Economics & Business for CAT RC, in 10 essays

Markets, inequality, work and money come with data, qualifiers and cautious conclusions. These essays practise reading numbers in prose and telling a firm claim from a tentative one.

Read them in order: they go from easiest to hardest. Answer the questions under each before moving on.

1. 1The Hawthorne Effect May Not ExistFor decades managers were taught that workers improve simply because they are watched. A reanalysis of the original lighting records in 2011 found little sign of it.Medium · 1 min
2. 2The Supersonic Jet and the Money Already SpentContinuing a failing project looks irrational until the cost of stopping is counted.Medium · 1 min
3. 3The Money That Never Had to MoveOn a Pacific island, stones too heavy to carry changed owners without moving, and the habit has become a favourite parable about what money really is.Medium · 2 min
4. 4The Giant That Declined a Small Partner and Defended Its Late FeesBlockbuster is said to have turned down a chance to run Netflix, and the reasons were less foolish than the legend suggests.Medium · 2 min
5. 5The Flaw Intel Called RareA professor found a division error in a Pentium chip in 1994, and a company answered with probabilities. The bill that followed was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.Medium · 2 min
6. 6The Broken Rung: Where the Gender Leadership Gap Really BeginsThe “broken rung” at the first promotion quietly disrupts the leadership pipeline, preventing many talented women from ever reaching the top.Medium · 5 min
7. 7The AI Divide: Who Gets to Design the Future of Work?As AI reshapes the global workforce, a new inequality is emerging. The real divide is not who uses artificial intelligence but who designs it, and without women in the architect's seat, tomorrow's algorithms may quietly inherit yesterday's biases.Medium · 5 min
8. 8In the Wake of the Black SwanRare, unpredictable events shape history more than trends, exposing the limits of prediction and the need for resilience over certainty.Medium · 5 min
9. 9The Paragraph That Moved The MarketA central bank governor says a few sentences about the future, and prices shift before any policy actually changes. Why does mere belief move an economy?Medium · 6 min
10. 10The Cobra Effect Was a Rat ProblemThe most quoted warning about bad incentives concerns snakes in Delhi that nobody has been able to find. The rats of Hanoi, which did exist, made the same point and were forgotten.Hard · 2 min

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