Tim Harford's Blog, page 21

Cautionary Tales – Oil and Blood: The Osage Murders

Minnie Smith had grown ill quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy and the doctors were baffled. “A peculiar wasting illness,” they called it. But then, her sister Anna went missing. Her rotting corpse was found a week later, a bullet hole through her skull. When a third sister, Rita, was blown up in her own bed, the grim pattern was undeniable.

Tom White, a law man, strode into town to investigate – and uncovered a vicious plot that chilled him to the bone…

This episode is based on David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon, and is produced in association with Apple Studios. The film of the same title is in movie theaters now.

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Ubiquitous yet hated – what does the triumph of PowerPoint teach us about Generative AI?

The aesthetic of our age was shaped in Paris in 1992, in the Hotel Regina. The occasion was carefully stage-managed by a team of technicians fussing over a huge colour projector that cost as much as a small house. The big unveiling came when Robert Gaskins, a Microsoft software engineer, walked up to the lectern, plugged his chunky laptop into a video cable and began showing PowerPoint slides in full colour, straight off his machine. The applause was, according to Gaskins, “deafening”.

There were visual aids before 1992, of course. At the high end, there were computer-co-ordinated slideshows in which dozens of projectors were choreographed to fit with music, script and each other, producing spectacular results at extraordinary expense. 

The mid-market was a monochrome or colour transparency placed on an overhead projector (OHP). In the heyday of the OHP, more than 2,000 were sold in the US every week. (For a detailed and delightful history of visual aids, I recommend Ian Parker’s “Absolute PowerPoint” in The New Yorker in 2001 and, more recently, Claire Evans’s “Next Slide Please” in MIT Technology Review.) 

Or there is the literally old-school approach: write on a blackboard, whiteboard or flip-chart.

Gone, all gone. These rival visual aids have been driven to near extinction by PowerPoint and Keynote, made by Apple.  This is odd, since few people love PowerPoint. Hotel Regina is a five-minute walk from the Louvre, but PowerPoint is a universe away from fine art. Gaskins and his colleague Dennis Austin, who passed away earlier this month, managed to create a product that was cheap, ubiquitous to the point of inescapability and widely reviled.

How did bad PowerPoint triumph? And what can we learn from that victory? One lesson is that when it comes to technology, we’re lazy. We reach for the nearest familiar tool without thinking about whether it’s the right one for the job, or even thinking clearly about what the job is. Are we trying to think through a problem? Get a discussion going? Show people that worth-a-thousand-words picture? We skip that vital contemplative step and load up a slide template instead.

Because everyone can use PowerPoint, everyone does. That is how highly paid managers, engineers and lawyers end up fussing about fonts and colour palettes.

PowerPoint is not to blame for this, any more than I should blame a Swiss Army Knife for poor results if I rely on it when putting up some shelves, rather than using a full set of tools. The fault is our tendency to grab whatever is within reach. 

One can see this by observing much the same tendency in our lazy, indiscriminate use of PowerPoint’s sibling, Excel. Type “SEPT1” or “MARCH1” into Excel and the software will automatically convert those inputs into dates. That is usually fine, but unfortunate if you were a genetics researcher referring not to dates, but to the genes with those names. The gene autocorrect problem was spotted nearly 20 years ago and appears to be getting worse. The proportion of genetics papers with autocorrect errors was estimated in 2020 to have reached 30 per cent. The Human Gene Name Consortium decided to rename the genes in question, wisely accepting that this would be easier than weaning researchers away from Excel. 

Compared to the way that generative AI will be similarly misused, such problems may come to seem small. We’ll ask Google’s Bard AI to sketch out an argument or Dall-E to draw us a picture, even if the results are often patchy. Why? Because at that difficult moment, when we’re staring at a blank page and wondering what to do, these tools offer escape. PowerPoint once included an “Autocontent” feature. That displays considerable insight: we humans will seize any technology that might liberate us from the tiresome need to think for ourselves.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman observes that when faced with a difficult question, we often subconsciously find an easier question that seems relevant, and answer that instead. This can be a useful approach, but the danger is that this process of substitution is so effortless that we may not even realise we have done it.

In the world of presentations, PowerPoint often plays a role in this subconscious switch. We are faced with a hard question: when standing up in front of an audience, what do I really want to communicate and how should I do that? It is vastly easier to ask, what are the first 50 bullet points that come to mind when I think about giving a talk? And then to pretend to ourselves that the two questions amount to the same thing.

The results are tedious, overstuffed talks in which the speaker’s notes are plastered on the wall behind them in advance. Better to print those bullet points on to 3x5in note cards, but that would defeat the subconscious goal of allowing the speaker to step as far away as possible from the centre of attention. Many presenters wish they could simply vanish. Using PowerPoint like this, they might as well. 

I don’t love PowerPoint, but as a technology there is nothing much wrong with it. It can do pretty much anything that you can do with a computer-choreographed barrage of slide projectors, and much more besides. And it can do it more flexibly, more reliably and much, much more cheaply. 

Yet that is the trap. A great talk starts with a message. Everything else — whether a joke, a story, a statistic or a picture — should be chosen to support the message. It’s always been easy to forget that. In a world of PowerPoint on tap, it can be impossible to remember it.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 22 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.

Cautionary Tales Double Header – A Monkey For Mayor / A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet

This week, we’ve twice the storytelling fun for you: two Cautionary Tales shorts, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers.

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A Monkey for Mayor: It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, but when the man who dressed as Hartlepool United’s monkey mascot stood in a mayoral election… he won. Actual politicians predicted disaster – since thousands of workers and millions of dollars were now in the hands of a complete novice.
But H’Angus the Monkey proved to be a more effective leader than anyone had predicted, raising interesting questions about how we select the best people to be our managers and mayors.

Shownotes

The main sources on the Hartlepool elections were contemporary reports from The Times, The Guardian and the BBC.

On random promotions, see In Praise of Random Promotions and Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo The Peter principle revisited: A computational study Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications,
Volume 389, Issue 3, 2010.

A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet: Can you tell the difference between an A211-7D bolt and an A211-8C? Well, nor could the tired and stressed engineer fitting a cockpit windshield to Flight 5390. The difference is tiny, but the consequences of muddling them up – which played out at 17,000 ft – were dramatic.
Such design flaws are common — and result in far more loose aircraft windows than you would ever imagine.

Shownotes

The ideal source on Maintenance Guy and his travails is Matt Parker’s wonderful book Humble Pi; the official accident report (pdf) is also worth reading.

The terrifying aftermath was described in contemporary reports from the Sunday Mercury, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The New York Times and the Financial Times.

The art of making good misstakes

Do good teams make fewer mistakes? It seems a reasonable hypothesis. But in the early 1990s, when a young researcher looked at evidence from medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals, the numbers told her a completely different story: the teams who displayed the best teamwork were the ones making the most mistakes. What on earth was going on?

The researcher’s name was Amy Edmondson and, 30 years after that original puzzle, her new book Right Kind of Wrong unpicks a morass of confusion, contradiction and glib happy talk about the joys of failure.

She solved the puzzle soon enough. The best teams didn’t make more errors; they admitted more to making errors. Dysfunctional teams admitted to very few, for the simple reason that nobody on those teams felt safe owning up.

The timeworn euphemism for a screw-up is a “learning experience”, but Edmondson’s story points to a broad truth about that cliché: neither organisations nor people can learn from their mistakes if they deny that the mistakes ever happened.

Such denial is common enough, particularly at an organisational level, and for the obvious backside-covering reasons. But it can be easy to overlook the implications. For example, Edmondson recalls a meeting with executives from a financial services company in April 2020. With hospitals across the world overwhelmed by Covid-sufferers in acute respiratory distress, and many economies in lockdown, they told Edmondson that their attitude to failure had changed. Normally, they explained, they were enthusiastic about sensible risk-taking and felt it was OK to fail if you learnt from that failure. Not during a pandemic, however. They had decided that failure was temporarily “off-limits”.

What nonsense. The moment that Covid turned the world upside-down was exactly the time to take calculated risks and learn quickly, not to mention a time when failures would be inevitable. Demanding perfection against such a backdrop guaranteed ponderousness and denial.

It can be wise to aim for perfection, explains Edmondson, but not without laying the groundwork for people to feel safe in admitting mistakes or in reporting mistakes from others. For example, when Paul O’Neill became the boss of the US aluminium company Alcoa in 1987, he set the apparently unachievable target of zero workplace injuries. That target lifted the financial performance of Alcoa because it helped to instil a highly profitable focus on detail and quality.

The case is celebrated in business books. But it would surely have backfired had O’Neill not written to every worker, giving them his personal phone number and asking them to call him if there were any safety violations.

Another famous example is Toyota’s Andon Cord: any production line worker can tug the cord above their workstation if they see signs of a problem. (Contrary to myth, the cord does not immediately halt the production line, but it does trigger an urgent huddle to discuss the problem. The line stops if the issue isn’t resolved within a minute or so.) The Andon Cord is a physical representation of Toyota’s commitment to listen to production-line workers. We want to hear from you, it says.

Creating this sense of psychological safety around reporting mistakes is essential, but it is not the only ingredient of an intelligent response to failure. Another is the data to discern the difference between help and harm. In the history of medicine, such data has usually been missing. Many people recover from their ailments even with inept care, while others die despite receiving the best treatment. And since every case is different, the only sure way to decide whether a treatment is effective is to run a large and suitably controlled experiment.

This idea is so simple that a prehistoric civilisation could have used it, but it didn’t take off until after the second world war. As Druin Burch explains in Taking the Medicine, scholars and doctors groped around for centuries without ever quite seizing upon it. A thousand years ago, Chinese scholars ran a controlled trial of ginseng, with two runners each running a mile: “The one without the ginseng developed severe shortness of breath, while the one who took the ginseng breathed evenly and smoothly.” With 200 runners they might have learnt something; comparing a pair, the experiment was useless.

The Baghdad-based scholar Abu Bakr al-Razi tried a clinical trial even earlier, in the 10th century, but succeeded only in convincing himself that bloodletting cured meningitis. One plausible explanation for his error is that he didn’t randomly assign patients to the treatment and control group but chose those he felt most likely to benefit.

In the end, the idea of a properly randomised controlled trial was formalised as late as 1923, and the first such clinical trials did not occur until the 1940s. As a result, doctors made mistake after mistake for centuries, without having the analytical tool available to learn from those errors.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the classical physician Galen pronounced that he had a treatment which cured everyone “in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die . . . it fails only in incurable cases”. Laughable. But how many decisions in business or politics today are justified on much the same basis?

A culture in which we learn from failure requires both an atmosphere in which people can speak out, and an analytical framework that can discern the difference between what works and what doesn’t. Similar principles apply to individuals. We need to keep an open mind to the possibilities of our own errors, actively seek out feedback for improvement, and measure progress and performance where feasible. We must be unafraid to admit mistakes and to commit to improve in the future.

That is simple advice to prescribe. It’s not so easy to swallow.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 15 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.

Confessions of a work-from-homer

I wouldn’t claim to be a workaholic — the word is ugly and glib. But as I enter my sixth decade, I am finally starting to own up to some bad work habits. Unlike my father, who would head to the office in the morning, come home in the evening and almost never work outside those hours, I might work anywhere and at any time. I draw the line at the bedroom. I never work in the bedroom. But other than that, I tend to let work seep into everything.

I realise this is nothing to be proud of. It’s also nothing unusual. Technology has been a great enabler of poor work hygiene. My father, who installed and programmed mainframe computers, would have struggled to do much useful work from the dining-room table. But for many knowledge workers today, that option is always available. The lines between work and play become so blurred that not only is work less productive, but leisure is less fun.

Of course, it is useful to be able to work from anywhere, to answer work emails while queueing at the supermarket, to tick off a couple of tasks while on the train, or to write reports and attend meetings during a pandemic lockdown. But convenience always breeds temptation. Soon enough, we are not only working during dead time, but while we should be relaxing, paying attention to our loved ones or having fun.

Workers win as well as lose from this. Your employer may be tempting you to answer emails while cooking for your family or demanding that you perform midnight research for your boss instead of joining your partner between the sheets. But what goes around comes around. In retaliation, you can goof off at your desk by playing a video game, gazing blankly at TikTok, or shopping online.

Or you can go and play golf. Several of my colleagues have noticed the most delightful yet infuriating academic finding of the year: researchers at Stanford University discovering that “working from home has powered a huge boom in golfing”. That boom is most visible midweek and mid-afternoon. For example, golfing on Wednesdays rose nearly 150 per cent between 2022 and 2019, while golfing at 4pm on Wednesday afternoons is up more than 275 per cent. This surge is less about the growing popularity of golf than about a change in golfing habits: golfing on Saturdays was slightly less popular in 2022 than it was in 2019.

“The most likely explanation,” write researchers Alex Finan and Nick Bloom, “is that employees are golfing as breaks while working from home.” Well, indeed.

This discovery brings a bitter joy. Golf reeks of privilege and, since the ability to work from home is also a privilege, this story is a double-decker privilege sandwich. On the other hand, there’s something delicious about the thought of any worker finding a way to play truant. Many of us struggle to stake out enough leisure time in our lives. Playing, relaxing, enjoying ourselves . . . these are things that no longer seem to come naturally.

It is good to see the golfers standing up for their right to have fun. It was during the first lockdown that I realised just how bad my own work habits had become and how frequently, pre-pandemic, I had been saved from drifting towards the desk by my countervailing habit of making firm plans to do other things, such as to go out for dinner or see a concert. All too often during lockdown, I would take a break for dinner and then head straight back to work. True, I was trying to convince myself during a difficult time that my number-crunching was somehow important. But, mostly, the work crept in when I hadn’t taken the time to think of something better to do.

As the world started opening up again, I was determined to remember the lesson. I have been trying to fill my leisure time with sufficiently compelling activities that the question of working simply doesn’t arise. It’s hard, not to mention rude, to check your phone while walking or having dinner with friends. Intense sport is perfect, as is going to a place where only a fool would check their phone, whether a swimming pool or a symphony hall.

As Benjamin Hoff presciently wrote in The Tao of Pooh (1982): “It’s really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have lots of time.”

What has changed since the pandemic is the awkward question of what office hours should be. Before, if you had a job, then you’d swim in the morning, evening or at the weekend. Now you might fancy a dip on Thursday afternoon. Who gets to decide whether you can? Who will even know?

In a world where so many people catch up with emails at 6am or midnight or both, it’s not clear to me that the worker who does yoga or golf in the middle of a working day is doing anything unreasonable. (This is not legal advice!)

What disheartens me about the golfers is that some of them are letting the side down. Surely one of the benefits of a good game — of golf or anything else — is to get away from workplace tasks for a while. But the golf course has long been a venue for business discussions, and it seems that has not changed: Finan and Bloom quote one tech executive whose colleague “was taking his Zoom call from the golf course. He was on mute and video off, but once when he was talking I heard somebody talking about the fairway and strokes.”

Attending a Zoom meeting from the golf course risks ruining both the meeting and the game of golf: proof that a righteous God exists, but definitely not an example for the rest of us to follow. At a time when all too many knowledge workers have forgotten the difference between work and play, we need to draw deliberate boundaries between the two.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 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.

Behind the fraud drama rocking academia

If the crowdfunding effort is anything to go by, there is huge sympathy for the data detectives Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons and Uri Simonsohn. The three men — professors of marketing, applied statistics and behavioural science, respectively — have carved out a reputation as defenders of sound scientific research methods. Now they face a lawsuit in the US claiming $25mn for defamation, and the campaign to fund their defence raised over $180,000 in the first 24 hours. The list of donors reads like a Who’s Who of behavioural science, including a $4,900 donation from Nobel laureate Richard Thaler.

In June, Nelson, Simmons and Simonsohn published four posts on their blog, Data Colada, in their own words “detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino”. The blog digs deep into the version history of researchers’ Excel spreadsheets, looking for what its authors say is evidence of data being manually altered at unexpected points. Gino, who is on administrative leave, has sued Harvard and the trio, claiming that their actions have damaged her reputation.

Professor Gino, a behavioural scientist, is entitled to defend her good name, although the flood of donations to the Data Colada defence fund reflects a widespread feeling that the blog is performing an important service. “The field benefits from Data Colada,” wrote one donor. Another declared, “Correcting the scientific literature deserves gratitude, not punishment.”

There is a broader lesson to be drawn about the scientific process. Scientific institutions favour research that delivers quantity over quality, novelty over robustness and the production of original claims rather than the scrutiny of familiar ones. The result, say researchers Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath, has been “the natural selection of bad science”, a place where good work suffers and bad work thrives.

For example, it is often easier to “discover” something publishable if your research methods are substandard. That might mean an outrageous fraud; more often that might take the form of a minor-seeming infraction such as testing lots of different hypotheses and only reporting the most interesting results. This makes nonsense out of the statistical methods we use to sift out flukes.

We are rightly more outraged by fraudsters than by researchers who cut corners, but if the aim is to advance knowledge, motive doesn’t matter. “Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud,” says the statistician Andrew Gelman.

In an ideal world, data sets would be properly documented and shared for anyone to analyse. Statistical queries would be logged so that scientists could see exactly what other analytical steps other scientists had taken. Experiments would be pre-registered, so that they didn’t disappear into file drawers when the results were disappointing. All this would make science more rigorous and collaborative, with less emphasis on eye-catching and more emphasis on building something that endures.

Dame Ottoline Leyser, the head of UK Research and Innovation, has pointed out that if everyone breaks new ground and nobody builds, all you have is lots of holes in the ground. The problem, says Stuart Ritchie, the author of Science Fictions, is that “all these things are just a hassle”. Not only is it tedious to jump through a lot of methodological hoops rather than running fun new experiments, it is also bad for one’s career. If high standards are voluntary, the fast-and-loose researchers will be able to pump out catchy findings while the rigorous scientists will keep torpedoing their own results.

Meanwhile, even for those not being sued for $25mn, the rewards for carefully scrutinising existing research are scant. Journals are keener to publish new findings than to publish “replications”, studies that check whether older experimental results actually stand up. As for the work performed by the Data Colada bloggers, there seems to be no place for this in the formal structures of the scientific establishment.

Another data sleuth, Elisabeth Bik, who spots manipulated images in scientific papers, won the John Maddox Prize from the charity Sense About Science for her work. But she has no professorial chair. She is funded by consultancy gigs and supporters on Patreon. If we fund such detective work by having an occasional whip-round, no wonder there is so much bad research and so little scrutiny.

The saying goes that science is self-correcting. That cliché obscures two uncomfortable facts. The first is that the truth emerges not through some automatic process, but because somebody did the hard work and took the reputational risk to find the errors. We shouldn’t assume that will just happen. We should find space and funding for it in our scientific institutions.

The second fact is that there is no need for correction if the science is right the first time. That means strengthening the basic standards of science — for example, by supporting replication efforts, by requiring the pre-registration of scientific experiments, and by building tools to support the sharing and tracking of data and methods.

There are glimmers of hope that scientists, scientific journals and grant-making bodies are all taking more interest in such work. The potential reward here is enormous. With the right digital tools, publication rules and scientific norms we can make rigorous research easier to do, easier to share and easier to check — while making life difficult both for the large number of too-casual researchers and for the small number of cheats.

Prevention is better than cure. It is never too late to spot mistakes and to correct the scientific record. But science will gain more — and for vastly less heartache — if journals, universities and funding bodies support better, more robust research practices right at the start.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 1 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.

Cautionary Tales – The Tragedy of Sydney Opera House

1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he’s just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a triumph. But the young architect couldn’t have imagined what a bitter victory this would turn out to be.

The Guggenheim in Bilbao; the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; the Shard in London. These days, everyone seems to want an iconic building. But Sydney Opera House was the first, the greatest – and the most painful. This is its origin story.

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Further reading

Two excellent histories of the Sydney Opera House are The House by Helen Pitt, which vividly covers the story from every angle, and The Saga of Sydney Opera House, by Peter Murray, which is particularly authoritative on the technical details and the relationship between Utzon and Arup.

Other sources include Murray Sayle “In The Tart Shop” in The London Review of Books, 5 October 2000 and Geraldine Brooks “Unfinished Business” The New Yorker 17 October 2005 .

John Pardey describes his meeting with Utzon in “Letters: Utzon’s Legacy” Arq Vol 13 2009

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner cover both the Opera House and the Guggenheim Bilbao in their book How Big Things Get Done.

Also see Flyvbjerg’s “Design by Deception: The Politics of Megaproject Approval” (June 2005). Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer, no. 22, pp. 50-59

The UK is doing a shoddy job keeping up with its neighbours

Upcoming Event – If you’re within hailing distance of London, please do come along to see me talk about “How To Be A Truth Detective” at the Royal Institution. The event is at 2pm on Saturday 23 September and is perfect for a familiy audience.

==

This column was published on 18 August, before the UK’s Officie for National Statistics published revisisions showing that the recovery from Covid had been sharper than previously believed. It’s interesting to read in the light of those revisions: at least one of the “slow accumulation of disappointments” no longer looks disappointing at all.

Many good foreign holidays raise the question, “why don’t we do it like this at home?” But this year I started to obsess about that idea. We’d gone to Germany — the Alps and the Black Forest — and everywhere I looked, I felt a twinge of envy. In the Alps, the village of Farchant (population 3,601) boasted a 50-metre swimming pool, a diving pool, a children’s pool and an assortment of slides. I wrote last week about the joys of Freiburg’s well-appointed trams, walkable cobbled streets and lively retail scene. Then there are the rollercoasters.

My son is going through a rollercoaster phase, which meant I visited England’s Alton Towers and Germany’s Europa-Park in quick succession. The comparison made Alton Towers seem cramped and tatty, with extensive queues even on a damp Monday. Alton Towers will sell you, at a painful price, the ability to skip those queues. The concept of monetising queue-jumping appears not to have occurred to the Germans, where the car parks were convenient and the lines were shorter and more entertainingly staged. The Rulantica water park next door was far more pleasant than any British alternative I’ve seen. It’s spectacular, clean and fun.

The general impression I drew from my holiday in Germany? This is what prosperity looks like — and the UK doesn’t have it.

It is perilous to draw conclusions from a brief visit to tourist hotspots. I might have formed a different impression from a wet October in Eisenhüttenstadt. And so I turned to the economic data for a sense of where the UK really stands.

I began by looking at the World Bank’s data for gross domestic product per capita, measured in “international 2017 dollars” — an imperfect but necessary attempt to adjust for the changing cost of living between countries and over time. In 2007, just before the financial crisis, the UK’s per capita output (in 2017 dollars) was a little over $44,000. Above us, Germany was just over $47,000, behind Denmark at over $53,500. The US was at nearly $56,000. France was a whisker behind the UK, Slovenia lower at under $35,000 and Poland was at less than half the British level.

By 2022, US GDP per capita had grown by more than 15 per cent and Denmark’s by 11 per cent. Germany’s had grown 14 per cent and Slovenia was 21 per cent richer than in 2007. Poland had done even better with more than 70 per cent growth.

But the UK? Like France, the UK had barely moved at under $47,000. German living standards, which two decades ago were a schnitzel’s-width away, now seem a stretch. Maybe that gap will narrow again, as Germany is squeezed by high energy prices and competition from China. Still, it is no comfort if Germany stumbles.

Meanwhile Slovenia’s GDP per capita is on course to overtake the UK’s within a few years, followed not long after by Poland. The UK’s limp economic performance reflects a slow accumulation of disappointments. A finance-heavy economy suffered a steep recession in 2008 (blame Gordon Brown); a slow recovery (blame David Cameron); more economic damage from Covid-19 (blame Boris Johnson); and the economic trauma of Liz Truss (blame Liz Truss). As a backdrop to all this, the economic costs of Brexit are steadily accumulating (Theresa May can take her share of the blame here).

GDP per capita is not a satisfactory measure of human flourishing, but these dry figures reflect something quite real. Krishan Shah and Gregory Thwaites of the Resolution Foundation write that “the US, France and Germany are all around one-sixth more productive than the UK. But these uniform gaps in productivity translate to widely different gaps in median household incomes.” France is no richer than the UK because the French use their productivity to work fewer hours and retire early; Americans are much richer but must endure longer hours and enjoy fewer services from the government.

Societies make choices, but the options are better in a more productive country, in which citizens can enjoy longer retirements, longer holidays, more consumption and even more rollercoasters. A nation can also, with the right priorities and rules, enjoy the benefits of economic growth while emitting less carbon dioxide.

The free market commentator Sam Bowman argues that the UK needs to recognise who its peers really are: “the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the US in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do”. He means the British are no longer at the technological frontier; rather than developing world-leading industries in order to grow, we just need to get the basics right: cheaper energy, cheaper houses and more investment. Like any emerging economy, we should aspire simply to catch up.

That is an exaggeration. In artificial intelligence, biomedicine and the creative arts, the UK still has some companies and sectors at or near the global cutting edge; we can still aim for economic leadership. But overrating the UK’s economic power has become an excuse for self-inflicted injuries, such as leaving the EU’s single market. The UK has made several other basic policy mistakes over the past 15 years, from cutting spending and raising taxes in the wake of a deep recession, to insidious errors such as under-investment in everything from hospital equipment to sewers, putting up endless obstacles to building new homes and chronically unpredictable policy. Getting the basics right seems worth a try.

Let’s not give up on the dream that the UK could be the next Denmark. But let’s not deny the possibility that if we can’t adopt some better policies, we’ll find ourselves gazing instead at Poland.

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

The UK is going about reclaiming city streets the wrong way

Freiburg, in south-west Germany, is about the same size as my home city of Oxford. It has a few beautiful old buildings — the Münster is breathtaking — but little to compare with Oxford’s dreaming spires, particularly after the centre of Freiburg was heavily bombed in 1944. So which is the more pleasant, walkable city? The English one filled with glorious architecture built centuries ago? Or the German one that was rebuilt as the motor car was rising to dominance?

The answer, surprisingly, is Freiburg, whose cobblestone streets are adorned with water features and bustle with pedestrians, cycles and trams.

Oxford, by contrast, has become a focal point for some unsettling protests against so-called “low-traffic neighbourhoods”, where campaigners with legitimate concerns about local retail or access for people with reduced mobility have been forced to rub shoulders with conspiracy theorists invoking the Holocaust. I was curious how Freiburg got to be Freiburg.

In Urban Transport Without The Hot Air, the academic and activist Steve Melia examines the city closely. Its transformation began in the early 1970s, the seeds sown by a seemingly unrelated argument: when the federal government proposed a nearby nuclear power station, an unlikely coalition of church leaders, students and conservative farmers decided that they were all environmentalists.

Freiburg’s historic city centre, the Altstadt, was pedestrianised in 1973, a radical idea at the time. Local businesses were initially against the idea, but were appeased by the construction of car parks just outside the Altstadt. (They needn’t have worried; shops and cafés are buzzing.) The city expanded the tram lines, introduced an affordable season ticket branded “the environmental card” and arranged buses to feed the tram network rather than compete with it. An extensive network of cycle lanes and bridges were constructed.

Freiburg’s traffic was also restrained: most streets have a speed limit of 30kph (18mph), and parking is controlled by residential permits and meters.

The result of all this has been a walkable city centre that fizzes with commerce, surrounded by residential areas where children safely play in the streets. Both cycling and public transport increased by about 50 per cent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, yet driving is perfectly possible and remains a popular way to get around.

Could we do the same in the UK? And should we? Walkable urban spaces are a good thing, and a few cars in the wrong place are quite capable of ruining those spaces. But I worry that we’re going about things the wrong way in our attempts to reclaim city streets for cyclists and shoppers and children at play.

First, we’re impatient. These things take time. In the 1960s, Freiburg’s beautiful Münsterplatz was a car park. When I visited this summer, the square was lined with pavement cafés and hosting a well-attended open-air concert. But this transformation did not happen overnight. It required the sustained accumulation, over decades, of one cycle lane or tramway at a time.

Our response as citizens is also gradual. Two academics, Rachel Aldred and Anna Goodman, recently examined the consequences of outer London’s low-traffic-neighbourhood investments. They found that car ownership took several years to fall steadily by 20 per cent. It takes time to change our habits and time to see the benefits.

Second, we struggle to find the right language to describe new transport investments. As Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland point out in Transport for Humans, clever ideas from transport planners often work, but “they don’t make sense to most people”.

The common-sense objection to low-traffic neighbourhoods is that they reduce mobility without reducing traffic, merely pushing cars unfairly from some streets to others. Aldred, Goodman and Melia have all found evidence that in the long run, traffic is reduced rather than displaced. But politicians have never been very good at waiting for the long run.

Third, we lack empathy for people in different life stages. There is no reason that a pensioner with an arthritic hip or a plumber with a van full of tools should feel much joy at the prospect of hopping on a bike. Any change to the status quo creates winners and losers, and the losers should not be ignored.

As Dyson and Sutherland explain, people care a great deal about what is fair. For example, in London, men are more than twice as likely as women to commute by cycle. What might that suggest about who will gain from more cycle lanes? I’m not sure, but the question needs addressing.

Recent episodes of the podcast 99% Invisible have described the Dutch and the Japanese experiences with walkable, cyclable cities. The Dutch have the advantage of topography while the Japanese have historically dense cities where narrow streets automatically slow down cars. But both countries have also made deliberate choices in response to what they felt were unacceptable rates of death and injury to children.

In Japan, cars are typically banned near elementary schools when children are arriving. You can’t bring your child to school in a car because that would unfairly endanger the other children. And since the streets are safe, why would you want to?

The Netherlands, meanwhile, was not always a utopia for cyclists: 50 years ago, pro- and anti-car factions literally fought in the streets.

Changes to our city streets will never please everyone. But with patience, empathy and an eye on fairness, we can certainly try. A visit to Freiburg might persuade you of that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 August 2023.

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Cautionary Tales – The City that Sold Itself to Wall Street

Cautionary Book Club:When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago’s parking metres for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced they had struck gold and hastily signed the deal. They soon learnt, however, that they hadn’t just traded away parking revenue. They had traded away the streets themselves…

In the first ever hybrid episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford tells the story of the Chicago parking metres fiasco of 2008. In the second half of the episode, Tim is joined by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise, to talk about the lessons to glean from Chicago’s deal with Wall Street, and why parking is such an emotive issue for so many.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

This episode is based, with permission, on Henry Grabar’s book Paved Paradise.

Supplementary sources include John Kass’s Chicago Tribune column of May 22, 2008, Carol Marin “Drivers’ anger over meters boiling over into a boycott” in the Chicago Sun-Times 25 March 2009, Jon Hilkevitch “Parking meter fixes rushed” in the Chicago Tribune 26 March 2009, and Jordan Stutts “You’re just milking the system” Infrastructure Investor 11 Sep 2018.