McDonald’s is planning to use fresh beef in its Quarter Pounder burgers in 2018. Chase Purdy wrote about why the rest of the fast food giants’ burgers are frozen:

• Frozen patties can be left in the warmer for up to 15 minutes after being prepared. Fresh patties must be served within just five minutes.
• McDonald’s makes 70% of its sales from drive-throughs, and preparing fresh patties in a timely manner during rush hour is difficult.
• The chain is a victim of its own success. It is so big that it would struggle to find a supplier that could provide fresh beef for all its burgers.
• But other chains such as Wendy’s and Five Guys have made it work.

Read more on Quartz.

Noam Scheiber wrote about the use of behavioural economics by Uber and its peers:

• Uber borrowed a trick from Netflix where the next trip will queue up before the previous trip ends to encourage drivers to stay on the road.
• Similar to Netflix this means that it requires more effort to stop binge driving than to continue it.
• Male managers trying to direct drivers to areas of high potential demand sometimes pretend to be female, as drivers are more likely to listen.
• Humans tend to set goals and if a driver tries to sign off the app may display a message encouraging them to continue driving because they’re just “$10 away from making $330 in net earnings”.
• Uber awards Xbox like badges for accomplishments such as good customer service. They’re free for Uber to hand out, but anecdotal evidence indicates that they can be a big motivator.
• In the future Uber could use personalized targeting. If a driver receives consecutive bad reviews after a long shift they may encourage the driver to go home.

Read more about some of the other tactics used on The New York Times.

We’ve previously covered the idea that food has replaced music in culture. Tyler Cowen wrote a little about why this was:

• With streaming services we now access whatever music we want – fewer people listen to the same music, and it’s hard to build a social identity around it.
• Streaming also means that we no longer own our music making it difficult to let it define us.
• In the past music played a big role in political movements like civil rights and anti-war. Today Taylor Swift is assiduously non-political, and Kanye West’s endorsement of Donald Trump generated few headlines.
• Food has taken over. Instead of MTV you now have the Food Network. Talk among friends is often dominated by the latest restaurant.
• On the bright side this allows people with a diverse set of preferences to join the conversation. Come from abroad and you can talk with pride about your home cuisine.
• But food seems to be less important as a cultural touchstone to minority communities, creating further divides in society.
• And a good meal with perhaps a splash of wine induces lethargy rather than the drive for political action that music used to.
• With the exception of one commentator worried about an over-abundance of taco trucks, our conversation about food is mostly non-political and perhaps somewhat banal.

In fairness things may be changing. As we’ve previously covered brunch may be losing its allure to political activism.

Read Cowen’s entire article on Bloomberg.

Alex Bellos, a blogger for The Guardian, polled people on their preferred number:

• People often pick numbers related to their birthdays or other key dates.
• Odd numbers are more popular than even ones
• Whole numbers are disliked. This might be because we round off to whole numbers and so we think they’re imprecise. If you want a favourite number it may as well be a number that stands for itself.
• Prime numbers are popular – people like to be unique.
• Eight is popular because in Chinese it sounds like “prosperity”. Four sounds like “death” and is disliked.
• Three is well regarded. Religion is filled with that number, so are stories like the Three Musketeers, and sentences like this normally feel more complete if they follow the rule of three.
• Seven is the most popular number. It is the only single digit number, other than one, that isn’t a multiple or a factor of any other. There are seven visible planets, seven days in a week, and seven deadly sins. Seven is luck in the casinos of Las Vegas.
• 110 is the world’s least favourite number.

Read more on Nautilus.

Klaus Ulrich looked into the history of “Made in Germany”:

• In 1887 the British passed the Merchandise Marks Act which required foreigners to label their products as having been made in a foreign country.
• This was done because of a perception that Germany profited by selling cheap knock-offs of British wares.
• The hope was that by labelling products as foreign, British consumers would buy local and boost local industry.
• It backfired. The “Made in Germany” tag came to signify quality, and boosted demand for German manufacturing.
• German cars and heavy machinery continue to benefit from an association between German engineering and quality to this day.

Read more on DW.

Via: Reddit

Rebecca Greenfield wrote about J&J’s latest product offering:

• About half of all senior business executives leave their new role within 18 months of getting promoted.
• For someone like a CEO, turnover can cost $1.8 billion in shareholder value.
• In that context J&J’s $100,000 a year program to help prevent burnout seems like a bargain.
• It involves an initial in-depth medical assessment followed by frequent check ins with three coaches. J&J likens it to the pool of medical experts that surround astronauts after splashdown.
• In the beginning J&J will take enrolled participants to the Mayo clinic for two and a half days for a examination that focuses on factors like metabolism and stamina.
• After that the three coaches – a dietician, a psychologist, and an executive coach – will conduct frequent in-person check ins. Sometimes at home to make sure enrolees have access to healthy food.
• They may also interview family and friends to identify potential future fracture points in the executive’s personal life.
• All in all executive coaching is a $1 billion industry in the United States.

Read more on Bloomberg.

Does going to college make you any smarter? Allison Schrager described a study which weighed in with some evidence:

• Earning a college degree leads to a 13% boost in income for sex workers.
• Screening clients to avoid risky encounters is a big part of the job. College educated sex workers have fewer, repeat clients, which allows them to cut down the amount of time spent screening.
• Instead of offering just sex they provide a “girlfriend experience” where they’ll cuddle with their clients and perhaps even go on dates.
• Such services command a premium because they require emotional engagement for extended periods of time.
• The findings make sense. College educated women have brighter earnings prospects. It would require a higher starting earnings prospect to entice them into sex work.
• Since sex workers aren’t the type to list tertiary education on their resumes, this suggests that going to college is more than just about signaling your worth as an employee. It seems to teach you useful skills.

Read Quartz’s report of the study. And find the study here.

Kevin Clark wrote that players in the NFL are increasingly divided into two categories:

• On the face of it it’s a great time to be an NFL player. The salary cap in 2017 is $167 million. A $12 million increase from last year, and almost a $50 million increase since 2011.
• But wealth is increasingly being concentrated in a few elite superstar players – at the expense of the average player.
• The lack of negotiating power is partly due to larger training camps and practice squad rosters – increasing the supply of players while holding demand constant.
• A rookie salary scale which reduced the income of newcomers – in an effort to direct money towards older players – had anchoring effects that changed how much money players expected to receive when they could freely negotiate pay.
• Teams have started including “injury splits” in their contracts for non-elite players. Players don’t get paid if they’re injured. This is estimated to have cost players $28 million in 2015.
• Per game bonuses are a different way to achieve the same goal.
• If a team knows that they’ve made the playoffs, some have started keeping those earning per game bonuses on the bench to save money.

Read all the details on The Ringer.

Via: Marginal Revolution

According to a study reported on by Beth Mole, Doctors – they’re just like us!

• The study found that mortality rates at hospitals decreased by 1.5% during weeks that inspectors that accredit hospitals conducted routine inspections.
• At major teaching hospitals – that have more of a reputation at stake – it was a much starker 5.9% decrease.
• If the gains at elite hospitals could be annualized for an entire year, that’d mean 3,600 fewer dead patients.
• There’s no one single reason for the decrease. It seems like people are just more careful and do a better job overall when someone is watching.

Read ArsTechnica’s full report on the study here. Find the study here.

South Sudan joins Venezuela in struggling with inflation wrote The Economist:

• Last year hyperinflation in South Sudan peaked at more than 50% a month.
• Oil used to produce 99.8% of the world’s newest country’s export revenue – and after prices collapsed the government printed money to pay its debts.
• Food is mostly imported from neighboring countries, and prices have massively jumped contributing to a “near-famine situation”.
• Despite its citizens needing all the help they can get, the government’s latest revenue measure is to raise the cost of work permits for foreign aid workers from $100 per person to $10,000.

Read more on The Economist.