The week in numbers: Gender audit
96
Number of BBC presenters and other on-air talent who earn more than £150,000.
62
Number of these highest earners who are men, leading the Sun to dub it the "British Blokes Corp".
8
In the list of the top salaries paid by the publicly funded British broadcaster, eight of the nine highest-paid are male, with the one woman in this group being Claudia Winkleman.
Image of the week: Tech royalty
It’s a royal return to our occasional series of public figures putting on virtual reality headsets while obliged to do the rounds at technology fairs. Here, the Duke of Cambridge, aka Prince William, puts on the goggles of foolishness at a tech business incubator in Warsaw, Poland, immediately transporting himself into a surreal fantasy world completely different from his real one – or it might have just been a virtual view of the Polish capital. The duchess, who took her turn at the VR, was also obliged to exchange pleasantries with a robot made by the company Proton, which reportedly moved when she patted its head. The direction of the robot’s movements was not reported.
The lexicon: Kakistocracy
Normally this section of Planet Business is devoted to new words, but this week it's the turn of an old word that has seen a resurgence in its popularity of late, for some strange reason. A "kakistocracy", coined in the 1600s, is a state that is governed by the worst people – the most unscrupulous or the most unsuitable or indeed both. Dictionary Merriam-Webster recently identified a spike in look-ups for the word, after US cable television host Joy-Ann Reid invited her fellow Americans to find out what it means, promising that "things will make much more sense". Kakistocracy is derived from the Greek word "kakistos" which means "worst" – the actual worst – and is the superlative of "kakos", which means "bad", or in the context of government performance, "normal".
Getting to know: Matthew Levatich
Reason to envy Matthew (Matt) Levatich: He's the chief executive of Harley-Davidson, which means he wears a leather jacket, owns four Harleys and earns a massive whack. Surely such a man has won at life. Alas, while Harley-Davidson might be safely regarded as an "iconic" motorcycle brand, consumer demand has been dropping, from about 350,000 a year a decade ago to expected sales of less than 250,000 this year and the company is now cutting production. Levatich, a mechanical engineer by qualification, seemed reasonably confident in 2015 that the mid-life crisis demographic wouldn't dry up because fortysomething men want to "feel alive". However, the ageing baby boomers are flooding the market with second-hand bikes and the millennials aren't getting on theirs.
The list: Writers on bank notes
Jane Austen has finally made it to the £10 note, 200 years after her premature death. So which other writers have enjoyed a more, well, intimate relationship with money than their peers?
1. James Joyce: The Central Bank issued Joyce-adorned, green-hued tenners in 1993, but he was replaced by the blood-red, writer-free €10 in 2002.
2. Charles Dickens: Before Austen graced the £10 there was Charles Darwin, and before Darwin there was Dickens, of Hard Times and Bleak House fame.
3. Hans Christian Andersen: The Danish fairytale writer who brought us The Emperor's New Clothes had his sceptical mug on the Danish 10 kroner from 1952 to 1975.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Treasure Ireland author looked thoroughly cheerful on some Royal Bank of Scotland commemorative £1 notes in 1994, the centenary of his death.
5. William Shakespeare: Between 1970 and 1991, the playwright could be seen on a £20 sterling note leaning suggestively against a pile of books.
