Tim Harford's Blog, page 22

The inconvenient truth about productivity

I didn’t ask to become a personal productivity guru, but somehow my colleagues keep volunteering me for the role — most recently for Isabel Berwick’s Working It podcast, in the recording of which I blushed and generally felt like an imposter.

This is partly because the practice of managing your own time well is fiendishly complicated. There are so many things one could be doing at any particular moment, and so many variables — where you are, how much energy you have, whether you’re being interrupted — that the whole exercise can feel like a game of five-dimensional chess that frequently leaves even the most skilled and seasoned players bewildered by an unexpected move.

There are plenty of good tactics that seem so obvious I feel embarrassed mentioning them: write tasks down, stop looking at TikTok, make time for what’s most important. All very true, and yet far from the whole story.

So, I wondered, what are the secret principles, the deeper truths, the underrated ideas that might help us all get more done, with less anxiety, in less time? I suggest three ideas. None of them is heretical but each seems under-appreciated.

First, look ahead. Look ahead further, and more frequently and more thoughtfully, than seems sane. Start by looking at tomorrow’s calendar at the end of each day before you draw up a list of things to do. On Friday afternoon, look at next week’s calendar — and the week after that. Where are the pinch points? Is there anything you need to do to prepare for the meeting, the party or your wedding anniversary?

David Allen, author of the crunchy-yet-brilliant Getting Things Done, advises that you keep looking further and further ahead until tasks no longer pop into your head as you do. You may be surprised at how much occurs to you during the diary-driven attempt at foresight. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, advocates making a quarterly plan containing the broad outlines of what you hope to achieve in the next three months and reminding yourself of it each week.

Allen also advises a full “weekly review” not only of the diary ahead but the diary behind, along with tasks, projects and sundry scribbles on Post-it notes. This weekly review is arguably the cornerstone of his entire system. It’s also the step that people are most tempted to skip.

Looking ahead matters for all the obvious reasons, but there is a hidden benefit, too. You feel calmer when you know — rather than just hope — that you are aware of what predictably lies ahead. And if you get into the habit of checking your calendar and your lists of tasks, you are more likely to trust them. This allows you to write things down and then relax, knowing you’ll be reminded of them at the appropriate moment.

Second, clarify. Far too many things linger in the inbox or on the desk because we fail to take the moment required to think about what they are. Does this need to be archived for reference? (Usually not.) Does it need to be simply deleted? (Very often, yes.) Is a simple, one-shot action required? (If yes, maybe do that immediately.) Or is there something more complicated implied? (If so, take a minute to think about what steps might be involved and write them down.) It is astonishing how much work, clutter or vague anxiety can accumulate simply because we hesitate to take this quick step of clarifying our thoughts.

Does this really matter? Yes it does. I was staggered to discover that not only does my esteemed colleague Pilita Clark have more than 100,000 unread emails, her friends and colleagues have 300,000 or 400,000. How does this happen, I asked myself? Then I realised the answer. If you keep looking at incoming emails and thinking, “Hm, I’m not sure what to make of that,” you’ll eventually get to 400,000. It is simply the accumulated result of 400,000 individual failures to make a decision. As Clark demonstrates, it’s perfectly possible to thrive with such an inbox but, personally, I’d rather not.

Third, be content. There is an endless temptation to believe that at some stage you’ll get on top of all the tasks, that you’ll clear the decks, and then at that point you’ll either be able to get on with the real work or rest. These goals are mirages. You’ll never clear the decks; there will always be more to scrub and tidy. Let’s not volunteer for the role of Sisyphus: “Yes, I will book a holiday and begin writing a novel, but first let me just roll that boulder up the hill one more time.” Each of us is just going to have to do what we can in the time allotted to us (whether that’s an eight-hour working day or an 80-year life) and realise that perhaps we couldn’t reasonably have done any more.

David Allen has pointed out that if, by some miracle, you were able to tick off everything on your to-do list tonight, by tomorrow afternoon you’d be fizzing with energy and ideas. The to-do list is not finished until you are. Learn to live in peace with that fact.

Or, for a more philosophical take on much the same idea, Oliver Burkeman builds on a line from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.” In that case, says Burkeman, in his delightfully wise book Four Thousand Weeks, stop yearning for the moment when you’ll grasp a handhold on the bank, climb out of the river, and relax as you watch it flow by. You are the river. Don’t waste the journey dreaming of the riverbank.

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

Cautionary Tales – General Ludd’s Rage Against the Machines

1812. A band of “Luddites” is laying siege to a textile mill in the North of England, under cover of night. They plan to destroy the machines that are replacing their jobs. But mill owner William Cartwright is prepared: he’s fortified his factory with skilled marksmen, fearsome eighteen-inch metal spikes and barrels of sulphuric acid.

Today “Luddite” is a term of mockery — a description for someone who’s scared of technology. But in 1812, Luddism was no laughing matter for the likes of Cartwright. He plans to teach the intruders a lesson…

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

The details in our account of the attack on Cartwright’s mill largely trace back to The Risings of the Luddites, an 1880 book by historian Frank Peel based on a combination of reminiscences and oral histories handed down locally with contemporary written accounts.

Many historians have written about the Luddite movement and how it should be interpreted. We found E. P. Thompson’s account in his 1963 classic The Making of the English Working Class, and Malcolm I Thomis’s 1970 book The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England, to be especially useful.

For more on the parallels to our current moment, see two books published in 2023: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, and Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.

Cautionary Conversations – Andy Warhol’s Factory of Truth

Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. What happens next is a landmark moment in the history of art and authenticity…

Tim Harford is joined by Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity, to discuss truth and fakery in modern times. Today, authenticity seems to matter more than ever — and yet we’re also constantly assailed by people and products that are not what they seem. What’s going on here? And what’s the attention economy got to do with it?

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

What I’d put in my museum of the economy

Above the Viking swords and skeletons, across from the enchanting display of vintage dollhouses, Denmark’s National Museum contains a human-scale hamster wheel. Visitors may climb inside, grab the controls and slowly, arduously, start to walk and jog. A digital screen turns the treadmill into a pizza-delivery game, offering the chance to collect some virtual cash along the way.

As a representation of the grinding repetitiveness of a gig economy job, the subtext is obvious. Unless you’re aged 11, that is. My son loved it.

The hamster wheel is a centrepiece of an exhibition all about money and the economy: KA-CHING — Show Me the Money! Along with coins and banknotes, it has interactive quizzes, images of Damien Hirst’s “For The Love Of God” (that diamond-and-platinum skull) and a video of musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, aka The KLF, burning a million quid on a Hebridean island in 1994. (Alas, I noticed no discussion of the true value of what Cauty and Drummond were destroying; curious readers may pick up a copy of my book The Undercover Economist Strikes Back if they are desperate to know.)

All in all, KA-CHING! is probably the best contender I’ve seen for a Museum of the Economy. Then again, there isn’t much competition. I’ve long fantasised about setting up such an institution, but it seems that few curators agree. While museums of science, technology and natural history adorn great cities all over the world, museums of the economy are rare.

Part of the problem is that economics tends to study large, diffuse phenomena through an abstract lens. Museums flourish when there’s something exciting to look at, whether it’s a Spitfire or the skeleton of a T-Rex. Good luck putting “recession” or “investment mania” into a glass display case. And so many economy-adjacent museums shy away from the central subject matter.

The Bank of England Museum, for example, is pleasant enough — spacious, elegant, free to enter — but its subject is really the Bank of England itself. There are exhibitions about the building’s architecture, the heroes and slave-trading villains who paced its corridors and, of course, coins and banknotes and a great big gold bar inside a Perspex box — you can reach in through a hole and try to pick it up. (Copenhagen’s KA-CHING! exhibit offers almost exactly the same Perspex-cased gold-bar-hefting experience.)

A new book, Making Economics Public, includes a chapter describing the Economy Museum of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. The Economy Museum tries to discuss and demonstrate economic ideas beyond money. There’s an exhibit about choice and opportunity cost, an eight-player simulation of a trading pit, a game of barter. It sounds fun, even if the museum does also contain one of those accursed lift-the-gold-bar exhibits.

Could we do better? Perhaps. When I created my books and radio series Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, my aim was to show the hidden economic forces around us by refracting them through everyday inventions. Not all of them compare favourably with a T-Rex, alas. I’m not sure how one would put “the welfare state” in a museum. Perhaps a waxwork of William Beveridge would do?

Nor does the index fund lend itself to an exhibit, even if the idea was once praised by the great economist Paul Samuelson as an invention to stand alongside “the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing, and wine and cheese”.

But other objects are more promising. The V&A wisely acquired Thomas Thwaites’s “Toaster Project” — a physical record of his doomed attempts to build himself a working toaster, starting with the search for raw materials. It brilliantly illustrates, by counterexample, the decentralised genius required to build a mass-market product; perhaps my nascent Museum of the Economy could arrange a loan from the V&A.

If so, I’d also beg the Science Museum for their Moniac, an amazing hydraulic computer designed to simulate the British economy. I’d pair it with a brief description of the life of its inventor, Bill Phillips, who had more adventures than Indiana Jones.

Perhaps someone could be persuaded to supply a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia; thanks to the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, we now believe those tablets to exemplify the simultaneous development of contracts, accounts, mathematics and writing itself, all in service of an increasingly complex urban economy.

Scarcely cheaper would be a printer ink cartridge, the perfect introduction to ideas such as two-part pricing and switching costs.

A tulip could serve as a springboard for a discussion of financial manias, but a steam locomotive from York’s National Railway Museum might be more historically accurate. It is also one of the few exhibits that might beat even a T-Rex for the ability to inspire sheer awe.

To illustrate the evils of capitalism, perhaps a Bonsack machine — an invention to efficiently produce the deadliest product in human history, the cigarette. And on the more cheerful side, Norman Borlaug’s starvation-fighting dwarf wheat, and an interactive display showing how long a person has to work to afford an hour’s worth of good light, from the oil lamp (days) to the LED (seconds).

There’s more we could do, I am sure. So if you happen to have an empty exhibition space, friends in South Kensington and a million quid to burn, we should talk.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 14 July 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 – Poles Apart: How A Journalist Divided A City

Heroic explorer Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying.

When Gibbs publishes that belief, he stands alone. Cook has a gripping manner and an excellent reputation: his winning tale must be true. Diners boo Gibbs at a restaurant, newspapers publish sly-looking caricatures of him, and he even receives threats of violence. But then, everything changes.

We often think of polarisation as a modern problem — but the story of Cook and Gibbs has much to teach us here.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

This episode is based, with permission, on The Explorer and the Journalist by Richard Evans. (US pre-order)

The eternal Google search for truth

What colour is the sky? The ocean?

You might think the answer is obvious: they’re blue. Maybe not, though. Homer’s seas were “wine-dark”, and he never referred to the colour blue. He wasn’t unusual in this; most ancient texts don’t use the word. Exactly why this might be is a matter of some debate, but one explanation is that in ancient societies, blue was an unusual colour. Blue dyes came later; blue flowers are the result of selective breeding; blue animals are hardly common. Which leaves the sky and the sea, and maybe they’re better described as white, or grey, or wine-dark. So maybe people didn’t say “blue” back in the day, because the colour was so rare that it needed no label.

These days, we can do what Homer couldn’t: we can ask Google what colour the sky is. Problem solved? Not necessarily.

As the sociologist Francesca Tripodi explains, if you type “Why is the sky blue?” into a search box, you’ll get plenty of scientific explanations. (“Rayleigh scattering”, apparently.) But ask “why is the sky white?” and you may be told — as I was — that this is because of the scattering of light by large particles in the atmosphere. Ask “why is the sky red?” and you’ll be told: it’s Rayleigh scattering again. “Why is the sky green?” Possibly because a tornado is coming.

The colour of the sky is not what intrigues Tripodi. She is fascinated, instead, by the fact that when you turn to the internet for answers, much depends on your question. When you meet someone who announces, “I’ve done my own research”, it should be a statement to inspire confidence that here is a person who is diligent, curious and inquisitive. But it isn’t, because somehow people who do their own research have a habit of concluding that the sky is the colour of chemtrails.

Perhaps that is unfair. A few years ago, Tripodi closely observed and conversed with Republican voters in Virginia, and found that — contrary to what metropolitan liberals might assume — they were thoughtful citizens who spent considerable time and energy critically evaluating the news. Like former vice-president Mike Pence, these people were Christian, conservative and Republican in that order, and they applied their habitual practice of closely reading the Bible to closely reading the Constitution and congressional bills. They would “unpack” the meaning and cross-check with independent research. They were very far from the gullible caricatures who are said to have believed that Donald Trump’s presidential bid had been endorsed by the Pope.

Unfortunately, as Tripodi explains in her 2022 book The Propagandists’ Playbook, carefully checking facts and arguments with a Google search does not guarantee wisdom, objectivity or even exposure to contrary arguments.

To pick a simple and fairly benign example, when NFL players started kneeling during the national anthem, Trump claimed that NFL ratings were down. Google “NFL ratings down” and you’d see confirmation from Trump-sympathising websites that he was right. Google “NFL ratings up” and you’d see a list of headlines from liberal websites claiming the opposite.

To avoid this problem, a truth-seeking citizen should systematically search for contrary views. But few people, from any part of the political spectrum, tend to do this. This is not because of crude partisanship, but a more subtle glitch in our logic modules.

In 1960, the psychologist Peter Wason published a striking study of this tendency. Subjects were shown a sequence of three numbers — 2, 4, 6 — and asked to guess what rule the sequence followed, then test that guess by coming up with other sequences of three. After each guess, subjects would be informed whether or not the new sequences fit the rule or not. Wason found that people kept testing their guesses by producing sequences that matched the guess. They rarely produced counterexamples that might show their guess was wrong.

For example, let’s say your guess was “a series of consecutive even numbers”, the next step should be to try to prove yourself wrong, with counterexamples such as “2, 8, 10” or “3, 5, 7”. But people would instead produce examples which fit their existing hypothesis, such as “6, 8, 10”. In Wason’s study, the actual rule was broad: any three numbers in ascending order. To find that rule, you need to start listing sequences that might contradict it.

Wason labelled this behaviour “confirmation bias”, a phrase that now stands for a broad spectrum of ways in which we notice and remember evidence which justifies our beliefs. That broader pattern contributes to political tribalism, and most of us are guilty of it in some form. The narrower original, however, is highly relevant to the search behaviour Tripodi observed: trying to check a fact by searching for the fact rather than by searching for something that might contradict it.

There is a further subtle obstacle to the quest for truth on Google: if you can induce people to search using unusual terms, they are likely to produce unusual results. Clever propagandists seed the conversation with oddly specific phrases — for example, “crisis actor” — and a search incorporating such phrases will uncover a rabbit-hole of conspiracy thinking.

For a harmless demonstration, try searching for “Why is the sky wine-dark?” The results are fascinating, and Rayleigh scattering is not mentioned. Tripodi argues that rightwing influencers are cleverer at using such tactics, but the problem is not limited to one part of the political conversation.

If we want to figure out what’s true, we need to get into the habit of presuming we might be wrong — and looking for evidence of our own mistaken assumptions. I’d like to boast that that is how I always think, but it isn’t. I suspect I’m not alone.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 7 July 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 V2 Trilogy

We’re releasing an epic three-part series about the V2 rocket – a terrifying and also bafflingly expensive weapon. How did Nazi Germany ever decide to build such a thing, and what does it teach us about grandiose projects today? Also – what does the shameful underbelly of the V2 programme tell us about complicity in the most dreadful crimes?

The full series is available to Pushkin+ subscribers. I’ve been working on it for more than a year, and I’m very proud of the results. If you’re not a paying subscriber (and I understand, it’s not for everyone) then you might still enjoy today’s impassioned discussion with our in-house WWII expert, founding producer Ryan Dilley, featuring contributions from Tom Lehrer.

A full episode will be on the main ad-supported feed next week, never fear.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

Essential sources for this series:

Murray Barber V2: The A4 Rocket from Peenemunde to Redstone

Norman Longmate Hitler’s Rockets

Jean Michel Dora

Michael Neufeld The Rocket and the Reich

Michael Neufeld Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War

Michael Neufeld also kindly agreed to be interviewed as background for the series.

Other sources include:

RV Jones Most Secret War

Steven Zaloga V1 Flying Bomb 1942-52

Steven Zaloga V2 Ballistic Missile 1942-52

Freeman Dyson Disturbing the Universe

Walter Dornberger V2

Daniel Lang “A Romantic Urge” The New Yorker 21 April 1950

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner How Big Things Get Done

Diane Tedeschi interview with Michael Neufeld Smithsonian Magazine 1 Jan 2008

Michael Neufeld “Wernher von Braun, the SS and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political and Criminal Responsibility.” German Studies Review. 25:57–78. 2002

Adam Tooze Wages of Destruction

Dean Reuter The Hdden Nazi

Brian Crim Our Germans

Annie Jacobsen Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America

Steve Ossad “The Liberation of Nordhausen Concentration Camp“

Amy Shira Teitel “The Nazi Smoke and Mirrors Escape That Launched American Into The Space Age” Motherboard, 15 September 2012

The 2024 elections will come under attack. Why aren’t we getting ready?

Fact-checkers are level-headed people in my experience. They see claims circulating online — or in parliament — and check them, clarifying the confusing ones and refuting the lies. They are not prone to moral panics or conspiracy theories. But some of my favourite fact-checkers are starting to warn that the next round of elections in western democracies will be under attack from many fronts — and they are getting little reassurance that governments are thinking seriously about the risk.

That risk comes in three parts. First, democratic elections can have big consequences, and narrow margins matter. The world would look quite different if Hillary Clinton had defeated Donald Trump in 2016, if Trump had defeated Joe Biden in 2020, or if the UK had voted to remain in the EU in 2016. With a modest swing in the vote, any of these outcomes could have happened.

Second, the small number of swing voters who are usually decisive in elections often make up their minds whether and how to vote in the final few days of the campaign. Late surprises can make all the difference.

Third, it is cheap and easy to launch a disinformation attack. Given the two points above, if you were a bad actor — a foreign government, an extremist group, a billionaire hoping to gain influence — then why not give it a try?

I spoke to Will Moy, outgoing chief executive of Full Fact, a UK‑based fact-checking organisation, and to Andrew Dudfield, who is Moy’s interim replacement and Full Fact’s head of artificial intelligence. They painted an unsettling picture of the possibilities.

What if, for example, there is a co-ordinated release of fake and inflammatory images and stories? A few weeks ago, fairly crude fake images of a non-existent explosion at the Pentagon sent a brief shudder through stock markets. The faked images were amplified by a Twitter account with a blue checkmark that appeared to be an official Bloomberg News account — but wasn’t — and by the Twitter account of the Russian state media outlet, Russia Today (it later deleted the tweet). It is not hard to imagine a more sophisticated piece of disinformation being unleashed just as a finely poised electorate goes to the polls, and proving decisive.

The event itself need not be faked. Perhaps a police officer is murdered, or a public building catches fire, and the disinformation attack is to falsely accuse a particular group of responsibility. Another possibility is the last-minute release of confidential information; even true information can be highly misleading if released in a selective way.

A third line of attack spreads disinformation about the electoral process itself — for example, alleging electoral fraud, or trying to suppress turnout by spreading lies about the process for voting, the location or security of voting booths, and even the date of the election. The Latin-American fact-checking organisation Chequeado has seen so many examples of this that it has published a top 10.

All of this has happened before, so it would hardly be a shock if it happened again. But we may not have fully adjusted to the fact that powerful tools for disinformation are now much more widely available. Lies can come from foreign governments, from influencers looking for clicks and advertising revenue, or from bored teenagers. Lies can also be targeted over social media, whispering to voters in quiet corners of the internet, unnoticed by conventional journalists, fact-checkers and commentators.

A new study by Ben Tappin, Chloe Wittenberg and others suggests that, at least for some topics, some fairly basic targeting of a particular type of message to a particular type of person makes that message substantially more persuasive. There is nothing wrong with such targeting — unless these targeted messages are flying under the radar of basic fact-checking scrutiny.

These are some of the obvious possibilities; there are, presumably, other lines of attack that we have not yet imagined. So how should we respond to these risks, while remaining an open society? It is important not to overreact: spreading unfounded cynicism about the electoral process is self-defeating, since one aim of bad actors is simply to undermine our confidence in our own elections.

One possibility is to take a leaf out of Canada’s book. Canada has a “Critical Election Incident Public Protocol” that appoints an independent panel of public servants to decide whether the integrity of an election is under threat, and if so what to do about it. It is a fairly light-touch approach to the problem, but that may well be wise.

Full Fact also suggests that disinformation needs the same kind of framework as severe weather, terrorist threats and so on: we should adopt a scale of one to five describing “information incidents” in a way that specialists can convey clearly to the rest of us just how serious a particular problem really is.

The alternative is simply to hope that nothing bad will happen, and that if something does, the government of the day will act appropriately while also seeking re-election. The potential for conflict of interest is painfully obvious. Equally obvious is that it will be impossible for politicians running for office to be trusted to take impartial and appropriate action about a competition they are trying to win.

“We don’t know what the next election will look like and neither does anyone else,” says Moy. But our current information ecosystem is fragile, and there are many who would be delighted to exploit that fragility — both inside the political establishment and well beyond it. Our unblemished record of being caught unprepared by everything from war to financial crisis to pandemic is remarkable. But at the risk of spoiling all the fun, it might be worth thinking this one through in advance.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 June 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 – A Fascination with Failure / Death on the Dance Floor (classic)

This week I present a personal reflection on what the late Henry Petroski meant to me and how he influenced my thinking and writing, followed by our classic episode “Death on the Dance Floor”.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski remains a classic.

—

How one tiny error brought 60 tons of glass, concrete and steel crashing down on a packed hotel lobby.

With its splendid modern architecture, the Hyatt Regency was the place to be seen in Kansas City in 1981. Beneath space-age walkways, guests drank, laughed and danced… not realising that the 60 tons of of glass, concrete and steel hanging above their heads was about to come crashing down.

One hundred and fourteen people died. But why? Was it cheap materials? Shoddy construction? Or a tiny error that seemed so insignificant that no one paid it any attention?

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughn.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, including Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Royston Beserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The Kansas City Star’s reporting was an essential source, including Donna McGuire “The Hyatt tragedy: 20 years later; Memories, lessons live on; Fatal disaster remains impossible to forget” The Kansas City Star 15 July 2001, Rick Montgomery “20 Years Later: Many are continuing to learn from skywalk collapse” Kansas City Star 3 Oct 2001, and Kevin Murphy “Hyatt skywalks collapse changed lives forever” The Kansas City Star Magazine 10 July 2011.

The May 2000 edition of the Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities features several articles on the tragedy, by Piotr Moncarz et al; Gregory Luth; Sarah Pfatteicher; and Jack Gillum.

Two essential books covering the tragedy are Henry Petroski’s To Engineer is Human and Levy and Salvadori’s Why Buildings Fall Down.

Is it even possible to prepare for a pandemic?

Be prepared! It’s the scout’s motto. But prepared for what? In The Lion King, the song “Be Prepared” is a rousing celebration of fratricide, while Tom Lehrer’s song of the same title advised boy scouts: “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice / unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

Clearly, preparation is not enough; one must prepare to do the right thing. The UK’s Covid-19 inquiry recently began hearings into the country’s “resilience and preparedness”. It’s about time. In an ill-prepared world, the UK is often thought to have been more ill-prepared than most, perhaps because of the strains caused by austerity and the distractions of the Brexit process.

“It is apparent that we might not have been very well prepared at all,” remarked Hugo Keith, the inquiry’s chief counsel, on the first day of proceedings, while the counsel for a group representing bereaved families declared: “Proper planning, adequate resourcing and swift action saves lives. From the families’ perspectives, the UK had none of those three things.”

I’m sympathetic to these views, but here’s a question: who was well prepared, not with hindsight but before the pandemic? In 2019, the well-respected Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security assembled an international team of experts to compile a “Global Health Security Index” (GHS). The GHS Index relies on more than 100 measures, ranging from “Does the country have a national emergency response plan for a pandemic?” and “Can the country’s lab system conduct five or more WHO core tests?” to “Does the country have an adequate road network?”.

According to the GHS Index, the best-­prepared country in the world was the US, while the worst-prepared country was Equatorial Guinea. But the death rate from Covid in the US was vastly higher than that in Equatorial Guinea. So what benefit did the US gain from being prepared? Admittedly, that sole comparison might be misleading. Elderly people were hugely more at risk of death from Covid, and there are more of them in the US. Many Covid-related deaths in Equatorial Guinea may have gone unrecognised or untallied.

Yet, in an unsettling study published late last year, the economists Robert Tucker Omberg and Alex Tabarrok took a more sophisticated look at this question and found that “almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic”. This was true whether one looked at indicators of medical preparedness, or softer cultural factors such as levels of individualism or trust. Some countries responded much more effectively than others, of course — but there was no foretelling which ones would rise to the challenge by looking at indicators published in 2019.

One response to this counter-intuitive finding is that the GHS Index doesn’t do a good job of measuring preparedness. Yet it seemed plausible at the time and it still looks reasonable now.

Another response is that pandemic preparation might have worked very well against a different pathogen. The Sars-Cov-2 virus spread widely even from people without symptoms, and was deadly enough to kill millions while being mild enough, often enough, that people kept wandering around unwittingly infecting others. Next time it may be, say, bird flu, and a well-prepared public health system may be more decisive.

But perhaps we need to take the Omberg/Tabarrok study seriously: maybe conventional preparations really won’t help much. What follows?

One conclusion is that we should prepare, but in a different way. There are things that are obvious now which were not obvious in 2019, even to many experts. For example, Joshua Gans, economist and author of The Pandemic Information Solution, argues that we’ve learnt that pandemics can be thought of as information and incentive problems. If you can muster enough reasonably accurate tests, provide incentives to people to take those tests and act appropriately on their results, you can isolate many cases and prevent the disease spreading without locking down everything. Preparing a nimble system of testing and of compensating self-isolating people would not have figured in many 2019 pandemic plans. It will now.

Another form of preparation which might yet pay off is sewage monitoring, which can cost-effectively spot the resurgence of old pathogens and the appearance of new ones, and may give enough warning to stop some future pandemics before they start.

And, says Tabarrok, “Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines”. The faster our systems for making, testing and producing vaccines, the better our chances; all these things can be prepared.

But we also need to be able to step back and look at the big picture. There is one indicator of preparedness that was correlated with a lower death toll, and it’s the broadest of all — “state capacity”, or the ability of a state to get things done. The political scientists Jonathan K Hanson and Rachel Sigman have measured state capacity by combining indicators such as the ability to raise complex taxes and the availability of good statistics. (Predictably, Denmark is top of the list, Somalia is at the bottom, and the UK and US perform less well than Germany and South Korea but better than France and Italy.)

It verges on a tautology that states should aim to improve their own capacity, but even tautologies can be worth remembering. The inquiry is doing an essential task in evaluating the UK’s preparedness for the last pandemic but the next one may be quite different, and the next crisis will probably not be a pandemic at all. From this perspective, “Be prepared” simply means “Get your shit together”. It’s not exactly one for the scouts, but it’s not a bad mission statement for the British state.

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