[Week 10 of 2026] Numbers, Nepotism, and Neckties

Welcome back to Price and Prejudice with a few musings from Week 10 of 2026. Now that the Capital Markets & Investments class at Columbia is in progress, the blog will also reference to some contents from class as well.

Soft Power, Hard Numbers

This infographic from Visual Capitalist shows the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index for 2026, where the U.S. leads at 74.9, China is close behind at 73.5, and Japan rounds out the top three at 70.6. The index combines familiarity (how well a nation is known), reputation (how positively it's regarded), and influence (how much it's perceived to shape other nations). Perhaps it's not a surprise that the top 10 looks a lot like a ranking of the world's largest economies.

Soft power is one of those concepts everyone agrees matters but nobody agrees how to measure. It's used to describe a country's ability to attract and persuade rather than coerce, but turning that into a single number requires choices that are hard to defend. As a simple example, familiarity and influence are not the same thing, but combining them means a country can score well simply by being large and well-known rather than genuinely admired. China's near-tie with the U.S. probably says more about global awareness than global affection.

The more interesting question is whether soft power can be deliberately invested in, and in my view, Korea is a sobering case study. The recent wins in Korean cultural exports seem stubbornly idiosyncratic: BTS, Squid Game, and Parasite weren't outputs of a policy playbook but rather specific, unrepeatable cultural moments that happened to land. This is the Gen Z "aura farming" problem: the tips for cultivating effortless cool exist, but the genre defeats itself because genuine aura isn't visibly farmed. And it looks like nations would face a similar issue when they deliberately wish to shape their soft power.

The Risk and Return of Dating Your Boss

This WSJ article covers new research on what happens to your paycheck when you date your boss. The data comes from Finland, where the author compares workers in relationships with managers at the same firm against workers who also date managers, just elsewhere. Female subordinates earn about 6% more while the relationship is ongoing, then see their earnings drop roughly 18% the year after a breakup, mostly because they end up leaving. Men gain more on the upside and barely lose anything when things end.

The more pressing question is what this says about efficiency, the idea that raises and promotions should flow to their highest-value use. The author is honest that it cuts both ways: if managers genuinely mentor romantic partners and make them more productive, the earnings gains are real and the labor market is working. If the channel is pure nepotism, the 18% drop after a breakup is just the correction. She finds evidence for both, so the efficiency verdict is genuinely hard to call.

One thing I think the paper doesn't touch: what happens to the manager's career. We have clean before/during/after earnings data for the subordinate. Whether the person on the other side of the power imbalance pays any price is, as far as I can tell, still looks like an open question.

The Vest and the Brightest

This piece in Interview Magazine profiles four young finance guys in New York, ages 23 to 25: FX trading, entertainment banking, AI consulting (is this finance?), and equity swaps. The questions are as entertaining as the answers. "How many vests do you own?" "Have you ever cried at work?" Interestingly, the financial advice from these folks is nearly identical across all four: diversify, invest early, live below your means. Two of them drink dirty vodka martinis. There's something genuinely earnest in there, mixed in with a lot of carefully managed image, which I suppose is what the job trains you to do.

Part of why finance keeps getting this treatment is obvious: the money. But the more interesting piece is what prolonged exposure to large numbers does to your sense of scale. Behavioral economists call it scope neglect: our perception of numerical magnitudes is roughly logarithmic, so the psychological distance between $100 and $1,000 feels larger than the distance between $1 million and $10 million, even though the latter gap is 100x bigger. Work in finance long enough and everything below a certain threshold starts to feel like rounding error.

The natural control group to see if this hypothesis is true is finance faculty, who also spend their days talking about large numbers, just without actually moving them. There are also quite a few ex finance faculty (here and here) who now work in the industry, so the line is more porous than it looks from the outside. The professors who cross over presumably go through the same recalibration: the numbers get bigger, the reference point shifts, and at some point a $3,000 jacket stops registering as a splurge.