The preamble on last week’s chart quiz was about William Playfair, inventor of time-series graphs and irrepressible blaggard.
It’s a pity that both modern biographies of Playfair are priced for the academic market, because there’s enough in them for a Netflix series. It was Playfair who wrote the pioneering works of dataviz from his cell in Fleet Prison after he flooded France with counterfeit notes to crash a revolution he probably helped organise, then who tried to profit from the resulting hyperinflation by printing more notes he falsely claimed had Bank of England backing. The rise of Napoleon and the line chart have the same genesis. Which was worse, who can say?
Anyway. Here are the answers to last week’s quiz:
That’s the share price of Brookfield, the asset manager recently dissected by Dan McCrum and Antoine Gara.
That’s the cumulative amount raised by Anthropic, a gen-AI company that promises artificial general intelligence as soon as next year, and whose chatbot currently underperforms Clever Hans the arithmetic horse.
That’s US foreign assistance as a percent of GDP, as nicked from this story.
Anthropic was the one that threw most contestants, but not Henri Besse de Laromiguière of AB Commodities in Monaco. To him, a T-shirt. To you, better luck this week.
