In partnership with
Incentives, meet outcomes
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
As a Ghost Mail Weekender reader, there’s a very good chance that you understand a bit about incentives and outcomes. This is core to the way the finance world works. But in truth, it’s core to the way humanity works.
In her brilliant column this week, Dominique Olivier draws a parallel between cobras, sesame seeds and AI-driven corporate restructuring - as only she can. It’s a fascinating read for anyone even remotely interested in how the design of a particular system can create unexpected (and unwanted) outcomes.
One of the best ways to observe a chasm between intention and outcome is by looking for examples of the Streisand Effect. The more a person tries to shut something down, the brighter the spotlight that the internet shines on it (Dominique has written on this topic previously, for those who want to dig into the origin story).
In honour of those who refuse to be gagged, you can read on for a wonderful example from 2012 of a primary school food blogger who took on the quality (or lack thereof) of school meals in Scotland - and won spectacularly. And in the Fast Facts, you’ll find various hysterical examples of the Streisand Effect.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
Show me the incentive and… you know the rest
Design an incentive carelessly and people will follow it perfectly – straight off a cliff.
Using three centuries of history and a widespread current corporate mistake, Dominique Olivier explains how the incentivisation in our systems will drive the outcome. Spoiler alert: the results are rarely as expected.
Speak naturally. Send without fixing.
Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text you can send the moment you stop talking. Not rough transcription you have to clean up. Actual polished text — ready for email, Slack, or any app.
Speak the way you think. Go on tangents. Change your mind mid-sentence. Flow strips the filler, fixes the grammar, and gives you text that reads like you spent five minutes writing it.
89% of messages sent with zero edits. Millions of professionals use Flow daily, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Works on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
The lunch tray heard around the world
TL;DR: The fastest way to make a 9-year-old famous, it turns out, is to try very hard to stop her.
Martha Payne was only 9 years old when she made her bold foray into food blogging in 2012. After being assigned a writing project by her English teacher, she decided to run a daily commentary on the lunches she was being served at her primary school in Lochgilphead, Scotland. The name of the blog - NeverSeconds - is a pretty strong indication of young Martha’s opinion of said lunches.
Martha received a £2 tray of food each day, which she then photographed and scored out of ten on a scale she called the Food-o-Meter, with a running tally of stray hairs. She wrote under the name Veritas Ex Gustu – truth from tasting- and with the totally unbothered candour of someone who hasn't yet learned which things they’re not supposed to say out loud.
The school was predictably unimpressed - but everyone else loved it. Martha’s little blog went viral after Jamie Oliver cheered her on via X. The hits soon climbed into the millions, which prompted Martha and her dad to start a fundraising page for Mary’s Meals, a charity that builds school kitchens in Malawi.
The local Council realised it had a public relations problem thanks to a third-grader with a camera and a discerning palate. Nervous about the headlines and protective of its cafeteria ladies, it summarily banned Martha from taking photographs of her lunches.
Unfortunately for the Council, the ban was a far better story than the blog had ever been.
It travelled accordingly, from local curiosity on Monday to national outrage by Tuesday.
The donations, which had been idling under £2,000, shot past £40,000 in a single afternoon and kept going - to £65,000, then £110,000, then more than £143,000, which was enough to help several Malawian schools.
Having watched Martha wildly overshoot her funding target, the Council folded within a day and admitted that perhaps the problem it should have been addressing was the quality of the food, not the child writing about it.
Sometimes, you reach for the off switch and hit the amplifier instead. A child reviewing her soggy slice of cafeteria pizza never would have achieved national fame without the unwitting assistance of her local Council.
Dominique’s Fast Facts - “Barbra Streisand everywhere”
In December 2024, Australian breakdancer Rachael Gunn tried to legally suppress a comedy musical about her - let’s call it iconic - Olympic performance. Her threats were written into a new version of the show, which promptly played to bigger crowds. That’s a rare case of a lawsuit improving the second act.
In December 2023, the Canadian Armed Forces at CFB Kingston sent a base-wide email to warn everyone about a sex worker advertising on base. She had been a mystery to most soldiers right up until the military personally introduced her to all of them. National news outlets then picked up the story and finished the job the email had started.
France's intelligence agency, the DCRI, leaned on a volunteer to delete the French Wikipedia article about the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station. The restored article briefly became the most-viewed page on the entire French Wikipedia.
In 2017, the ANC announced it would ban Jacques Pauw's book The President's Keepers, which detailed corruption under then-President Jacob Zuma. Sales promptly went parabolic, and the book sold out within 24 hours (before the ban even took effect). It then became a national bestseller through several reprints. The lesson took so poorly that the EFF tried the same trick on his follow-up, Our Poisoned Land in 2023, which had almost exactly the same effect. It’s a profitable, albeit stressful business model that Pauw has been pursuing.
On 20 February 2020, Apple filed suit to stop sales of App Store Confidential, a German-language book by former App Store manager Tom Sadowski, citing confidential business information. The resulting publicity carried the book to number two on Germany's Amazon bestseller list and straight into a second printing. Confidential no longer.