Tim Harford's Blog, page 24

What Rishi Sunak got wrong about maths

As a professional nerd, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been asked what I think of Rishi Sunak’s enthusiasm for maths. It’s hard to know quite what to say. I agree with much of what Sunak said in his speech last month singing the praises of numeracy. Yet there is little sign of action to match the fine words.

It’s not just Sunak’s strange obsession with forcing people to learn extra maths at the age of 17, when the more pressing need is more and better maths teaching and support for younger children. It’s also the basic disconnect between rhetoric and policy. There is a long-running shortage of maths teachers in the UK, and teacher pay was cut by about 10 per cent in real terms between 2010 and 2022, with additional cuts looming. Quite how this will help Sunak achieve his goal of a more numerate UK is a mystery.

It was Shakespeare, not square roots, who gave me a moment of clarity about all this. Shakespeare as interpreted by a chatbot, that is. A couple of weeks ago, a student’s homework assignment about Twelfth Night went viral. The essay that the student handed in began, “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I am not able to complete this assignment. However, I can provide you with some guidance on how to approach this essay.”

The teacher’s feedback was a not unreasonable: “ChatGPT – Rewrite the assignment in your own words.”

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry; this was a student so completely uninterested in their homework that they couldn’t be bothered to read even the first sentence of the essay that they’d asked ChatGPT to write for them, let alone follow the advice the chatbot was providing.

What has any of this to do with maths, you ask? Well, I see the same utter disengagement all around on the subject of numbers. To pick an amusing example: after billionaire Michael Bloomberg failed to come close to becoming US president in 2020, someone on Twitter gloated that “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The US population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over.”

Of course, if you have $500mn and you divide it between 327 million people, you’ll run out before you’ve given each of them their second dollar. What’s astonishing about the tweet is not the error – we all make mistakes – but the fact that on prime-time television, senior journalists Brian Williams and Mara Gay discussed the tweet without noticing that it was absurd. Neither of them, nor the MSNBC production team, seem to have checked the arithmetic.

Perhaps this is utter innumeracy; perhaps they did check and didn’t spot the error. I doubt it. More likely the entire TV crew displayed the same attitude as the hapless “student” of Shakespeare: they didn’t feel that even the most basic check was worth the five seconds it would take.

When calculators first became widespread, people worried that students would use them to cheat. “You need to learn arithmetic because you won’t always have a calculator with you,” I remember being told. But we always have calculators with us these days. Perhaps people should have worried less about the fact that people would use calculators to cheat and more about the fact that people wouldn’t bother to use the calculator at all.

What is missing in both cases is a cluster of related attributes: motivation, curiosity, confidence and a sense of what is possible. People can’t be bothered to put the effort in, don’t care what they might discover, feel they couldn’t dig deeper if they tried and don’t have a sense of what they might achieve if they did. We have allowed too many young people to find themselves in this predicament.

If you feel this way about much of the world around you, life is going to seem difficult and you will miss out on many opportunities. But if you only feel this way about arithmetic in snarky tweets, congratulations: you may have a bright future ahead of you as a cable TV anchor.

Sunak phrased the problem as an economic one: people without basic numeracy skills are twice as likely to be unemployed as the numerate, he said. (Let us gloss over the fact that this statement conflates correlation and causation; the point is well taken even if the logic is patchy.)

But there is more at stake here: if people feel helpless in the face of numbers, they will be vulnerable and frustrated from the supermarket to the voting booth. It is no basis for a healthy, happy society.

Tempting as it is to offer a neat solution, I don’t have one. It surely cannot hurt to give children more mathematical support, from well-trained and well-paid teachers, much earlier. It cannot hurt, either, to teach children about the tools they can use to solve practical problems in the world around them, whether those tools are a chatbot, an internet search or even the humble calculator.

Otherwise, the costs are grave. When I was a child, my mother used to teach adult numeracy classes. Sometimes she would come home mournfully describing how helpless her students felt in the face of numbers, and the suffering that had caused them as they looked for jobs and tried to stay away from people who would exploit them. But they were all determined to learn, and they all understood what was at stake. Alongside the pitiful anecdotes there were stories of hope.

If young people feel that maths is a tool they can use to avoid being scammed, to help spot clues or peel away the surface of what they hear and read, or even (perhaps) to help get a better-paid, more satisfying job, that is all to the good. Fundamentally that is not about calculus or cosines. It’s about curiosity and confidence.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 5 May 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.

Why we shouldn’t hold referendums

Citizens of democracies can be ill-informed and inconsistent, and this often feels like a tragedy or even a crisis. Occasionally, however, one reads something so absurd that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Consider a recent survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC), which finds that 60 per cent of Americans think the government is spending too much.

But, the survey also asks, what exactly is the government spending too much on? Not social security: 62 per cent think the government spends too little on that, versus 7 per cent who think it spends too much. Not Medicare (58 per cent want more spending, 10 per cent want less). Not healthcare (63 per cent want more spending). Not education (65 per cent want more). Not assistance to the poor (59 per cent want more). Military spending is more controversial, but more Americans favour an expansion than a contraction. Add in debt interest, and these areas together cover 91 per cent of US federal government spending last year.

In short, a solid majority of Americans wish their government would spend less money overall, while also spending more on almost everything in its budget.

“That survey is a real classic of the genre,” says Ben Zaranko, an economist at the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies. Then he adds, “but it is how governments in the UK behave at spending reviews”.

Spending reviews in the UK usually happen every three years, although we had them in 2019, 2020 and 2021. At these reviews, the government first decides how much it wants to spend overall, then allocates that sum between competing public services, before realising that the overall spending cap implies unpalatable cuts to specific areas. Eventually, the government backtracks and finds extra cash. This has happened in each of the past four spending reviews — most recently, to the tune of £30bn of extra funding, or nearly £500 per person.

What is happening here? The most intuitive explanation is that people see specified parts very differently from the way they see a generic whole. Another example is that people tend to worry about crime, the state of the economy or the quality of politicians when pondered in abstract, while feeling more upbeat about their local area or indeed their local representative.

This tendency has been found in other contexts. For example, when asking forecasters to ponder the future, the probability of a broad scenario such as “Vladimir Putin ceases to be president of the Russian Federation before 2030” is usually estimated to be lower than the total probability of more specific narrow scenarios added together. (For example, Putin dies in office; Putin is ousted in a coup; Putin is persuaded to resign; Putin retires, citing ill health.) Many forecasters make the mistake of treating the sum of the parts as much greater than the whole.

These are all examples of what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky labelled the “availability bias”. We often reason on the basis of the first examples that leap into our minds — and different examples will come to mind depending on whether a question is framed broadly or narrowly. Are we thinking of schools and hospitals, or of penpushers and red tape?

Lucy Barnes, associate professor in comparative politics at University College London, argues that people tend to see generic “government spending” as a category full of waste and inefficiency, but apparently we don’t feel that way about specific policy areas such as health or education. She also reminds me that “people who don’t categorise government budgets for a living see these categories differently” from the official definitions.

Foreign aid is one of few specific categories of government spending which is unpopular, but many Americans would include the cost of sending armies to Afghanistan and Iraq as (wasteful) foreign aid. Who is to say they are mistaken? Or perhaps voters simply do not know what governments spend money on. Foreign aid is only about 1 per cent of the US federal budget, yet the average voter believes the US government spends almost a third of its budget on foreign aid.

That resolves the apparent contradiction in the AP-NORC survey: a voter who wants to shrink the state by eliminating half of foreign aid spending and redistributing the rest to social security, education and health, is not making any logical error. That voter is simply mistaken about what foreign aid truly costs.

It’s unclear if all this is a serious issue. If there is a problem to be fixed, politicians might address it by hypothecating taxes — make this tax a “healthcare levy” and that tax an “education charge”, and pretty soon voters will have a real sense of where their money is going. Tax purists hate this idea, for the very good reason that individual tax revenues tend to wobble around, while spending is best stabilised. One could simply lie to the voters and pretend to hypothecate taxes without really doing so, but that is asking for trouble.

One clear conclusion is that voters must be kept away from expressing direct preferences in referendums, because we don’t have enough information to make complex decisions. (Perhaps we have learnt that lesson already.)

In the UK, at least, voters seem happy enough to leave the details to the boffins: recent data from the World Values Survey suggests that an unprecedentedly high 61 per cent of Brits now think that policymaking should be left to the experts. I wonder why?

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 April 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 never-ending brilliance of board games

What is the point of games? For Lizzie Magie, the idiosyncratic genius who inspired Monopoly, the answer was clear: she thought games are educational. Klaus Teuber, the equally brilliant designer of the board game Catan, had a different view: he thought games are fun.

Teuber died at the beginning of April, after a brief illness. I was sorry to hear the news. He was a charming person and seems to have been viewed with great affection in the German board-games industry, the world’s most influential purveyors of cardboard entertainment. He won Germany’s Spiel des Jahres prize four times. The annual honour is awarded to the best new board game, and given their importance in the country, Teuber’s achievement is not unlike a novelist winning a quartet of Booker prizes.

But his greatest triumph was The Settlers of Catan — now simply Catan — which replaced Monopoly in the affections of anyone who knows anything about board games. “Settlers of Catan changed everything,” says James Wallis, a game designer and author of a new history of board games, Everybody Wins. Players gather resources and trade with one another to build cities on an island. Catan is as simple to learn as Monopoly, but vastly more enjoyable — quicker, more interesting when it’s not your turn, building to a climax rather than a grinding elimination of the weak.

There’s no secret ingredient to Catan; it’s just a superbly executed collection of good ideas. “You’re involved with the game at all times but not so much that it demands your complete focus,” adds Wallis, “and although there’s a lot of dice rolling it almost never feels that you’re at the mercy of unfair randomness.”

Catan ushered in the golden age of board games which began in the 1990s and has continued ever since. Cardboard games have thrived despite competition from computers, partly because the internet provided a new way to find the best games and meet other players. When the pandemic struck, sales of Catan soared as people looked for something fun to do at home. Board gamers also flocked to websites that replicated their favourite tabletop games online. We all learnt quickly that Zoom hang-outs can be grim without some kind of activity, and board games are more fun than most other options.

Games continue to evolve. One of the stars of recent years has been Pandemic: Legacy, a game in which all players collaborate to try to contain and then eradicate a deadly virus, and which contains a kind of cursed advent calendar that keeps throwing challenges and new plot twists at the increasingly stressed players. Imagine a cross between Risk and The Last of Us TV series, and you might be close. A little on the nose, perhaps, but it’s incredibly tense; my family is hooked.

There are many reasons to applaud board games. Lizzie Magie patented her Monopoly precursor, The Landlord’s Game, in 1904, and she hoped to use her game to illustrate the benefits of Henry George’s ideas about taxation. It was embraced and adapted by various economic radicals.

Magie was not the first to think of games as teaching life lessons. Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of Life, from 1860, encourages young players to embrace virtues such as honesty and bravery, while rejecting idleness and other vices. That educational, even moralistic, strain of thinking continues today. Thankfully, modern games wear such pedagogy more lightly.

Almost any good game will have cognitive benefits: the mental arithmetic of instantly summing a pair of dice, or the acts of strategic imagination, surely stimulate the mind. And many enthusiasts emphasise the social benefits of gaming, of getting children to compete in a safe environment, away from their screens. Klaus Teuber himself told The New Yorker about a boy in a sanatorium who didn’t speak to any of the other children until, one day, someone set up a game of Catan. “He came to the other children and started to play,” Teuber said. “Now he gets contact with other people. Catan is the medium for that.”

But there’s a trap in this, something which in a different context the writer Adam Gopnik has termed the “causal catastrophe”. The causal catastrophe occurs when everything has to be done for some other reason; nothing can be worthwhile in its own right. It’s a tempting mistake, and a tragic one. Life must sometimes (always?) be lived for its own sake.

There is nothing wrong with having a good game with some friends, even if nobody becomes a smarter, wiser person as a result. Indeed, when the Dutch sociologist Johan Huizinga tried to define a game, back in 1938, one of the defining features he identified was that games were played for their own sake. Games played for some other reason are no longer games.

Teuber understood this better than anyone. He was sure that computers would never entirely replace tabletop gaming. “People miss sitting around the table together, interacting with each other, laughing, joking and talking,” he told me when I met him back in 2008. He has been right ever since, and the lockdowns of 2020 merely underlined his point.

“It is a part of mankind to play games,” he continued. “We played in the Stone Age. We played in Roman times. It’s an escape from the everyday grind. Every day we work hard and we make mistakes, and we are punished for those mistakes. Games take us to another role where you can make mistakes and you don’t get punished for them. You can always start another game.”

Five of the best board games

Agricola (Uwe Rosenberg) Plough fields, invent new technologies and — if you have time — have children. Set aside two hours, but the gameplay is rich and satisfying. All-time favourite.

Colt Express (Christophe Raimbault) A fast, slapstick wild-west train robbery. You’ll get shot, but you won’t get hurt. A delightful family game.

Dominion (Donald X Vaccarino) An elegant, highly adaptable deck-building game. It’s easy to give younger players a head start.

Roll for the Galaxy (Wei-Hwa Huang and Thomas Lehmann) Bucketloads of dice rolls resolve your attempts at galactic exploration, trading and conquest. The online version is rapid and addictive.

San Juan (Andreas Seyfarth) Tactics, strategy and luck all in a portable format make this our favourite for family holidays.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 21 April 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 Man Who Bet His House on a Pop Song (A Eurovision Tale)

You can gamble on horses or on the turn of a card – but Daniel Gould made a living betting on the outcome of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Daniel made a profit because he studied the voting history of the competition, as well as the cultural and geo-political factors that predict which songs will triumph and which will score “nil point”.

In 2018, Daniel was so sure of his system of reducing the risk that he took out a loan on his home and bet it on Israel’s song to win… only to see the entry from Cyrus suddenly rocketing up the leader board. Was Daniel about to lose everything?

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Further reading

Philip Tetlock’s classic book on forecasting is Expert Political Judgment.

Why is the field of economics still so elitist?

There is no shortage of white men in economics. That is clear enough from a glance down the very male, very white list of winners of the discipline’s Nobel memorial prize. There are a few exceptions: the black Caribbean-born scholar Sir Arthur Lewis won in 1979; the first woman to win, Elinor Ostrom, did not do so until 2009, astonishingly late. Other non-white, non-male winners are few and far between.

Even now, away from the pinnacle of the profession, things are scarcely more encouraging. Academic economics still appears to be an unattractive environment for women. I’ve written before about the fact that while many stereotypically male-studied subjects such as science and mathematics now have large numbers of female students, economics has not managed to achieve the same progress. Women make up 56 per cent of the UK-domiciled undergraduate population, but just 32 per cent of economics undergraduates are women. That proportion has fallen slightly, not risen, in recent years.

There is more to diversity than race and gender. Consider social class. Class is not something that has been explored much by those analysing the economics profession. This is partly because it can feel somewhat ineffable and partly because what data exists is not freely available to most researchers. However, a recent report by the Royal Economic Society breaks new ground on this question. (Full disclosure: I used to serve on the RES Council, the group which oversees the society’s activities.) The report explores the socio-economic background of UK-domiciled students studying economics as undergraduates, and its conclusions are disturbing. Put simply, most of the people who are under-represented in the undergraduate population as a whole are even more under-represented in economics courses.

And while there are various ways to measure social class, however the data is sliced, the same basic pattern shows up: economics students are disproportionately from more favoured socio-economic backgrounds. Consider, for example, students from areas that don’t produce many students: 12.2 per cent of UK-domiciled undergraduates come from these areas, but just 5.2 per cent of students studying economics. About 8 per cent of UK-domiciled students went to private school, but nearly 20 per cent of economics students did. Some 44 per cent of students have a parent who went to university, but 55 per cent of economics students do. The children of managerial or professional parents are particularly over-represented in economics courses.

What about ethnicity? “Ethnic representation in economics is actually not too bad,” says Stefania Paredes Fuentes, the report’s lead author. Indeed, students of Asian and black African ethnicity are better represented in economics courses than other degree courses and relative to their weight in the British population as a whole. But the broader picture is not encouraging. While any young person is more likely to attend university if they are from a richer family with a history of higher education, that is particularly true of those choosing to study economics. Economics students from disadvantaged backgrounds are rare.

Why is this? The explanation is largely practical: economics tends to be taught by more venerable, selective universities. It is often not taught at all in newer ones. Very few economics courses are taught part-time. Economics courses are disproportionately taught in universities in or near London. Students from far-flung regions hoping to study economics at a local university will have few options. In short, all the factors that make university education hard to access for some people apply in economics with extra force.

“Economics can be considered an elitist discipline,” the RES report begins. That is not intended as a compliment, but some economists might nod in approval. It’s nice to feel part of an exclusive club, after all. But this is a mistake. Not every student can be John Maynard Keynes; not every university can be Cambridge. If we accept that there’s a role for less exacting universities, then there is nothing about economics that makes it too good for such places.

Economics could do more to appeal to everyone, and the profession is engaged in some soul-searching both about its culture and about its content. The culture of academic economics needs to be more inclusive; the content of economics courses has (rightly) been shifting away from abstraction towards real-world problems, which prospective students care about.

This is not just a problem for economics alone. The overall picture that emerges from the RES report is one of shameful educational inequality. If UK students from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t make it to university, and particularly don’t make it to the best universities, then we are all diminished as a result. The disparities in economics courses simply exemplify the broader problem in its most concentrated form.

But there is a double tragedy that it is economics, rather than some other subject, which so starkly displays educational inequalities. First, economics students tend to get well-paid jobs. “The economics discipline is great at increasing social mobility,” says Paredes Fuentes. It is a scandal that so many poorer young people are missing that opportunity.

Secondly, economists carry a great deal of weight in policymaking. If young people from more marginalised upbringings were better represented in economics, they would also be better represented in the corridors of power. But they are not. And you don’t need a degree in economics to understand the consequences of that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 14 April 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.

Does winning the lottery actually ruin your life?

At the start of the graphic novel Bloke’s Progress, our everyday hero Darren Bloke isn’t coping with the everyday stresses of life. He has a tedious job, a grinding commute, squalling children and too many bills to pay. Then he wins the lottery — and his troubles truly begin.

First, Darren becomes estranged from his friends, who keep pestering him for money. He hangs out with a richer crowd but feels out of place. He divorces his wife and marries a new woman. Then she divorces him. His money is soon gone, and so, too, are his family and friends. In Bloke’s Progress, Darren is saved by conversations with the spirit of the Victorian sage John Ruskin. (Of course!)

Ruskin’s insights deserve a separate column — or a book. But Darren’s tale made me wonder: is this what happens to people who win the lottery? A glance at the newspapers suggests that it is. The Courier Journal tells the tale of David Lee Edwards from Ashland, Kentucky. He won $27mn in 2001, spent it on drugs, fast cars and a Learjet. He was living in a storage unit within five years, and died penniless. The Guardian explains that Michael Carroll, self-proclaimed “king of chavs”, was declared bankrupt just eight years after winning nearly £10mn — while Lee Ryan ended up sleeping rough, and spending time in jail for handling stolen cars, despite winning £6.5mn. If only the spirit of John Ruskin had been there to save them all.

But while these cautionary tales offer us a moralistic narrative arc that sticks in the memory, they aren’t necessarily typical. A lot of people win big prizes on the lottery, enough to allow us to draw more subtle — and less tragic — conclusions. First, do lottery wins estrange us from our friends? Darren Bloke’s fate seems plausible: his friends kept asking him for money, leading him to feel exploited and them to accuse him of meanness. Yet a study by Joan Costa Font of the London School of Economics and Nattavudh Powdthavee of Warwick Business School finds that people who win more than £10,000 on the lottery spend more time socialising with their friends, although less time talking to neighbours.

This result won’t come as a shock to those who read a 2016 study by Emily Bianchi and Kathleen Vohs, which found that richer Americans tended to spend less time with neighbours and family, and more with friends. The simplest explanation is that money makes it easy to socialise for pure pleasure, while reducing the need to maintain relationships for practical reasons, such as sharing childcare.

Second, do lottery winners blow their winnings and lapse into poverty? Here, myths abound; the National Endowment for Financial Education is often cited as the source for a claim that 70 per cent of lottery winners go bankrupt. The NEFE has issued a press release explaining that it has not made that claim and has no reason to believe the claim is true.

A study by the economists Scott Hankins, Mark Hoekstra and Paige Marta Skiba looked at 35,000 lottery winners in Florida, of whom 2,000 later filed for bankruptcy (that’s less than 6 per cent, not 70 per cent). The researchers did find that lottery winners were more likely to file for bankruptcy than non-winners. Perhaps that is not surprising, since lottery enthusiasts tend to be low-income, and most of them don’t win much. Hankins, Hoekstra and Skiba found that bankruptcy struck with equal likelihood whether people won less than $10,000 or more than $50,000. These Floridian winners, then, were more likely to face bankruptcy than non-winners, but bankruptcy was still an unusual outcome. Nor did it make any difference how much they won.

Third, do lottery winners quit their jobs, as Darren Bloke did? Not according to a study of Swedish lottery winners who had won an average of 2mn Swedish kronor — roughly £200,000 — at some stage between the mid-1990s and 2005. This was about eight times the annual salary of a nurse or police officer in Sweden at the time. The researchers, Bengt Furaker and Anna Hedenus, found that some of these winners reduced their hours or took some unpaid leave, but 62 per cent carried on working exactly as before, and only 12 per cent quit their jobs completely. Either people felt that the jackpot wasn’t quite large enough to make it sensible to quit, or — perhaps more likely — they rather enjoyed their jobs. John Ruskin, who celebrated the value of honest labour, would surely have approved.

Thus far we’ve seen that lottery winners spend more time hanging out with friends, are not notably at risk of bankruptcy and often keep working in their old jobs. The big question remaining is: are they happy?

Yes, say Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini, who studied lottery winners in (again) Sweden. They find that winners of large prizes were significantly more satisfied with their lives — and in particular were significantly more satisfied with their finances. There is little sign in this data of the feckless or reckless lottery winners who squander their winnings. The overall impression I get from these studies is that lottery winners are . . . well, rather sensible. “I won’t let it change my life,” goes the cliché, and perhaps the cliché is true.

Lottery winners typically use their money to increase their financial security and to spend more time with friends. They rarely quit their jobs. Some squander the money; most do not. Ruskin argued that money had no value unless it was wisely used. Lottery winners don’t do as badly as we might have feared.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 7 April 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 Dark Money Behind Mother’s Day

Anna Marie Jarvis wanted a national holiday to honor the dedication and sacrifice of America’s mothers. She wasn’t the first person to propose a Mother’s Day – but her campaign caught the imagination of the people and the ears of the politicians.

Congress officially recognised Jarvis’s Mother’s Day in 1914 – but the indefatigable campaigner had allied herself with businessmen with vested interests in such an annual event. Mother’s Day soon span out of its creator’s control and caused an embittered Jarvis no end of heartache.

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Further reading

Two indispensable sources for this episode were Katherine Lane Antolini, Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day, and Leigh Eric Schmidt Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.

Other sources include

Planet Money “The Holiday Industrial Complex”

Howard Wolfe Behold Thy Mother: Mothers Day and the Mothers Day Church

Norman Kendall Mothers Day: A History of Its Founding and Its Founder

Bruce Handy and Barbara deWilde “Op-Art; The Mother of All Holidays” The New York Times May 13, 2007

Vibeke Venema “Anna Jarvis: The woman who regretted creating Mother’s Day” BBC News 10 May 2020

Jonathan Mulinix, “Why Mother’s Day Founder Anna Jarvis Later Fought to Have the Holiday Abolished”  Mental Floss

Time Magazine “Mother’s Day, Inc.” 16 May 1938   

Has 21st century policy gone medieval?

Criminal justice has always been a source of knotty problems. How to punish the guilty while sparing the innocent? Trial by ordeal was a neat solution: delegate the decision to God. In the Middle Ages, a suspect who insisted on their innocence might be asked to carry a piece of burning iron for a few paces. If the suspect’s hand was unharmed, God had pronounced them innocent. If God is benevolent, omnipotent and highly interventionist, this idea works. Otherwise this judicial ordeal punishes innocent and guilty alike, inflicting harm without sorting good from bad.

Suella Braverman, the UK’s home secretary, and her “dream” of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, is an eerie 21st-century echo of a medieval idea. In a way, the comparison is unfair to the medieval courts. Judicial ordeals really were designed to solve a policy problem, while the government’s Rwanda rhetoric is designed to deflect attention from strikes, NHS waiting lists and a stagnating economy.

But in other ways the comparison is apt. Deporting migrants to Rwanda, or similar deliberate cruelties such as separating parents from their children at the US-Mexican border, might well be expected to deter some attempts to enter the country, while those fleeing murderous regimes would come regardless.

Many people, myself included, draw the line at “deliberate cruelties”. But public policy is full of ordeal-like interventions: long waits, arduous paperwork and deliberate stigma are all common policy tools. The economist Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard defines ordeals as “burdens placed on individuals which yield no benefits to others” and argues that such burdens can sometimes be an effective way of ensuring scarce benefits are targeted only to worthy recipients.

But do these ordeals really select the most deserving? Carolyn Heinrich, professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, has studied South Africa’s Child Support Grant, with a series of bureaucratic ordeals requiring bewildering paperwork and long waits. The families who struggle with these ordeals are those who face longer journeys to the benefits office, or have a limited grasp of bureaucratese.

Heinrich found that because of these arbitrary distinctions, many families received less support than they were entitled to. Most interruptions to benefit payments were errors, and the children in the affected families would become adolescents who were more likely to engage in crime, alcohol abuse or risky sexual behaviour. The ordeal harmed the innocent, undermined the goals of the support grant and seems unlikely to have saved public funds.

Some ordeals are the result of incompetence, such as badly designed forms, or underfunded public services. But others betray a misanthropic mindset in policymakers. If you are fearful of benefit scroungers who don’t wish to work, hordes of bogus asylum seekers, promiscuous teenagers and parents who can’t even be bothered to feed their children properly, then the tough love of an ordeal might seem like common sense.

Yet I wonder. Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples, a 2006 book by Zeckhauser and Peter Schuck, explains that stigmatising unwed teenage mothers may be a useful ordeal: “Their irresponsible conduct . . . must be firmly condemned because of the immense harm that it will likely cause . . . if the stigma has the effect of reducing the number of other teenagers who have children out of wedlock, then the stigma will be socially salutary on balance…”

That’s a big “if”. In the UK, the teenage conception rate has plummeted from 42 conceptions per 1,000 women aged 15-17 in 2007, to 13 in 2020. (The number of abortions for women under 18 has fallen at a similar pace.) This is not because teenage motherhood is more stigmatised, but because official government policy was to “build an honest and open culture” and reduce unwanted pregnancies “by ensuring that people have access to the full range of contraception”. Rather than discouraging teenage pregnancy by making it a stigmatised ordeal, the policy assumed that well-informed teenagers given access to contraception would avoid pregnancy anyway.

A similar story can be told about jobseekers. A few years ago, the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team ran a controlled trial in job centres. The trial compared the old ordeal of demanding regular proof of past job-seeking activity with a new approach in which job centre staff helped jobseekers make a plan for the days ahead. Replacing the ordeal with some simple mentoring improved people’s chances of working again. Jobseekers, like teenagers, needed guidance, not sanctions.

It’s too much to expect politicians to abolish ordeals altogether, but we need to collect more data on whether they are having the intended effect. It’s one thing for an ordeal to be tough but effective — quite another to be wantonly cruel.

Even medieval ordeals may have been smarter than they looked. The economist Peter Leeson found that many ordeals exonerated the suspects, somehow miraculously unharmed by searing hot iron. How so? Leeson argues that the medieval ordeal filtered out the guilty: God-fearing criminals would rather confess than face the ordeal, so only the innocent would agree to endure it. Knowing this, the priests who administered the ordeals would secretly ensure the iron wasn’t hot enough to blister the skin. Medieval ordeals, then, really di

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 31 March 2023.

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d punish the guilty and spare the innocent. If only rich, civilised countries could make the same boast today.

What Mystic Meg can teach economists about forecasting

Economist Ezra Solomon once quipped that “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”. I’m not sure if the astrologer “Mystic Meg” was ever respectable, but she was certainly much loved. “Britain’s most famous astrologer by a million miles,” said her agent, after her recent death prompted an outpouring of affectionate recollections about her campy image and her arch forecasts about the National Lottery, praised both for their brilliant accuracy and sheer absurdity.

It seems hard to imagine that an economic forecaster will ever earn such valedictions. But many economic pundits seem to have been taking lessons from astrologers. Consider this horoscope: “The balance of risks remains tilted to the downside, but adverse risks have moderated . . . On the upside, a stronger boost from pent-up demand in numerous economies or a faster fall in inflation are plausible. On the downside, severe health outcomes in China could hold back the recovery . . . ”

That pretty much covers everything: good news, bad news, more inflation, disinflation. In case you’re wondering, it’s the latest World Economic Outlook from the IMF. But that sort of “rainbow forecast” is typical of the genre.

Forecasting expert Philip E Tetlock, in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgement, noted that expert pundits had a tendency to make vague forecasts, and to excuse error as “erring on the side of caution” or being wrong only on timing.

If so, those experts are treading a well-worn path. Consider the following statements: “You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.” “You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.” “While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.” They sound like the kind of thing a clairvoyant might say after gazing into a crystal ball, but these statements are from an academic paper, “The Fallacy of Personal Validation”, published in 1949 by psychologist Bertram Forer.

After getting his students to fill out a diagnostic questionnaire, Forer handed each of them a written assessment of their traits. The students believed the assessments were uniquely tailored on the basis of the questionnaire. But, in fact, each student got the same list of 13 statements, including the three above. The students felt the diagnostic had done an excellent job, and the vast majority agreed with at least 10 out of 13 statements. When the deception was revealed, wrote Forer, “they burst into laughter”.

These “Forer statements” — also sometimes called “Barnum statements” after showman PT Barnum — can feel uncannily specific. Most people don’t realise that they are almost universal.

In defence of economic forecasters, including the IMF, Barnumesque verbiage is traditionally accompanied by specific falsifiable numerical predictions. Surely, the real incorrigibles are the economics columnists. We’ll blithely hand-wave about risks and opportunities which may or may not manifest. And like Mystic Meg, we’re kept around only because people find our prognostications entertaining.

The parallels should be no surprise. Walter Friedman’s history of economic forecasting, Fortune Tellers, explains that clairvoyants and economic forecasters started from a similar place. Evangeline Adams and Roger Babson were near contemporaries, born in the US in 1868 and 1875 respectively. Both offered investment advice in general and stock market forecasts in particular. Both were in high demand, and both died rich. The chief difference was that Adams was an astrologer, while Babson offered data-driven forecasts inspired by ideas from physics.

Babson’s forecasting ideas look very strange today. He was a huge fan of Isaac Newton: he purchased and moved the parlour of Newton’s house from London to Massachusetts, funded research into antigravity, and his forecasting ideas are full of misappropriated Newtonian physics. His “Babsonchart” was built around the Newtonish idea that each boom above the trend was followed by an equal and opposite bust below. With hindsight, this was true by definition when Babson plotted the trend line in the right place. Alas, it offered little predictive power beyond generalities.

Still, generalities will get you a long way. Babson’s reputation as a forecaster was secured when, on September 5 1929, a few weeks before the great crash, he opined, “sooner or later a crash is coming which will . . . cause a decline of from 60 to 80 points in the Dow-Jones Barometer”. Impressive. What is less impressive is that those gloomy forecasts began years earlier, in 1926, after which the Dow more than doubled. The crash was vastly bigger than Babson had predicted, and it continued long after Babson started predicting a recovery.

No matter. Shortly after the crash began, Babson ran an advert in The New York Times announcing that “Babson clients were prepared” and he still gets credit for predicting the crash.

Aficionados of clairvoyancy will recognise some similarities here. If you want to be admired for your forecasts, temper your bold claims with vagueness and be sure to trumpet the successes and downplay the failures.

No sooner had Mystic Meg’s death been announced than The Sun, which published her column, was explaining that her final horoscope was a “sweet prediction” that she would be reunited in the afterlife with an old flame who died in a car crash in 1977. “Leo: It can be the most routine of routine journeys that takes you towards your soulmate.”

For those readers willing to swallow the idea that death itself is “the most routine of routine journeys”, it’s a startling piece of prescience. For the rest of us, it’s audacious silliness. Mystic Meg would have been proud.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 24 March 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 true scandal of Lydia E. Pinkham’s vegetable compound

It could cure almost any ‘female ailment’ – even cancer – said the adverts. But Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was, in fact, just a concoction of herbs and alcohol of no proven medicinal merit. That didn’t stop desperate American women from buying bottles of the stuff – and writing to Lydia Pinkham for medical advice.

Why did her customers shun ‘expert’ doctors and opt instead for quack medicines? And why, when Lydia Pinkham finally came in for criticism, did no one question the efficacy of her vegetable compound?

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Further reading

Sarah Stage’s indispensable biography of Lydia Pinkham is Female Complaints.

Other books about the history of medicine (and quackery) include

Eric Jameson The Natural History of Quackery

Stuart Holbrook The Golden Age of Quackery

James Harvey Young The Toadstool Millionaires

Druin Burch Taking the Medicine

Supplemented by Britannica’s biography of Thomas W Dyott and “Was There Really a Dr Robertson?“

Other sources on Lydia Pinkham:

Jean Burton Lydia Pinkham is Her Name

Rebecca Rego Barry “Was Lydia E. Pinkham the Queen of Quackery?“

On how women have been treated by the medical profession see also

Elinor Cleghorn Unwell Women

Caroline Criado Perez Invisible Women

Werner Troesken’s classic article about the economics of snake oil is The Elasticity of Demand With Respect to Product Failures: see also Chris Dillow’s essay about Troesken and politics.