Tim Harford's Blog

Cautionary Tales – The Canal, the Crash and the Ketamine (Pushkin’s Reign of Error)

In 1983, a plane takes off from Ottawa with less than half the required fuel on board. As the engines cut out one by one, the pilot is left with a ticking clock and an impossible task. But what does a tale of an unusual plane crash have in common with one about a disappearing canal?

For this special episode, Tim is joined by colleagues from across Pushkin’s podcast network. Heavyweight’s Jonathan Goldstein stops by to muse on the cost of mistakes and whether we’re really in control of how many we make. Plus, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from the podcast Risky Business have a gambler’s take on the strange science of regret. 

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Further Reading

On the Chesterfield Canal

The Day they pulled the Plug, Nigel Blundell The World’s Greatest Mistakes and Stephen Pile The Book of Heroic Failures.

On the Gimli Glider

Humble Pi by Matt Parker. Freefall by William and Marilyn Hoffer, the official investigation report and reporting in Flight Safety Australia, Soaring Magazine and The Ottowa Citizen.

The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration

In 1799, the German adventurer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt set out on what would prove to be a five-year exploration of South America. Young, independently wealthy and almost absurdly energetic, Humboldt took a vast array of instruments with him. A one-man harbinger of the age of big data, he measured the circumferences of cacti, the air pressure and ground temperature near the summit of Mount Chimborazo, and even had time to correct the positioning of Havana on the maps of the Spanish navy.

Humboldt was also deeply curious about the wonders of the new world. He was an exciting writer and a sensitive painter, and would have been puzzled at the suggestion that anyone should have to choose between scientific data and personal experience.

I’ve been thinking about Humboldt as I tried to make sense of YouGov’s recent polling. Since 2011, YouGov have asked survey respondents to pick up to three issues they feel are the most important facing the UK. A few weeks ago, “Immigration and Asylum” became the most popular choice.

This is slightly unnerving, since the last time that was true was the summer of 2016, just before the issue was eclipsed by four glorious years of the most important issue being “Britain leaving the EU”. We don’t necessarily make our smartest decisions when our brains are awash in anxiety about immigration.

It is also slightly puzzling. Why is this suddenly now the issue of the day — rather than the economy (slow growth, persistent inflation, high taxes) or health (widespread chronic illness, long waiting lists for the NHS)?

What would Humboldt make of all this? Does either the data or personal experience suggest that the UK’s most pressing problem is something to do with immigrants?

Start with personal experience. We all have problems in our lives, and some of those problems feel like the kind of things our political leaders should be dealing with. Maybe you’re looking for a job and can’t find one. Maybe you’ve recently been burgled or robbed. Maybe you can’t afford a decent house, have been waiting too long for a medical appointment, or are aghast at how much tax you have to pay.

Any of us can make such a list — a sort of satanic inversion of the gratitude journal. But when I look at my own list I’m quite struck by how hard it is to connect any of my actual, real-world, everyday problems to immigrants in general or asylum seekers in particular.

One possible retort is that migrants actually are lengthening NHS waiting lists and raising my tax bill, I just don’t realise it. Maybe. My impression is the NHS needs as many immigrants as it can hire, but nothing on my tax bill tells me whether asylum seekers are responsible for any significant part of it. Maybe they are.

Another retort is that my experiences don’t represent those of the ordinary UK resident. Fair enough. There are nearly 70 million of us and we’re all entitled to our own headaches. No one person’s experience can come close to reflecting everyone else’s.

Personal experience may not even reflect the truth of what is right in front of us. Just ask MP Rupert Lowe, who a few weeks ago tweeted a photograph with the text “Dinghies coming into Great Yarmouth, RIGHT NOW. Authorities alerted, and I am urgently chasing. If these are illegal migrants, I will be using every tool at my disposal to ensure these individuals are deported.” Lowe also called for “mass deportations. NOW.”

The boat was in fact being rowed from Land’s End to John O’Groats by a team raising money for a motor neurone disease charity. It’s easy to chuckle at Rupert Lowe, but we are all at risk of seeing only what we expect to see.

The economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano and Stefanie Stantcheva have conducted some fascinating surveys of public perceptions of a variety of policy issues, and the results on immigration are sobering. UK respondents dramatically overestimate how many immigrants there are and how many of them are Muslim. They overestimate what proportion of immigrants are from north Africa by a factor of 10, and from the Middle East by a factor of two, and underestimate how many are from North America. Respondents underestimate how many are Christian, and also underestimate the education levels and employment status of immigrants relative to the UK-born population. These misperceptions are not unique to the UK — they are common in rich countries.

We should, like Humboldt, pay a bit more attention to the data. Oxford university’s Migration Observatory has curated a useful collection of evidence about migration and the asylum system in the UK. We can see, for example, that the cost of the entire asylum system has soared in recent years, from less than £500mn in 2013/14 to more than £5bn in 2023/24. That is still a small sum relative to the cost of the NHS, which spends £5bn every 10 days or so. But it’s not trivial, and it has grown quickly. The issue has not simply been dreamt up by tabloid editors.

Yet just because the system for processing asylum claims has become overwhelmed does not mean the UK itself has too. Foreign-born UK residents are much more likely to be of working age than the UK-born — and thus less of a fiscal burden. They tend to be healthier than the UK-born, and are much more likely to have a university degree. Seventy-five per cent of them have lived in the UK for more than five years and 90 per cent speak good English. None of this suggests that immigration is likely to usher in any sort of financial, social or cultural calamity.

It is not hard to see how so many people came to worry about immigration. We are surrounded by apocalyptic social media messages and news headlines. But the hard data suggests that the largest of the UK’s very real problems are no more being caused by mass immigration than they are by a group of charity fundraisers rowing past Great Yarmouth.

Then again, the hard data is never as eloquent as a good story. That is why the voraciously curious Alexander von Humboldt sets us such a good example. He’d measure the cactus but he’d also sketch it; drag his barometer up a volcano, but be sure to spin a yarn about the epic climb.

In short: respect the data, but also look carefully at what you see all around you. Above all, think for yourself.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 Sep 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Cautionary Tales – Can You Make A Sherman Tank Float?

It’s D-Day and the Allies are about to invade Nazi-occupied France. For the landings to succeed, American soldiers on Omaha Beach will have to break through some formidable coastal defences – Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Sherman tanks will come in very handy – and the Allies have come up with a novel solution for getting them to the beach. These tanks will swim. Everyone from Winston Churchill down thought swimming tanks were a great idea… but were they?

This episode is available exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club, and Pushkin+ subscribers.

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Further Reading

The Second World War. Vol II. W Churchill.

Normandy 44 by James Holland

Overlord by Max Hastings

Beyond the Beachhead by Joseph Balkoski

The Maritime Archaeology of Duplex Drive Tanks in the United Kingdom by Thomas Cousins, Thomas Harrison and Dave Parham. Bournemouth University, UK

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman 

Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing by Carmen Nobel (Harvard Business School)

Don’t Solve the Wrong Problem by Prashant Verma 

What is Workplace Innovation? By The European Workplace Innovation Network 

Interview with D-Day veterans – D-Day I Was There. BBC News.

Cautionary Tales – Schrodinger’s Spy: Businessman, Fraud or Russian Agent?

When the Financial Times uncovered the billion-dollar Wirecard fraud, it seemed like the story was over. But then the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Marsalek, vanished – leaving behind clues that pointed to a double life as a secret agent. 

In his new podcast Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, FT journalist Sam Jones follows Marsalek’s trail through a globe-spanning world of spies, secrets, and corruption. Sam joins Tim to take him behind the scenes of the hunt for Marsalek, share his insights on the future of Russian espionage, and explore what modern spy stories tell us about ourselves. 

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The relentless rule of my fitness tracker

At a time when we’re all blaming digital devices for ruining our attention spans, our children’s mental health and even the future of democracy itself, let’s give credit where it’s due: my cheap fitness watch has changed my life.

Three and a half years ago I started running at my local Parkrun, taking more than half an hour to limp around the 5k course for the first few weeks. After a few months of consistently showing up I made the kind of progress one might expect. But when I bought an entry-level runner’s watch, things really started to change.

Urged on by the watch, I began training several times a week and lengthening the runs to 10k, 10 miles and beyond. My wife got the bug — and her own watch. Our daughter described us as “running mad”. You be the judge: mad or not, I’m running the London Marathon in April next year. As a stubborn non-runner for the first 49 years of my life, there’s no way I’d have signed up for that sort of insanity without the watch.

These fitness trackers are not without their downsides, and I’ve become fascinated by the way they’re a microcosm of our increasingly quantified lives. The most obvious objection is that they are a privacy nightmare. They track our location and make sharing it easy and tempting. Stanislav Rzhitsky, a Russian submarine commander, was assassinated while going for a run in his local park; he was in the habit of posting his running routine on Strava. In the US, a man was convicted of murdering his wife after her Fitbit data contradicted his account of events.

And it is not just location: Carissa Véliz, the author of Privacy is Power, warns that with the right technology, heartbeat data can be as distinctive as a fingerprint. It’s unclear how much is already up there in the cloud, waiting to be abused by someone or other.

Fitness watch manufacturers would rather focus on these trackers as tools for performance. Even in this respect, there is a mixed picture. Like any good performance metric, my watch provides me with structure and helps me optimise my running. I can feed in a goal — a distance, a time — and it will generate a training program. Once-difficult tasks, such as running at a consistent pace, become straightforward.

Yet like many performance metrics, the watch can also nudge me into counter-productive activity such as overtraining to the point of injury. The sleep-tracking function tempts many people into thinking too much about sleep, which is the sort of thing that can make it hard to drift off. There’s a term of art, “orthosomnia”. It means that you’re losing sleep because you’re worried that your sleep tracker is judging you.

There is another subtle effect at work, something called “quantification fixation”. A study published last year by behavioural scientists Linda Chang, Erika Kirgios, Sendhil Mullainathan and Katherine Milkman invited participants to choose between a series of two options, such as holiday destinations or job applicants. Chang and her colleagues found that people consistently took numbers more seriously than words or symbols. Whether deciding between a cheap, shabby hotel or an expensive swanky one, or between an intern with strong management skills or one with strong calculus skills, experimental subjects systematically favoured whatever feature had a number on it, rather than a description such as “excellent” or “likely”. Numbers can fixate us.

“A key implication of our findings,” write the researchers, “is that when making decisions, people are systematically biased to favour options that dominate on quantified dimensions. And trade-offs that pit quantitative against qualitative information are everywhere.”

They may or may not be everywhere, but they are certainly in my fitness regimen. My watch takes walking, cycling and running seriously — especially outside rather than on a treadmill — but a hard session at the gym barely registers. It will count my steps for me, but I have to count my own pull-ups. The result is an incessant tug away from exercise that may be good for my body or my spirit, but which doesn’t “count” — and towards the kind of aerobic, trackable activity that the watch rewards.

Management theorists have long known about this problem. Steve Kerr’s essay in the Academy of Management Journal, “On the Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping for B”, is 50 years old and the folly seems more common than ever, perhaps because we now have an ever easier selection of automatically generated metrics upon which to fixate.

Quantification fixation may explain an early, infamous study of using fitness trackers for weight loss, published in 2016, which found that the trackers made it harder rather than easier to lose weight. That might be a statistical fluke, but it might also reflect the fact that when you exercise more you may be inclined to eat more. The fitness tracker monitors and therefore encourages extra exercise, but turns a digital blind eye to extra calories — this is quantification fixation in automated form.

A different aspect of the same problem is when I face a choice between the run prescribed by my watch, or an opportunity to run with a friend — possibly over the wrong terrain, for the wrong distance, at the wrong pace. “Wrong”, of course, being defined by the sensors in the watch. It is almost always better to seize the opportunity for a sociable run, but do I always seize it? I do not. It’s a shame to let down a friend, but it’s a disaster to let down the watch.

We live in a quantified world and in many ways our lives are better as a result, whether the metrics have been used to create more effective medicines or more efficient delivery vans. My watch may be a punctilious little wrist-worn box of tricks, but my running, and indeed my overall fitness, is far better than it was before I bought it.

Still, we would do well to keep the quantification revolution in its proper place. I never would have started running in the first place without the friends who encouraged me to show up at Parkrun, a movement that relies on community spirit, deftly seasoned with just the right amount of quantification.

And I’m not running a marathon because my watch told me to do it; I’m running in memory of a young woman who died of cancer at the age of 20. The fitness watch is a means to an end, not the end in itself. All I need to do is to remember that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 Sep 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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Cautionary Tales – Missing Fish and Fatal Feasts: Ritual and Ruin at the Sun King’s Table

In the gilded court of Louis XIV, 17th Century France, manners are everything. Where to sit, how to eat, what to wear – any misstep is costly. No one knows this better than François Vatel, the greatest party planner in all of France. Tonight, Vatel must deliver the ultimate banquet, a chance for his master to rise through the ranks and win the king’s favour. But where there is opportunity there is danger, and even one mistake could prove deadly. 

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Further Reading

The key source for story of the party at Vaux-le-Vicomte is Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art (2002) by Carolin C. Young

Other sources include

Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton

King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV by Philip Mansel

Vatel et la naissance de la gastronomie by Patrick Rambourg

And by Norbert Elias: The Court Society (1968) and The Civilising Process (1939)

Contemporary accounts and sources included:

Le Cuisinier, Pierre de Lune (first published 1656)

The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Her Friends

Memoirs of Louis XIV., by The Duke of Saint-Simon

Useful articles:

Good servants and bad masters: the several deaths of François Vatel by Daniel M. Lavery (29th August 2022) 

Chateau raises a glass to party planner undone by missing fish by Adam Sage (8th August 2023) 

The websites Etiquipedia and en.ChateauVersailles.fr

If AI lifts off, will living standards follow?

Once artificial intelligence really gets going, how fast can the economy grow? Five per cent a year? Ten per cent? Fifty per cent? Name your number. If you want press coverage, make it a big one.

ARK Invest, an investment manager focused on disruptive innovations, has argued that 7 per cent real GDP growth is plausible. Epoch AI, a think-tank focusing on AI trends, has suggested that growth rates could exceed 20 per cent a year, once certain preconditions are met. Other commentators are vastly more conservative — for example, Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu reckons that over the next few years AI might nudge annual growth rates up by about 0.1 percentage points. That would be nice to have, but not necessarily nice enough to notice.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what such growth rates might mean in practice. At 7 per cent annual growth, an economy would double in size every decade, and, potentially, so might living standards. (Would the proceeds of such growth be widely shared? Another question, for another column.)

In such an economy, people who became parents at the age of 30 could plausibly expect their children to grow up to be eight times richer than them. All but the most profligate governments would see their fiscal problems evaporate, the burden of the national debt vaporised by the white heat of economic growth.

Such numbers are not unprecedented: a few economies, such as those of China, Japan and South Korea, enjoyed long stretches of this sort of growth while playing catch-up with then-richer societies. But to see such growth rates from the world’s richest economies would be something new.

An economy growing at 20 per cent per year is even further removed from our intuitions. At such rates the economy would double in size three times a decade; children would grow up to be about 500 times richer than their parents. Centuries of economic progress would be compressed into decades, and years into months.

Could such growth possibly happen? The theory feels plausible enough. AI becomes sufficiently advanced to help make AI yet more advanced. With ever-better AI helping to develop ever-better AI, the capacity of AI grows at a super-exponential rate, the growth rate increasing each year. These superintelligences help with many other problems — for example, by developing fusion as the near-limitless clean source of energy that would no doubt be needed to fuel all those silicon brains. All the time, the AIs would get better and better — and more and more numerous.

This is all very nice in theory. In practice, the obstacles are clear enough. The most obvious source of doubt: will AIs really become advanced enough to build better AIs? Will AIs be good enough to take over from humans, or multiply the output of humans, not just at abstract processing but making strategic decisions or performing physical and emotional labour too? And is there really enough usable energy to power all this computation?

The history of technology suggests some caution, too. Look back to the 1960s. The world population growth rate was reaching a peak, increasing the number of geniuses who could develop ideas to benefit all humanity. Education was on the rise: more and more people were going to school and on to university, producing a dramatic — and potentially self-reinforcing — increase in trained brainpower. The computer was dramatically lowering the cost of calculation, and computers were being used to help design better computers. The internet was on the horizon, too, and there were countless other potential sources of support: faster, cheaper travel; more sophisticated finance to support new ideas; libraries full of ever more books.

If an economist pointed to all this at the end of the 1960s and argued that the growth rate of leading economies was about to double, would that have seemed so absurd? And yet growth in the US didn’t double. It slumped after 1970 and has been disappointing ever since. Maybe increasing the rate of economic growth isn’t as easy as one might hope.

A recent essay by the economist Luis Garicano points to a couple of reasons why. One is the “O-ring” effect, an idea named after the failure of a simple component that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle, killing all seven crew. In economics, the O-ring represents the idea that sometimes a sophisticated and highly productive system is only as good as its weakest link.

Imagine the robot masseur that only occasionally snaps your neck; the self-driving car that rarely mistakes you for a piece of trash blowing across the road; the generative AI system that can write prose for you, and can go for days, even weeks, before producing a career-threatening error. In some cases it is easy to work around a weakness in the AI system. In other cases those weaknesses, like the brittle O-ring, may be the only thing that really matters.

A related challenge is the Baumol Effect, named after the economist William Baumol. Baumol and his colleague William Bowen were originally describing the economics of a string quartet, but produced an insight of much broader relevance. Any part of the economy that is valued but cannot easily be made more productive will tend to consume a growing share of spending.

This has happened many times. First, agriculture became vastly more productive. Then steam engines became vastly more productive; then manufacturing; calculation; communication, and so on. Despite these productivity miracles — in fact, because of them — more and more spending is devoted to sectors such as healthcare, education and restaurant meals. If agricultural productivity were to double again tomorrow, that would barely register in the GDP statistics. Computational productivity is doubling all the time, but GDP growth is stubbornly lower than in the 1960s.

There are reasons to speculate that this time is different, but creating silicon intelligence is not the only problem to be solved if we want to see living standards grow at 20 per cent a year. One lesson to take from all this may be this: a growth rate of 1 per cent may be meagre by the standards of the 20th century, but even 1 per cent growth is exponential growth nonetheless — and exponential growth may be harder to sustain than we assume.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 Sep 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Cautionary Tales – Don’t Panic! Douglas Adams’ Guide to Tomorrow (with Arvind Ethan David)

Writer Douglas Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, used science fiction and satire to warn us about potential dangers in our future, from artificial intelligence to social media. In this Cautionary Conversation, Tim is joined by Arvind Ethan David, author of the new audiobook Douglas Adams: Ends of the Earth, to discuss why Adams was in the business of telling Cautionary Tales, his worries (and fixes) for the future and what we all have in common with a sentient puddle. 

Please check out our new Cautionary Club and consider joining for bonus episodes, ad-free listening, monthly video conversations and our behind-the-scenes newsletter.

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How to dodge the tourist traps

Traffic jams, heatwaves and hidden charges: you know they’re coming but somehow they are impossible for the holiday-maker to dodge. This summer, after online comparison shopping, we paid a vast sum for the privilege of collecting a hire car in Germany but dropping it off in Italy. Surprise surprise, when we reached the Avis office in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, they wouldn’t hand over the keys until we paid an extra fee. The problem was, they explained, that while we had paid to drop the car off in Italy we hadn’t paid the charge for driving in Italy. (Presumably, the online price assumed that we would wrap up the car in brown paper and ask Deutsche Post and Post Italiane to deliver it to Bologna for us.)

The charge wasn’t optional, so why hadn’t it been mentioned when we booked? My wife’s blood started to boil. I started to chuckle and take notes for this column. 

But wait; loyal readers might be feeling a sense of déjà vu. Haven’t I described this exact scenario before? Yes I have, back in the innocent days of 2019. The situation was different, though. That was Europcar. This time it was Avis. Different company, same trick.

Why doesn’t competition do away with such nonsense? One possibility is that the forces of competition are simply not strong enough: Garmisch-Partenkirchen is popular with tourists, but it’s not a big place, and there aren’t that many international car hire firms there competing for your business. A second possibility is that we customers just aren’t quite savvy enough: the trap yawns in front of us, but we don’t watch our feet and we stumble in every time.

That second possibility is an intriguing one. Everyone hates being ambushed by an extra fee, so why doesn’t a car hire firm win business by proclaiming that they impose no hidden charges?

The answer, proposed two decades ago by the economists Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, is that such a proclamation might backfire. What about customers who look at the hefty price tag of the company that charges everything upfront and think to themselves, “If I can dodge the hidden charges I might be better off with the competitor.”

Consider the traveller facing a choice between Hotel UpFront where the room is expensive but the phone, WiFi, minibar and parking are all sensibly priced, and Hotel FlyTrap, where the room is cheap to lure in the suckers who make costly calls and drain the minibar. A moderately savvy customer might prefer the all-inclusive Hotel Upfront. A truly savvy one will arrange for a virtual SIM, drop in at the local 7-Eleven to pick up a cold beer and some snacks, then stay in Hotel FlyTrap, their cheap room subsidised by the suckers. In other words, “no hidden charges” also implies “if you can avoid hidden charges, you should choose our competitors”.

The hidden charges can flourish, write Gabaix and Laibson, “even in highly competitive markets, even in markets with costless advertising”.

All this is annoying, and it raises the prospect of customers buying products that they would not have chosen if they had been told the truth. My wife and I had been wavering over taking the train to Italy and hiring a different car there; if Avis had listed all their fees up front, perhaps that is the choice we would have made.

And there is a more systemic problem, too. Even a customer who spots every trap and jumps through every hoop may find themselves paying too much. This is because all the obfuscation and misdirection weaken the incentive for any company to offer a good price. If only a handful of customers are conscientious enough to figure out the best deal, they may find that the best deal wasn’t really worth figuring out anyway. 

So what can be done? One straightforward approach is to insist on transparent, all-inclusive pricing wherever feasible. The UK’s Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Act 2024 requires this, and new guidance from the Competition and Markets Authority would seem to explicitly forbid the car-hire company practice of adding a compulsory extra local charge. (The CMA argues that even if a charge such as a tourist tax is inevitably paid later and in local currency, it can and should be mentioned at the time of booking.) 

These transparency rules are all very well as far as they go, but in an ideal world products and services would be sold with maximum comparability. I should be able to ask a price comparison website or even a digital agent to take my requirements, search the web, and return with the best deals. This was the concept behind the “midata” initiative floated by the UK’s coalition government in 2011, which pushed for standardised, machine-readable terms in banking, mobile phone contracts, and energy bills. The idea was that you could download information about your phone calls or electricity use, upload that data into some sort of comparison engine and be told which provider was best for you. Now we are told that AI agents will start navigating the web’s dark patterns for us, defusing the booby traps and defanging the predators. I wonder about that. 

Midata has been only a partial success, making much more progress in banking than energy, but the more complex a product the harder it is to make sensible comparisons. Each person has their own pattern of phone use or energy consumption, but at least those patterns vary in ways that are easy to compare. But take more idiosyncratic products, or one-off purchases, and the complexities compound. Where and when did you want to drive that car? How good a view do you want your theatre tickets to have, and would you like to include drinks at the interval? We want variety and choice, even customisation, but we also want honest, comparable pricing. And as a fellow once said, you can’t always get what you want.

Perhaps better technology and better rules will prevent price ambushes in future, but it is more likely that customers will find themselves acting out a version of the serenity prayer, wishing for the savvy to spot the price traps that can be avoided, the grace to accept the price traps that cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. Failing that, “stay away from the minibar” is never bad advice.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 August 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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Cautionary Tales – A deadly day at the races: What radical protest can and cannot do

After years of campaigning for votes for women, the Suffragettes emerge at the turn of the 20th Century. Their motto, ‘Deeds Not Words’, heralds the start of more radical actions, including fire bombing, civil disobedience and hunger strikes. Emily Davison is a passionate rebel, but she pushes at the limits of what her allies find acceptable. History remembers Emily for her final act, but have we got everything about the story right?

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Further Reading

This script relied on books including Lucy Fisher’s Emily Wilding Davison: The Martyr Suffragette, Maureen Howes’ Emily Wilding Davison: A Suffragette’s Family Album, Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes, and Michael Tanner’s The Suffragette Derby.

The Radical Flank: Curse or Blessing of a Social Movement? was published in the journal of Global Environmental Psychology in 2024.

For more on Just Stop Oil’s protest at Silverstone, see coverage in the BBC and Northampton Chronicle & Echo and Just Stop Oil’s own YouTube channel.