in 2025 was R9.6bn, for a 22% claims ratio. The claims ratio for 2024 was 19% (“the claims ratio is probably less than 25%”). The lapse rate for 2025 was 29%, and similar in previous years.

Industry data is available on the ASISA website: https://www.asisa.org.za/statistics/life-insurance-statistics/. Not all insurers are members of ASISA, so this is not a full picture.

Rethinking Funeral Financing, July 2025, by Khalawan, Wishnia, Flowers, and Chennells is another useful source. This is a report prepared for the Actuarial Society of South Africa. In table 7, the authors estimate how much an insurer pays out in claims for every R100 it receives in funeral premiums: between R3 and R12 for a 30- to 40-year-old (“I’ve seen estimates as low as 3% for some classes of customer”). This is probably an overestimate, because the calculation doesn’t account for policies on which a claim is never lodged (someone has a funeral policy and dies, but his dependants never claim). In table 9 of the same report, you can see that an insurer charges four times what a bank would charge for the same coverage. You can find the report here: https://www.actuarialsociety.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/NFI-Final-report-20250220.pdf.

In 2015, SASSA tried to prevent Lion of Africa from selling funeral cover to recipients of child social grants. Lion of Africa took the matter to court. The Black Sash submitted an amicus brief, and contracted Roseanne da Silva – professor at Wits and President of the Actuarial Society – to write an appendix. She estimated that on the policies in question, Lion of Africa would pay out 0.9% of all premiums as claims. Her report starts on page 26 of this document: https://www.wits.ac.za/media/wits-university/faculties-and-schools/commerce-law-and-management/research-entities/cals/documents/programmes/bhr/in-court/BS%20NoM%20and%20Founding%20Affidavit%20re%20Lion%20of%20Africa%20Amicus%20Annexures%206%20April%202016%20FINAL%20(signed%20and%20redacted).pdf.

Here is an article from 2025 by GroundUp, called Grant beneficiaries confused by funeral policy deductions. It is about how funeral policies were sold to illiterate South Africans who receive an old age grant, including one 76-year-old: https://groundup.org.za/article/insurance-payments-deducted-from-social-grants-without-permission/.

You can read how the industry defends itself in Why insurers need to rethink the red tape around funeral policies by Berniece Hiekmann: https://iol.co.za/personal-finance/financial-planning/2024-02-16-why-insurers-need-to-rethink-the-red-tape-around-funeral-policies/ and also in If South African insurers own the default prevention paradox, they can also solve it by Cherise Collins: https://www.fanews.co.za/article/life-insurance/9/funeral-cover/1002/if-south-african-insurers-own-the-default-prevention-paradox-they-can-also-solve-it/44416.

You can read some of the regulator’s views in Review of the regulatory framework for the distribution of funeral insurance in South Africa, a joint release by the Reserve Bank and the FSCA. They say that the Microinsurance Policy Framework of 2011 was intended to “Extend access to and take-up of a suitable range of good-value formal insurance products appropriate to meet the needs of low-income households (including funeral insurance), thereby supporting financial inclusion.” The release is available here: https://www.resbank.co.za/content/dam/sarb/publications/prudential-authority/pa-public-awareness/covid-19-response/2024/Joint%20Communication%207%20of%202024.pdf.

The estimate of the total cost of state capture is actually R57bn, and can be found on page 34 of the Report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture: Part VI: Vol. 3. https://www.justice.gov.za/commissions/STCC/STCC-Report-Part-VI-Vol-03.pdf.

Sports betting brought in R48bn of gross gaming revenue in the year to March 2025. That’s the net amount of money handed over to gambling companies by punters. It’s the latest number available from the National Gambling Board at the time of writing, and it’s up from R8bn in the year to March 2021. See slide 28 of National Gambling Statistics FY 2024/25. https://www.ngb.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/National-Gambling-Statistics-Financial-Year-Ending-31-March-2025-02-October-2025.pdf.

Chapter 14: Think It Possible

On the economics profession: “Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and aesthetic puzzles of established research programs rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works”, from Zombie Economics (see Further Reading).

You can read more about Oliver Cromwell’s statement here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell%27s_rule.

Chapter 15: Everything on Red

The passage I read on the plane is from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, part 2, book 4, chapter 6.

The “I am a friend to subordination” quote is from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Here are four more passages from that book which are relevant to the scene:

Johnson harangued upon the qualities of different liquors; and spoke with great contempt of claret, as so weak, that a man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk. He was persuaded to drink one glass of it, that he might judge…He shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling), must drink brandy’.

In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, TOO, TOO, TOO: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile.

It seems he had been frequently observed at the Club to put into his pocket the Seville oranges, after he had squeezed the juice of them into the drink which he made for himself.

Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a Whale.

And lastly, in Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson there is this exchange:

He loved the poor as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy. “What signifies,” says some one, “giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco.” “And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?” says Johnson; “it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to show even visible displeasure if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths.”

The Peter Kreeft quote (“There is more joy…”) is from The God Who Loves You, page 164.