The article evaluates two contrasting thinking approaches: first principles thinking and the outside view. While first principles focuses on innovating without historical bias, the outside view emphasises learning from past experiences to make accurate forecasts. The tension lies in the potential pitfalls of both methods, especially regarding predicting outcomes and managing expectations.
South Africa’s exchange control framework is being substantially rewritten for the first time in sixty-five years. The draft Capital Flow Management Regulations, published for comment in April 2026, will replace the Exchange Control Regulations of 1961 in their entirety. Inside this overhaul is something unusual. For the first time, cross-border crypto asset transactions will be…
Hard work means two quite different things. If you don’t understand the difference, they can feel like they are the same thing, when they are not. The first can be described as the difficulty to begin the work. There can be many reasons for this. I can recall for example how this very article began…
There is a commonly told story about exchange controls: they were a mid-century aberration, just a hangover from war and depression, and when the great liberalisation wave of the 1980s and 1990s happened they were swept away. Capital moves freely now, the story goes, except in a handful of holdouts too poor or too badly…
There is a lazy but persistent habit in most professional environments, regulatory ones included, it’s reasoning by comparison. A new proposal arrives on your desk, and the instinct is to ask what it resembles, as in: where have I seen this before? Following this approach is not problematic, it’s efficient. It’s efficient because to rebuild understanding…
I was born in East London, a small, scenic town found along the South African coast of the Eastern Cape. A beautiful, sometimes wild place. I grew up in the suburb of Berea, and not far from where I lived, there was a post office. As a youngster, I have very fond memories of taking…