Tim Harford's Blog, page 20

Cautionary Tales – Glowing Peril: the Magical Glitter That Poisoned a City

In Goiânia, Brazil, a junk dealer acquires an old medical device from two scrap-metal scavengers. The device itself isn’t useful, but it comes with precious lead which will fetch him good money. There’s something else inside the device, too: a curious, crystal-like substance that glows bright blue in the dark.

At first, the dealer is mesmerised by it: he wants to turn it into jewellery for his wife. But, everyone who comes into contact with the glowing substance seems to get sick. His own family succumbs to nausea and vomiting. A doctor suggests food poisoning – but this isn’t like any food poisoning they’ve ever known before. And soon, the whole city is contaminated…

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Further Reading

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report, The Radiological Accident in Goiania, is a comprehensive account of the accident and its aftermath. We also drew from online sources including The Goiânia Radiation Incident: A Failure of Science and Society by Marco Antônio Sperb Leite and L. David Roper; Carla Lacerda’s blog post Sobreviventes do césio 137 – Ferida no corpo; the Transparência Nuclear blog; and reports from Correio do Estado, Jornal Opção, and the BBC.

The story of the radium girls is told in detail in Kate Moore’s book The Radium Girls, with our complementary sources including Claudia Clark’s Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform 1910-1935.

Policy Lessons from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party

Not long ago, I heard a Tory grandee giving a speech in support of a political rookie. As the occasion demanded, he offered some advice. Life in politics would be hard, he warned, but success was possible: just look at Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony party.

You might think that the Conservative veteran was being sarcastic in invoking Lord Sutch’s name, as Sutch (who was not a Lord) holds the record for the largest number of parliamentary elections or by-elections contested, and he lost all 39 of them.

(That figure is according to Guinness World Records. Sutch himself wasn’t so sure. While Sutch was working on his autobiography, his co-author told him he had tried and failed to produce a definitive count of all those election defeats: “There’s no doubt you’ve stood in an awful lot of by-elections . . . to be perfectly honest, your stuff’s in such a mess I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work it out precisely.”)

But no, the praise for Sutch was genuine. Screaming Lord Sutch, argued the grandee, was a singularly successful politician. Although Sutch never succeeded in renaming South Hams, Devon as “South Hams Egg and Chips”, he has an enviable record in seeing his policies embraced by the establishment.

When the young Sutch first stood for election in the 1960s, his platform included promises to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, to introduce commercial radio and to pedestrianise Carnaby Street. All of these policies were introduced within a decade of Sutch championing them, followed shortly afterwards by the abolition of the national 11-plus exam that sorted pupils into or away from selective grammar schools, for which he had also campaigned.

Sutch also pushed for regulatory reforms: the introduction of all-day opening for pubs, followed by 24-hour licences; the abolition of dog licences; and the introduction of pet passports. All became policy, despite Sutch never having a sniff of being elected.

We already know that you can lose a string of British parliamentary elections while seeing your policies embraced by the political mainstream; Nigel Farage taught us that. But Sutch’s triumphs suggest something further: that policies which seem daft to one generation can seem essential to the next.

I couldn’t help but wonder what silly policies today might feel foundational tomorrow. And Sutch’s heirs could do worse than ponder the eccentric policy platforms that follow:

From the Yimby party: abolish all requirements for planning permission. The costs of British planning rules are crushing. We have a wholly inadequate number of boxy houses built on flood plains, all unaffordable, because it’s all but impossible for someone to simply buy some land and build housing on their own property.

Some might instead advocate piecemeal reform to protect people’s right to light and ensure funding for local infrastructure. But we’ve been promised piecemeal reform for a generation, and it never materialises. Vote Yimby, burn the regulations and let’s see what happens.

From the Tax Jaffa Cakes party: VAT on everything at 25 per cent. No more arguments about why tampons attract no VAT but period pants do, or whether Jaffa Cakes are biscuits, or about why children with big feet have to pay VAT on shoes, but adults with small feet don’t. Introduce VAT on chartering helicopters and on everything else.

To those who think this policy is cruel and regressive, I direct your attention to Denmark, where it seems to work well enough. The UK needs to get serious about addressing poverty, and if we believe that poverty is best relieved by offering patchy tax breaks for small shoes, tampons and selected biscuits, who really is the loony? Thankfully, levying a high rate of VAT on everything will raise more than enough money to increase benefits for those in need. It might even fund a small but universal basic income.

From the Haven’t Had Enough of Experts party: let’s have the Monetary Policy Committee — but for everything. The MPC has been given the job of keeping inflation around 2 per cent and, despite their evident struggles, nobody is under the illusion that elected politicians would do a better job.

Some jobs are best delegated to experts. I may decide that I’d like to install a power shower, but having made that decision I am happy to leave the details to a plumber. It’s the same with monetary policy, so what else might we delegate?

A fiscal stimulus committee made up of tax wonks could vary VAT with the aim of stimulating or restraining the economy, as appropriate. The climate change committee, currently just an advisory body, could be handed control of a tax on carbon emissions and asked to set it at an appropriate level. Politicians might grumble that it is inappropriate to give control of substantial taxes to unelected boffins, but the MPC already has a huge influence over many household budgets, and few people seem to think the job should be handed back to politicians. In any case, the government would set the targets and retain control over all other taxes, including income tax. What’s the harm in trying?

Finally, the We Are All Lord Sutch party proposes choosing the entire membership of the House of Lords by lottery, in accordance with the advice of some Italian academics. The lucky winners, selected at random from the adult population, can do the job on rotation — like jury service but with a better restaurant. Surely it beats giving the job to bishops, the descendants of Norman barons and the hangers-on of the past few prime ministers.

No doubt these ideas seem rather more far-fetched than the pedestrianisation of Carnaby Street. Indeed, I feel awkward even mentioning them. I certainly wouldn’t advocate them. What do you think I am, a loony?  

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 October 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales – George Washington’s Beard of Beetles, with The Dollop

Cautionary Conversation: Just before Christmas 1799, President George Washington was riding around his country estate, Mount Vernon, when it began to snow. When he arrived home, guests were waiting for him. Known for his punctuality, he hurried to entertain them – still clad in his damp clothes.

The next morning, Washington had a sore throat and a chesty cough. The family took a fateful step: they summoned a doctor…

Tim Harford is joined by comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds, hosts of the hugely popular history podcast The Dollop. They discuss the parade of doctors that tended to the ailing Washington, and the various remedies they prescribed – from lamb’s blood to a collar of beetles. Tim, Dave and Gareth also look at what happened when cars first hit the streets in the early twentieth century: why did so many cars “turn turtle”? Who were the first jaywalkers? And which British inventor rode around in a giant white stiletto?

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Why are some jobs so “greedy”?

Why do women still tend to earn less than men? There is nobody better placed to answer that question than economic historian Claudia Goldin, the winner of the 2023 Nobel memorial prize in economics. Her answer tells us how to fight unfairness, but also how to create saner and more productive working lives for everybody.

Let’s nod to a few obvious explanations, all of which play a role. There’s outright discrimination, something Goldin examined with Cecilia Rouse in a celebrated study of the leading US orchestras. As those orchestras started to ask job applicants to audition from behind a screen, the proportion of women who were accepted increased dramatically.

Then there is the question of what career choices make sense to a person who might become pregnant. In the 1960s, the contraceptive pill was not widely available to unmarried women in the US. Law, medicine, dentistry and management degrees were utterly male-dominated in 1970. No wonder: investing in such a profession felt expensive and risky for a young woman who might suddenly find herself to be a young mother. Goldin and her colleague (and spouse) Lawrence Katz showed that as US states liberalised access to the contraceptive pill during the 1970s, young women surged into these courses. By giving women unprecedented control over their fertility, the contraceptive pill allowed them to invest in their careers.

For many women, however, the pill is not a method of preventing motherhood completely, but a way of delaying it until a more convenient moment. Which brings us to the present day. Goldin’s research suggests that much of the gap between men and women is more properly described as a gap between mothers and non-mothers. The reason? There are certain jobs — “greedy jobs” — that often pay very well indeed but require long and unpredictable hours.

(Goldin did not coin the term. It was first used by the sociologists Lewis Coser and Rose Laub Coser, a married couple. He used the idea to describe institutions which “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty”; she used it to describe the demands of motherhood.)

So what is a greedy job? If you may need to work late, take work phone calls at the weekend, or travel to Singapore for a meeting, all without much notice and with the absolute assumption that nothing else will get in the way of you doing so, then you have a greedy job. If you are also the primary caregiver for children then, as Rose Laub Coser understood, that’s a greedy job, too, arguably greedier than it has ever been. And it is in the nature of greedy jobs that you can only have one of them at a time.

A common arrangement between highly educated, highly employable heterosexual couples, then, is that one of them (often the woman) takes the unpaid greedy job of parenting, perhaps alongside a more flexible paid job, while the other (often the man) takes the well-paid greedy job of being a corporate lawyer or investment banker or C-suite executive.

There’s nothing inevitable about this. The couple could hire a live-in nanny: another greedy job. Or they could both work in flexible jobs where the expectation is that family comes first. But both of those options come at a steep price, since the most lavishly paid jobs are usually greedy.

As Goldin puts it in her book Career and Family (2021), “As college graduates find life partnerships and begin planning families, in the starkest terms they are faced with a choice between a marriage of equals and a marriage with more money.”

The couple could flip gender norms, with the woman working unpredictable hours and hopping on the flights to Singapore, while the man is the one doing the school pick-up and dropping everything when there’s an emergency. Apart from a few weeks around the moment of birth itself, that’s perfectly possible. But it remains unusual, so both of them will spend time explaining themselves.

What to do? We can all challenge the assumption that it’s the mother who must plan childcare and deal with emergencies so that her spouse can focus on his greedy job. But we also need to question why so many jobs are still greedy.

Goldin contrasts lawyers with pharmacists. Law is a quintessentially greedy job, with the biggest bucks coming when you are a partner at a law firm — a job that is not compatible with being the person who drops everything when a child falls off a swing in the school playground.

In contrast, you can be very well paid as a pharmacist, even though many pharmacists have non-greedy jobs. In the US, more than half of pharmacists are women and the gender pay gap for pharmacists is tiny. This, says Goldin, is a matter of job design: pharmacists work in teams and are substitutable for each other. If someone is not available to work, someone else can fill in.

Why aren’t more jobs designed like this? It takes effort and attention to create substitutable jobs. Processes must be standardised, excellent records kept; tasks assigned and monitored using a proper workflow system rather than everyone jumping on email to figure out who has the baton. These better systems don’t just allow the very best workers to operate under non-greedy conditions, they also allow for better teamwork and less burnout. Yet the people with the power to make these changes have not yet seen them as worth all the bother.

My hope — and Goldin’s too — is that the shock the pandemic delivered to working practices everywhere will help to unlock better systems, leading to further progress in gender equality and many other benefits besides. But she is a historian, not a soothsayer. We must wait and see. Or we must fight for the changes we want.  

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 20 October 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales – Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc

William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from.

900 years later, the BBC began its own Domesday project, sending school children out to conduct a community survey and collect facts about Britain. This was a people’s database, two decades before Wikipedia. But just a few years later, that interactive digital database was totally unreadable, the information lost.

We tend to take archives for granted — but preservation doesn’t happen by accident, and digitisation doesn’t mean that something will last forever. And the erasure of the historical record has disastrous consequences for humanity.

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Further Reading

On William the Conqueror

English Heritage; History of Information; the National Archives; Andrew Whitby, The Sum of the People.

On the BBC Domesday Project

Peter Armstrong remarks at the Centre for Computer History 16 Nov 2019
Tony Quinn “Domesday Plus 900” Acorn User December 1984
Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce “Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs” Ariadne Issue 36, 30-July-2003
Andy Finney’s website
Robin McKie and Vanessa Thorpe “Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000” The Observer 3 March 2002

Mick Harker “Community stalwart dies” Sussex World 12 Feb 2008

The Centre for Computing History.

Daniel Earwicker Domesday Reloaded Reloaded

On the Windrush Scandal

Demetrios Matheou “Surviving the Windrush Scandal” Unison Magazine 6 June 2018
Amelia Gentleman “Man living in UK for 56 years loses job over immigration papers” The Guardian 9 April 2018
Amelia Gentleman “Home Office destroyed Windrush Landing cards, says ex-staffer” The Guardian 17 April 2018
Georgina Lee “FactCheck – who destroyed the Windrush Landing cards?” 24 April 2018
Amelia Gentleman The Windrush Betrayal 2019

Michael Braithwaite interview with ITV (embedded on the Daily Mail website).

Human Rights Watch – “UK Hostile Compensation Scheme Fails Windrush Victims” 17 April 2023

On archives
Zittrain, J., Albert, K., & Lessig, L. (2014). “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations.” Legal Information Management, 14(2), 88-99.
Richard Ovenden “We must fight to preserve digital information” The Economist
Richard Ovenden Burning The Books

Why we can’t quit email, even though we hate it

It’s the sheer variety of emails that bewilders. A forwarded review of a fried-chicken shop, suggesting it as a venue for a date. A heartfelt break-up letter, one that could have been written on paper in the 1960s. A note from Joe to his friend Brian suggesting a way to make a bit of cash, which turned out to be the founding document of Airbnb.

Printed large and displayed on the wall of the Design Museum in London, each of these emails is part of a temporary exhibition, “Email is dead”. The show was created in partnership with, and funded by, an email marketing company, so it is no place to come for a dispassionate evaluation of the medium’s strengths and weaknesses.

Still, those emails linger in the mind.

There’s an exchange between a young man announcing the relaunch of his business and his proud parents telling him how much they love and respect him. This frozen conversation would always have been meaningful, but its significance changed when he died the next day of a sudden heart attack.

Or the “Replyallpocalypse” at NYU, when student Max Wiseltier’s reply to a mail-out from university administration inadvertently went to 40,000 other students. That wasn’t the problem, nor was his second email, apologising 40,000 times. It was 40,000 students impishly realising that each of them had the power to reach their entire cohort with any nonsense they cared to dream up.

(I sympathise with Wiseltier, who became known as the Reply All Kid. I did much the same in one of my first jobs and firmly believe that the problem lies with the email system that allowed the booby-trapped email to be sent, not the hapless replier. The story has a happy ending, however. The Reply All Kid’s notoriety led him to meet the woman who is shortly to become Mrs Reply All.)

Then there’s the email Dan Angus received after appearing as an expert TV pundit on the national evening news in Australia. It was from a skin cancer specialist warning him that he appeared to have a dangerous melanoma: “I couldn’t help but notice the obvious irregularly pigmented lesion on your R. cheek . . . Upon searching images of you on Google I see that this lesion is new and/or growing in size.” Creepy, for sure. But Angus had already been fobbed off by his doctor, and that email from a complete stranger prompted him to insist on the second opinion that saved his life.

Email is, and I hardly need to tell you this, a special kind of torture. Most office workers are utterly dependent on it. We also hate it. And we also find it enormously useful. Not sort-of handy-in-a-certain-light like Instagram or X, but essential, like a search engine or your computer mouse.

Email is the cockroach of computing. BlackBerry instant messenger and Friends Reunited may come and go, but email cannot be killed. The variety of emails displayed on the wall of the exhibition make it clear why. Any new ping in your inbox could be your lover dumping you, a friend proposing an idea that will make you both rich or a stranger with a piece of information that could save your life. Even the everyday traffic will contain both time-wasting spam and a message from a senior colleague that you ignore at your peril. There may be semi-useful administrative information (don’t Reply All), sweet nothings from a spouse, disposable quips from friends, politely phrased requests from complete strangers, interesting newsletters and much more.

It’s all in there. No wonder we feel overwhelmed. No wonder we can’t do without it.

It is that vast range of importance in the emails pouring into our inboxes every day, from the trivial to the life-changing, that explains why the inbox can be so addictive. The psychologist BF Skinner once serendipitously discovered while running low on supplies of rat food that the rats in his laboratory were more motivated by unpredictable food rewards than by predictable ones: the uncertainty grabbed their attention in a way that a steady pay-off never could. Whenever we check our inboxes, we’re like Skinner’s rats. It has been at least 90 seconds since we last checked, after all. Will the email slot-machine offer us a jackpot or a disaster? Or just a chance to hit “refresh” and have another spin?

Despite every effort, I still check my own email too often, but even for those with better habits than I, that range of possibility poses a challenge. I have argued before that one of the underrated habits of any productive person is to clarify what needs to be done — if anything — with each new incoming thing. It rarely takes long to decide with a single email but, given that the scope of possible responses could be anything from “delete” to “find a good lawyer”, it is not surprising that we get bogged down and let the undecided emails accumulate.

So what to do? Some people long ago gave up hope, ignoring their emails and switching to something like the instant messaging service WhatsApp to do the same job. Since WhatsApp has most of the downsides of email and many additional annoyances, that solves little. Others, such as Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email, maintain multiple email addresses with multiple inboxes, designed to constrain that wild variety. Newport aims to partition his emails regarding his university position away from his personal email, emails from fans of his books and emails from his editors.

Apparently that works for him, but I have always baulked at the prospect of setting up another productivity system. I have long favoured the simplicity of a single inbox, for all its travails. One place to check, one place to clarify and decide, one place to clean out and leave empty. And one more spin as I wait for the jackpot.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 October 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Netflix and bill – the high price of a subscription lifestyle

One of the modern classics of economics is an article from 2006 with the self-explanatory title “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”, in which researchers Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied the behaviour of nearly 8,000 gym members and found it “difficult to reconcile with standard preferences and beliefs”.

By that, they meant that gym members seemed to be delusional, weak-willed or both. People on a monthly contract paid more per visit than those who simply showed up and paid at the door, suggesting they either had a very basic problem with arithmetic or, more likely, optimistic expectations about how often they would exercise. People on the rolling monthly contract also tended to let more than two months elapse between the last visit and the moment they got round to cancelling their membership.

For nerds like me, the article has an important message about the field of behavioural economics. We’ll get to that.

There’s also a broader question. The subscription business model has expanded from traditional products, such as newspapers and gym memberships to software, streaming media, vegetable boxes, shaving kits, makeup, clothes and support for creative types via Patreon or Substack. We should all be asking ourselves, if so many people are paying not to go to the gym, what else are we paying not to do?

A new working paper from economists Liran Einav, Benjamin Klopack and Neale Mahoney attempts an answer. Using data from a credit and debit card provider, they examine what happens to subscriptions for 10 popular services when the card that is paying for them is replaced. At this moment, the service provider suddenly stops getting paid and must contact the customer to ask for updated payment details. You can guess what happens next: for many people, this request reminds them of a subscription they had stopped thinking about and immediately prompts them to cancel it. Relative to a typical month, cancellation rates soar in months when a payment card is replaced — from 2 per cent to at least 8 per cent.

Einav and his colleagues use this data to estimate how easily many people let stale subscriptions continue. Relative to a benchmark in which infallible subscribers instantly cancel once they decide they are no longer getting enough value, the researchers predict that subscribers will take many extra months — on average 20 — to get around to cancelling.

Don’t take the precise numbers too seriously — as with most social science, this is not a rigorously controlled experiment but an attempt to tease meaning out of noisy real-world data. What you should take seriously is the likelihood that you are swimming in barely noticed subscriptions, some of which you would choose to cancel if you were forced to pay attention to them for a few minutes. Perhaps you should. Come to think of it, perhaps I should.

But I promised a geeky lesson about behavioural economics too. Loyal readers will have noted some recent scandals in behavioural science: experiments conducted separately by two well-known researchers, Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino, have been found (in the opinion of independent experts) to contain manipulated or fraudulent data. Both deny wrongdoing.

In the light of this dismaying situation, it would be understandable if people lost a bit of confidence in the field of behavioural economics. So it is worth reminding ourselves of what behavioural economics is trying to achieve. The field has long aimed to bring some psychological realism to economics, whose traditional textbook model has no room for people who take out a gym membership, fail to go to the gym and then neglect to cancel the gym subscription.

Its founding member is the co-author of Nudge, Nobel memorial prize winner Richard Thaler. Thaler’s project has always been not to argue that the textbook model is contradicted by laboratory experiments, but that it is contradicted by the way that important markets work in the real world.

It is certainly reasonable to ask how many experiments in social psychology may have been fraudulently manipulated. Less outrageous, but of more practical significance, is the possibility that many experiments in social psychology are poorly reported and analysed. As I’ve argued recently, we need to strengthen the foundations of scientific practice to prevent this. Economists can certainly learn from experiments, but contact with reality should be an important part of economics, which is — or should be — a practical subject.

Whether we are sticking closely to the old textbook model or embracing the latest ideas from behavioural science, our concepts should be taken more seriously when they explain what we see around us every day. If people really are lazy, short-sighted and inattentive, as behavioural economics suggests, then subscriptions are a hugely attractive business model. The subscriptification of everything suggests that businesses have noticed this.

There are some whimsical ideas in behavioural science, and some of them will not stand the test of time. But the central proposition of Nudge is not whimsical: it’s that the default position matters far more than you’d think, not in a laboratory experiment but in markets where billions or trillions are at stake. People delegate life-changingly huge decisions — for example, about contributions to their pensions — to the path of least resistance. If behavioural public policy means anything, it means shaping those default positions for the public good. It’s an idea to which I still subscribe.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 October 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

A great deal on electronic copies of The Truth Detective

My book for younger readers (to be honest, most adults also seem to prefer it) is The Truth Detective. Everything you need to think more clearly about statistics with the aid of everyone from Darth Vader to a pooping cow…

Anyway: for a limited time only it’s 99p on Kindle. Seems like a steal.

If you like the idea of the book but would rather purchase a physical copy, one place you can do that is Bookshop, a website which supports independent retailers.

In any case – enjoy the book and please tell your friends.

Cautionary Tales – Killers of the Flower Moon: Osage Chief Jim Gray In Conversation

Henry Roan has been shot through the back of his head. The local sheriff and town marshall have found his body slumped over the steering wheel of his car. There’s no gun at the scene: this is no suicide – it’s murder. And the man who ordered Henry Roan’s killing? He claims to be his best friend…

Former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation Jim Roan Gray joins Tim Harford to speak about the murder of his great-grandfather Henry Roan; the Osage Nation today; and his take on Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon.

This episode of Cautionary Tales was produced in association with Apple Original Films.

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Sometimes a random solution is best

Just over a decade ago, Egypt’s Coptic Christians chose their new pope. The names of three favoured candidates were placed in a glass bowl, then a blindfolded boy selected from the trio at random. Religious people can appeal to the idea that the outcome wasn’t truly random; God himself decided on Tawadros II. Yet it is a seemingly unsettling way to deal with a serious decision.

In secular settings, randomness is usually reserved for gambling and games. The words “postcode lottery” are not uttered in joyous celebration. With the notable exception of jury service, we do not usually draw lots to allocate duties, jobs or privileges.

Perhaps that is a mistake. Why not — bear with me here — allocate academic funding by lottery? Traditionally, a grant-maker would have a pot of money, invite applications, then rank them all and give grants to the best. But an alternative is to deploy a simple cut-off: every application that seems credible enough to take seriously goes into the pot and the grants are distributed at random.

Ten years ago, the Health Research Council of New Zealand began awarding funding along these lines. Several other grant-makers have followed suit, including the British Academy, which now awards about 500 grants each year using a lottery.

One benefit of this approach is efficiency. The British Academy grants are not large, £10,000 at most, and a thorough evaluation might cost nearly as much as the grant itself.

Another attraction is diversity. Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy, has been pleased to see more grants go to researchers from ethnic minorities and to researchers from institutions that previously hadn’t been funded. This is partly because such researchers have been more willing to apply under the randomised process.

While a quick, transparent and even-handed process is simpler, randomisation can offer us much more than that. Whenever there is an idea, policy, treatment or procedure of uncertain value, randomly giving it to some and not to others is the ideal way to figure out what its effects truly are.

Again and again, we have assumed that expert judgment is enough, only to find that the experts didn’t really know. That is the lesson of medical history, where doctors would confidently prescribe a course of treatment that turned out to be harmful. That was true in the time of bloodletting and is still true in the modern age.

For example, antiarrhythmic drugs were widely deployed in the 1970s and 1980s in the belief that they calmed errant heartbeats and therefore saved lives. That belief was only properly tested in 1987, when a large five-year randomised trial began. It was stopped halfway through when it became clear that, while the drugs did indeed stop the errant heartbeats, they had a tendency to stop the regular heartbeats too. According to Druin Burch’s Taking the Medicine, these drugs killed 50,000 people in the US alone. It took a proper randomised trial to put a stop to the well-meaning but fatal error.

The stakes are lower at the British Academy, and the variables that might be studied are less stark than the death rate. But the principle is the same: once you randomly allocate anything, you can compare the recipients with those who missed out and start to gauge the impact.

Philip Clarke, a professor of health economics at the University of Oxford, was part of a team evaluating the New Zealand grants and will also be assessing the new approach at the British Academy. He hopes to be able to figure out, for example, whether receiving a grant enables a researcher to stay in academia, to publish more, to be cited more by other researchers, to secure other grants or to win media coverage in their research.

Without randomisation, all of these impacts are nearly impossible to gauge. Did being selected for a grant help you to publish a widely cited article? Or was the grant itself irrelevant, and you received it because you were the kind of person who publishes good work anyway? With randomisation, the impact of the grants can be measured, at least in principle.

We shouldn’t stop there. Randomisation presents a golden opportunity to learn. And once you start looking for those opportunities, you see them everywhere. Not long ago, Ben Goldacre and his colleagues at the OpenPrescribing project analysed the prescription behaviour of clinics around the NHS, figuring out who was quick to follow the latest prescription guidelines and who was prescribing expensive or outdated treatments.

When Keith Ridge, then chief pharmacist of the NHS, saw the results, he asked for a list of the worst offenders, planning to upbraid each of them personally. Goldacre had another suggestion: conduct a randomised trial of Keith Ridge, by giving him a random assortment of the worst offenders to see whether those berated actually improved as a result.

I’ve written before about researchers who used random allocations to study the impact of substantial business development grants to Nigerian entrepreneurs, or small grants to tiny Sri Lankan businesses rebuilding after the terrible tsunami of 2004. Since there is a limited amount of cash, and many deserving recipients, and since everyone can see the fairness of drawing lots, why not turn scarce resources into insight?

Perhaps it is a stretch from the Coptic pope to Keith Ridge, but it should not be a stretch to use more lotteries — and to learn from them.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 29 September 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now available (not US or Canada yet – sorry).

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.