Tim Harford's Blog, page 13

Cautionary Tales Live at the Bristol Festival of Economics

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How to stay curious while avoiding distraction

My wife doesn’t even bother to roll her eyes any more when I fail to complete the simplest of household tasks. “Did you get distracted?” she will ask, although she knows the answer. Thankfully, now I have cover, because if there is one person in the household more likely to stop halfway through putting on his shoes or brushing his teeth, because he suddenly remembers something he wanted to read or watch or listen to, it’s my 13-year-old son. When they make Getting Distracted an Olympic sport, my money’s on him being a medal contender.

My wife, of course, cuts him more slack than me.

“He gets distracted because he’s so curious,” she said. And the remark stuck in my mind, partly because I’d read almost exactly the same thing from the design guru Don Norman, who wrote: “My curiosity frequently leads me to insights that have helped me in my career. So why is this wonderful, creative trait of curiosity given the negative term ‘distraction’?” These are ideas to ponder. Yet surely there is a distinction to be teased out between the essential trait of curiosity and its evil twin, distractibility.

Janelle Shane’s exploration of AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (2019), sheds light on the question under controlled conditions by looking at the behaviour of curious, and distractible, AI systems. As Shane explains, AI systems are often trained by using some form of trial and error, with a “reward function” deciding which experiments should be regarded as a success and which should be regarded as a failure. For example, you might teach a computer to learn to ride a virtual bike in a simulated 3D environment by rewarding the distance pedalled, and penalising the number of times the bike falls over.

The challenge comes when the reward function misses what the human programmers really wanted. Perhaps the AI will avoid the risk of falls by leaving the bike on the floor, or maximise distance pedalled by wobbling in a big circle or even by standing the bike upside down and cranking the pedals. These are not merely theoretical possibilities. One algorithm was designed to sort a list of numbers and simply deleted the list, instantly ensuring that not a single number was out of place.

These are fairly simple problems. The more complex the desired behaviour, the easier it is to accidentally reward the wrong thing. But there is a clever and effective approach for training computers to solve a fairly wide range of problems: reward curiosity. More precisely, reward the computer when it encounters situations in which it finds the outcome unpredictable. Off it will go in search of something it hasn’t seen before.

Shane writes: “A curiosity-driven AI will learn to move through a video-game level so it can see new stuff, avoiding fireballs, monsters and death pits because when it gets hit by those, it sees the same boring death sequence.” Death is to be avoided not for its own sake, but because it’s terribly predictable.

All this is fascinating in its own right, and hints at why humans themselves might have evolved a sense of curiosity. But AI systems, like 13-year-old boys, can also be curious to the point of distractibility themselves. For example, ask a curiosity-driven AI to teach itself to play a Pac-Man-style game in which ghosts move randomly around a maze, and you will struggle: the AI doesn’t need to do anything to have its curiosity satisfied, because unpredictable ghosts are endlessly fascinating. Or, as Shane explains, a curiositybot will quickly learn to navigate a maze, unless one of the maze walls has a TV on it that shows a series of random images. “As soon as the AI found the TV, it was transfixed.” Much like my son. Or, for that matter, me.

This problem is sufficiently well known to AI researchers that it has a name: the “noisy TV problem”. And, for a clever programmer, it can be solved. Alas, our modern world is full of distractions as perfectly designed to grab our attention as a TV full of static is designed to grab the attention of a curiositybot, and we cannot simply reprogram ourselves to avoid these intellectual empty calories.

One solution is defensive: avoid noisy TVs. Delete your social media account (or, at least, remove the app from your phone and install two-step verification to make it annoying to log in). Don’t sleep with your phone in the bedroom. Switch off all but essential notifications. We know all this, and if you can make yourself do it, it works. But a second approach focuses more on the positive. As well as trying to cut out mere novelty, we should seek out things worth being curious about. This is easier than one might think, because thoughtful curiosity builds knowledge, and knowledge builds thoughtful curiosity.

As Ian Leslie explains in his book Curious: The Desire To Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (2014), human curiosity usually requires a reasonable base of facts to underpin it. “The curiosity zone is next door to what you already know,” he writes.

That seems right. I am vastly more curious about new ideas in fields about which I already know a bit, such as economics, table-top games or callisthenics, than I am about subjects in which I have no intellectual toehold, such as anthropology, knitting or hockey.

So the plan for both distractible members of the Harford household must be the same: keep learning. The more you know, the more you will prefer something in-depth, rather than the next thumbnail recommended by YouTube.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 August 2024.

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

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Cautionary Tales – Steel and Kindness: The Clash of the Skyscrapers

Paul Starrett has just won a major building contract. If everything goes according to plan, this will be the tallest building in the world. But will everything go according to plan? This prestigious new project will have his biggest workforce yet. Everyone will need to pull together, but labour relations in the United States have been rough. There have been tens of thousands of strikes in recent years, many ending in shootings and arbitrary mass arrests.

Something else is bothering Starrett too. Enormous steel-framed buildings normally take three or four years to complete. The deadline on this one? Just thirteen months.

This is the second episode in a four-part series about how to succeed without being a jerk. It’s based on David Bodanis’ book The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean.

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Cautionary Tales – The Nice Guy, the Bully, and the Kiss

Leo Durocher would stop at nothing to win. The baseball player-turned-manager was a skilled tactician and famously tough. But he also cheated, intimidated umpires and was violent; he was even known to beat up fans. Durocher was famous for coining the phrase “nice guys finish last” – but is that really true?

Tim Harford and David Bodanis examine lessons from the life of a ruthless, pugnacious baseball star. This is the first episode of a four-part mini series about how to succeed without being a jerk. It’s based on David’s book The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean.

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The real questions posed by counterfeit clobber

Travel broadens the mind, especially if the destination is the cradle of the Renaissance. However, the Florentine masterpiece on display that caught the attention of Harford Jr was not Ghiberti’s bronze baptistery doors, nor Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, but some extraordinarily expensive accessories in the window of the Louis Vuitton store. Who would pay €2,000 for a bumbag? Or €500 for a baseball cap?

My son perkily explained to me that in Sicily he could get a fake Louis Vuitton cap for €12 and he thought that was a better deal. Out of the mouths of babes. The conversation raised questions. Does the existence of the €12 fake threaten the market for the real thing? Is the customer being ripped off by the fake, or by the genuine article? And who really loses when there is a flood of counterfeits?

Much depends on what luxury brands really convey. On one view, it’s a guarantee of quality for the purchasers. Expensive brands promise quality materials and craftsmanship, and the promise is credible because the brand’s hard-won reputation is valuable. In her book, Authenticity (2022), Alice Sherwood is embarrassed to realise that she nearly wore her fake Longchamp handbag to Paris’s Musée de la Contrefaçon, the Museum of Counterfeiting. The risk of awkwardness didn’t last long, though: “Ten days after I got home, my counterfeit Longchamp fell to pieces.”

If brands certify quality, that might explain why I would pay extra for a reputable washing machine, a reputable lawyer, or a reputable condom. But it does not really seem to explain why anyone would pay €500 to ensure that a €12 baseball cap is properly stitched. Perhaps a better explanation is that buying the €500 cap demonstrates that you have money to burn.

The real trick that luxury brands have pulled off is that the two features of the brand — subtle excellence paired with conspicuous expense — reinforce each other. In its purest form, conspicuous consumption is crass and unattractive; it needs the cover story of excellence before it becomes appealing.

Both excellence and expense are part of the brand promise, then, but the difference between them matters. If the brand is mostly about excellence, the purchaser of the fake is the obvious loser: they are getting shoddy goods masquerading as something much better.

But if high-end brands are largely about expense for the sake of expense, then counterfeit brands are like counterfeit banknotes. Their ubiquity debauches the value of the once-exclusive brand and the suckers are not the people who buy the fakes, but the people who pay retail for the tarnished originals.

Should we worry? In the rich and felonious tapestry of human wrongdoing, how dastardly a crime is the counterfeiting of Prada or Armani? That depends. Counterfeits can be fatal. The most worrisome cases are not about baseball caps, but about life-or-death products such as pharmaceuticals. Or aircraft parts: in 1989, 55 people were killed when Partnair flight 394 crashed off the coast of Denmark; the accident investigators cited the failure of a component “which was of a non-standard design and of unknown origin”.

Less grave, but still vexing, are markets in which every product is junk because nobody can prove they are selling something better. The economist George Akerlof won a Nobel memorial prize for modelling such markets.

But is this inability to signal quality really a problem for luxury fashion brands? I doubt it. Those who walk into the Louis Vuitton shop down the street from Florence’s Duomo and pay €500 for a baseball cap will be confident that they are getting the real thing, and rightly so. Those who pay €12 in a Palermo street market are expecting a knock-off, and they are right too. Which brings us back to that tricky business of conspicuous consumption. If anyone can afford a knock-off, where is the snob value of the expensive original?

The economist Karen Croxson, now at the Competition and Markets Authority, once published a theory of “promotional piracy”, in which companies would tolerate the copying of some products because it created demand for the real thing. Microsoft probably benefits if tens of millions of schoolkids familiarise themselves with pirated copies of PowerPoint and Excel.

And while the possibility of counterfeit Gucci loafers seems unlikely to enhance the appeal of the real thing, maybe some brands might be happy to see influential young artists, musicians and trendsetters displaying their logos, fake or not.

Or maybe the ubiquity of the imitations builds demand for the original? Over in the Uffizi, “The Birth of Venus” is so prized because it is so recognisable, and that is down to it having been duplicated, imitated and remixed so often. Perhaps this is as true for Versace as it is for Botticelli.

Promotional piracy notwithstanding, the people most directly damaged by the existence of counterfeits are likely to be the big brands themselves. With each fake in circulation, the value of those brands ebbs away a little. The more plausible counterfeits are available, the less great fashion houses will be willing to invest in establishing themselves as the reference point for style.

That might not be a catastrophe. Does anyone think the world doesn’t spend enough money trying to make fashion brands look cool? They’ll cope. So will we.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 August 2024.

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

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What geeks can learn from sport

For those of us who love sport, the Euros followed by the Olympics have given us a vintage summer. For those of us who love geeking out over data, even more so — because sport, like life itself, is ever more quantified, a world in which metrics are thoroughly analysed in the hope of finding an edge.

But while high-performance sport is hoping to learn from the geeks, there is also the possibility that the geeks may learn from sport. Sport is far more constrained than life, which helps social scientists looking for clear, sharp answers to vexing questions about how individuals and teams behave.

The economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta has been making this argument for many years, and recently published a working paper titled “The Beautiful Dataset”, surveying a wide landscape of economic topics that have been addressed using data from sport.

For example, professional golfers are less accurate when trying to make birdies and eagles (better than the par score) than when trying to avoid bogeys (worse than par). This is an example of “loss aversion”: golfers, like us, seem to hate losses more than they like gains. Another example is whether a free market tends to reduce unfair discrimination. It might, in theory: after all, refusing to hire good people on the basis of race or gender is not only repugnant, but an expensive vice. But in practice? Hard to say.

The history of baseball offers a clue: after 1947, major league teams were permitted to hire Black players. Many managers disdained that idea. Those who were more open-minded could hire good Black players cheaply, and gain an advantage in the league. Did they? The answer, according to a 1974 study: yes . . . but with outrageous slowness.

The penalty kick in football is a great example of the stark simplicity of some sporting situations. Most strikers will have a stronger side, but to favour it too much is to become predictable. The striker might aim for the weaker side instead. So should the striker aim left, or right? And since the keeper has to guess which way to dive, which way should they go?

The situation, argues Palacios-Huerta, is perfect for testing a foundation of game theory: the Minimax theorem, proved by the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann in 1928. After looking at hundreds, and then thousands, of penalty kicks, Palacios-Huerta concluded that both strikers and goalkeepers play in accordance with the optimal game theoretic strategy, perfectly balancing the advantage of unpredictability and the advantage of favouring the stronger side.

When I previously wrote about this research, I quipped that top football professionals were also “superb economists”, suggesting that players intuitively optimised their tactics. But there may be nothing intuitive about it; teams can — if they wish — easily analyse such questions and advise star players accordingly. (Recall the England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, who faced a penalty shootout with Switzerland. He was armed with a water bottle listing every opposing player and the best guess for how to save their shots.) Teams who neglect their data lose out.

So while Palacios-Huerta is justified in his proud claim that “these findings represent the first time that both implications of von Neumann’s Minimax theorem are supported under natural conditions”, the word “natural” might raise an eyebrow. Players are making optimal choices, yes — when supported by backroom teams. One might wonder whether there is any broader lesson.

Indeed, there is a question mark over whether top football players really do optimise. A study by researchers including Michael Bar-Eli and Ilana Ritov found that goalkeepers, contrary to game theory, demonstrate a predictable bias in the way they respond to penalty kicks: the action bias.

To understand what that bias is, consider what I left out of my earlier analysis of whether a keeper or a striker should go right, or left. There is another alternative for each. The keeper could stand still, while the striker could cheekily chip the ball down the middle of the goal — the “Panenka” penalty named after the Czech Antonín Panenka, who won the Euro 1976 final with the audacious technique.

The problem is that, as a striker, if you try the Panenka and the keeper stays still, you’ll look like an idiot. The goalkeeper faces a similar dilemma. Bar-Eli, Ritov and their colleagues find that goalkeepers would do better if they stood still more often rather than diving for the sake of looking keen.

Even the starkest of situations, the football penalty, is more complex to model than it might seem. Is it better to assume that each player has two options, or three? Is their aim to win the game, or to avoid embarrassment?

Perhaps the lesson here is not that professional players optimise, or fail to, but that sport is less clear-cut than it appears. As the statistician George Box was fond of saying, all models are wrong, but some are useful. A game theorist might well be able to give good advice to a team preparing for a penalty shootout, but it is too much to expect them to analyse every detail of the situation on the pitch.

One of the many pleasures of professional sport is that it offers us much of what makes life interesting, but in a purer, more concentrated dose. That is its attraction to economists too. But let’s not fool ourselves. Sport may be simpler than life, but that’s not saying much.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 August 2024.

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

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Cautionary Tales – Tim’s Tolkien obsession and Amazon Prime’s “The Rings of Power”

Tim Harford’s life has been building up to this moment. In this Cautionary Conversation, he discusses the works of his favourite author J.R.R. Tolkien and the social science at play in Amazon Prime’s series The Rings of Power. What do elves and whistleblowers have in common? How can evil hide in plain sight? And where do orcs come from?

This episode is sponsored by Amazon Prime’s The Rings of Power. Season 2 of the Rings of Power is available to watch on Prime Video from August 29th.

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The strange, illusory rise in UK inequality

It’s only natural that a Labour government would want to concern itself with inequality, not least because that’s what many voters want. According to the Resolution Foundation, the share of the public citing poverty and inequality as one of the most important issues facing the UK rose from 7 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent on the eve of the pandemic.

It seems obvious that inequality in the UK has been rising since the financial crisis, and in particular since the Conservatives took power in 2010. No catechism of the UK’s woes is complete without the rote intonement that “inequality is rising”.

And yet, it isn’t. Don’t take my word for this. Take a look instead at the World Inequality Database, painstakingly assembled by a team including the economic superstars Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty. All three are closely associated with the view that inequality is a serious problem.

And yet the WID is clear: in the UK, the share of income flowing to the richest 1 per cent is lower than it was during the financial crisis. It is much the same in the most recent numbers as it was in 1997, when Tony Blair was elected, and this is true both for pre-tax income (of which the richest 1 per cent get 13 per cent) and for post-tax income (8.5 per cent). Income inequality hasn’t risen, it’s fallen. Redistributive taxes have given it a little extra nudge.

If the point about redistributive taxes seems surprising, it shouldn’t be. We have all been told — rightly — that the total tax take relative to the size of the economy is near the highest level for more than 70 years. Yet for people on average incomes, direct taxes (income tax and national insurance) are at their lowest level for decades.

That is partly because more taxes are levied through indirect taxes such as VAT, but also because the rich pay more tax than they used to. According to Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, someone earning £200,000 a year pays about £10,000 a year more in tax under today’s tax arrangements than they would have in 2009.

Meanwhile, for someone on average earnings, the total income tax and national insurance paid has fallen fairly steadily from about 30 per cent in the late 1970s to less than 20 per cent today. Record taxes? Not for Jane and John Average.

If income inequality has fallen, and taxes have become more redistributive, then what is the problem? The answer: slow growth. Broadly-based economic growth supplies the funding for public services and benefits, while easing people’s concerns about affording the essentials of life. The UK’s problem is not that economic growth has been too narrow, but that it has barely happened at all. What we have had is broadly-based stagnation.

That said, there are at least three aspects of inequality that deserve priority. The first is that niches of deprivation have been allowed to develop. Some are poorly studied — for example, the Department for Work and Pensions did not publish data about food bank use until last year.

Other pockets of poverty are the result of deliberate policy choices. Contrary to popular belief, child poverty is not rising in the UK. However, relative poverty in households with three or more children is rising — no surprise, given that in 2017 the government limited child support to the first two children in each family.

A second source of inequality that weighs heavily on the UK is that between London and the rest. This problem gets plenty of attention but too little action. Output per hour is actually falling in London — it’s lower than it was in 2007. This is a shocking state of affairs.

But the struggles of London are little help to the UK’s smaller cities. Look at gross value added per worker in Europe’s great cities, and you’ll see London remains one of Europe’s most productive and populous conurbations, albeit some way behind Paris. But it’s the UK’s smaller cities that are failing to live up to their potential. Lyon, Toulouse, Barcelona and Milan are all doing substantially better than Birmingham or Manchester. Germany has a dozen cities doing better than the UK’s second most productive major city, Edinburgh.

A third pernicious source of inequality is the UK’s sclerotic housing market. When Blair was elected, house prices were three times earnings. Now they are more than six times earnings or twice as difficult to afford. For those on these typical salaries, affording a home requires access to dynastic wealth. This is a source of inequality that mere income statistics do not convey.

The new government’s early plans look promising: in particular, effective planning reform would make housing more affordable. But fixing the planning problem, and the lost potential of smaller cities, is a much more challenging task than what recent governments have done, which is to redistribute some income using the tax system.

There is a paradox here: the weaker growth becomes, the more people focus on inequality, fighting over the pie rather than finding ways to make the pie grow. This new government is right to emphasise the need for growth rather than redistribution. It’s unclear that the voters — or its own backbenchers — will feel the same way.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 19 July 2024.

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

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Gamification: Like fun, but more hellish

There are few more depressing scenes than the one painted by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in her book Addiction by Design. She describes slot-machine players in Las Vegas so absorbed in their gambling that, when one of them collapses after suffering a cardiac arrest at the slots, others neither notice nor make space for the paramedics.

As Schüll explains, these slot-machine superusers aren’t even playing in the hope of winning money, but because they find the machine soothingly absorbing. They have entered what we might call the “junk flow state” — a grotesque parody of what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow”, a state of intense focus and immersion in a challenging activity.

Disheartening stuff. But even more disheartening is the knowledge that the same techniques long ago escaped the casinos and settled on your smartphone. Now toddlers watch TikTok with the same slack-jawed expression as the slot-machine addicts, while couples interrupt their dates to show some love to their phones.

The “gamification” of your phone sounds as though it means making everything fun, like a game. It doesn’t. Instead it means adding elements such as points, league tables, streaks and pseudo-rewards. These feel exciting but are as valueless as the “false win” experienced by a slot-machine player who pays $5 for a spin and then, with bells and flashing lights going off, gets $3 back.

Gamification can be beneficial when it keeps people coming back to language-learning apps or exercise programmes. But it has more in common with addiction, and all too often it is deployed in circumstances which are questionable or outright harmful. Consider the pricey meditation app which will tally your uninterrupted streak of daily practice, leading to not-entirely-meditative anxieties about breaking the streak.

At least that’s funny. Less amusing are investment apps which gamify trading. They give unpredictable rewards to new users, display leader boards with the top traders or award points and badges for activity on the app. Both common sense and evidence from The Behavioural Insights Team suggest that such apps are likely to damage the wealth of investors. Gamification encourages investors to trade more often, which is profitable for the app makers but not for their users.

These are not unusual examples. They are all but inevitable, given how much smartphone software depends on advertising. Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that smartphones have a way of subtly redirecting our attention from our desires to the desires of advertisers. Gamification is part of the way that our phones keep us checking in.

For a lover of games such as myself, the most irritating thing about gamification is that it besmirches the good name of fun. Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, coined the term “fake fun” to describe these travesties of the real thing. For real fun, she suggests, look for a flow state, social connection and a spirit of playfulness. As for fake fun, there is no need to look for that: a bottomless supply of fake fun is already looking for you.

This is a great shame, because — and I can hardly believe I am having to write this — fun is great. Fun is great for building skills. We have all absorbed the idea that to achieve high levels of skill in anything, you need thousands of hours of practice. But it’s much easier to practise for thousands of hours if practice is fun. In his book Hidden Potential, the psychologist Adam Grant describes the playful practice of basketball legend Steph Curry and percussion maestro Evelyn Glennie. In the game of “21”, Curry’s fitness coach challenges him to score 21 points in 60 seconds, sprinting back to the halfway line between each basket. Glennie might challenge herself to play a piece backwards. Why not? And importantly, Curry and Glennie aren’t outsourcing their practice to a grimly gamified tracker of streaks or leader boards. They start with what’s fun.

Ali Abdaal’s book Feel-Good Productivity suggests a similar approach to work. “What would this look like if it was fun?” Abdaal asks himself, looking for the playfulness which leavens a difficult day. Steven Johnson’s book Wonderland even makes the case that “play made the modern world”: our games, sports, music and even stage magic have fuelled innovations in everything from chemistry to computing.

Still, this is all a bonus. The real purpose of fun is not to motivate more effective practice, to keep you going through a tough afternoon at work or to inspire the invention of software. The real purpose of fun is that it has no particular purpose at all: it’s one of those truly rare things in life worth having for its own sake.

In 2005, I visited Las Vegas to research my first-ever feature for the FT Weekend Magazine about how geeks took over poker. I watched the packed hall at the World Series of Poker, full of players who, despite the high stakes, the long hours and intense competition, definitely seemed to be having fun. Social connection, flow and perhaps even playfulness were all in evidence, even as both the pressure and the chips mounted.

How different was my evening, when I went to the bar and chatted to another journalist over a beer. While we talked, he fed a $100 bill into a slot machine that was built into the surface of the bar itself. Then he stabbed away at the screen, muttering, “This is so stupid.” It was a glimpse of our gamified future. It wore the trappings of fun, but it wasn’t fun at all.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 26 July 2024.

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

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Cautionary Tales – The Human Guinea Pigs of of Camp Lazear

Young doctor Jesse Lazear has deadly Yellow Fever. He thrashes around and convulses in his sick bed, and his vomit is black. He is just 34 when he dies.

Curiously, mosquito expert Lazear was researching the disease when he became ill. Some historians think his infection wasn’t an accident, and that he was secretly experimenting on himself…

Today, human challenge trials – where volunteers are intentionally given a disease under the watchful eye of medical support – are rare. The authorities are wary of the risks involved. But such trials can also mean that vaccines are developed faster, and thousands of lives are saved. Is it time to start thinking differently about experimenting on humans?

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Further reading

Two in-depth histories of yellow fever are The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby, and Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets by John R. Pierce and James V. Writer. This episode also owes a debt of gratitude to the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission online exhibit hosted by the University of Virginia.

Published in March 2020 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Human Challenge Studies to Accelerate Coronavirus Vaccine Licensure sparked a debate on the ethics of challenge trials that was covered by outlets such as CNN and Wired. An academic article by Mabel Rosenheck puts the debate in historical context. The 1Day Sooner-sponsored paper asking what challenge trials might have changed is Vaccines at Velocity: Evaluating Potential Lives Saved by Earlier Vaccination in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Pushkin+ listeners seeking further reading for our episodes on the Panama Canal should consult the shownotes here.