[wskinner]

This piece tells a compelling story. But it throws around enough casual assertions unsupported by evidence that I’m unsure what, if anything to conclude. For example:

> “The Wall Street banks kept more teams in the office, so they seem to have done a lot better than Europeans.” That may have been due to malfunctions on home-based tech platforms. But Beunza attributed it to something else: in-person teams had more incidental information exchange and sense-making, and at times of stress this seemed doubly important.

This phrasing asserts that an observed affect may be due to one of two possible causes. Of course, the author attributes their observations to the phenomenon they are studying. They don’t seem to have considered the possibility that either the American bankers are just better, or that disparate trading returns between banks in a given year might be explained by factors external to the trading team itself. This kind of sloppy reasoning calls the rest of the content into question - if a researcher is willing to make these inferences in one place, they are probably making them elsewhere.

It’s a nice story, though.