Tim Harford's Blog, page 25

Lockdowns are over. WFH isn’t. Why?

Each February, the team at NPR’s fabulous Planet Money podcast announce their Valentines, nerdy love letters to under-appreciated data releases or obscure supply-chain trackers. This year, co-host Amanda Aronczyk revealed that her Valentine would be for . . . the office. She loved the camaraderie of office life.

As love letters go, it was bittersweet. At the beginning of the day, Aronczyk was “walking down the street like a boss with my box of a dozen Valentine-themed doughnuts” looking forward to the cheers from her colleagues at Planet Money’s small office in midtown Manhattan. But most of the team had scattered across the country, and all her meetings that day were on Zoom. At the day’s end, she sounded deflated as she stashed six uneaten doughnuts in the freezer before heading home.

Nearly three years after Italy introduced the first nationwide lockdown of the pandemic, much of the world remains in the grip of what economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis have called “Long Social Distancing”. Although the acute phase of the pandemic has passed in the western world, working patterns have not returned to normal.

Barrero et al have been running a survey of working-age Americans since May of 2020, targeting those with a history of paid work. They find that before the pandemic, less than 5 per cent of working days were spent working from home — the result of a long slow climb from less than 0.5 per cent in the 1960s through 1 per cent in the early 1990s. In the first wave of the pandemic, that figure jumped to more than 60 per cent before quickly ebbing.

But what is striking is that the number has plateaued at levels that would have seemed unimaginable before the pandemic. In January 2021, more than 35 per cent of paid working days were from home. By January 2022 — after a spectacular vaccine rollout and the infection of a large proportion of the US population — 33 per cent of days were still worked from home. That number stayed around 30 per cent throughout last year before dipping to 27 per cent in the survey for January.

Maybe that recent dip is statistical noise; maybe it reflects new habits and policies for a new year. Either way, even 27 per cent is a radical shift from the 5 per cent of 2019. And working from home is particularly prevalent in the largest US cities — which may explain Amanda Aronczyk’s inability to give away a dozen doughnuts in midtown Manhattan.

Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, while not directly comparable, suggests a similar picture: between 30 and 40 per cent of workers say they’ve worked from home “in the past seven days”, and there is little sign of that number falling. It is hard to believe that we will return to 95 per cent attendance at the workplace in my lifetime.

Why is that, and what might the implications be? Some people still fear infection, but for most, the change reflects a lasting shift in how we view remote and hybrid working. That shift has several elements behind it.

The first is that we’ve learnt that working from home works better than we had expected. In a now-famous 2015 study, Bloom and colleagues had found that workers at a Chinese travel agency were substantially more productive after being randomly assigned to work remotely. At the time, few people seemed to believe that this conclusion would carry over to most office work. They were wrong. Having been forced by the pandemic to give remote working a try, many people have discovered it works perfectly well.

The second element is investment: we’ve stumped up for new webcams and comfortable office chairs at home, and replaced patchy WiFi with wired broadband connections. We’ve also taught ourselves to use Zoom and Teams, Dropbox and Google Docs. Attending a video conference or giving a virtual presentation once seemed a Herculean task with inadequate equipment. Now it feels barely more complex than writing an email.

And the third pillar supporting this permanent shift is that it’s a shift we’ve made together. That changes the social dynamic, by destigmatising those who choose to work some or all of their days from home. It reduces the benefits of commuting: why would Aronczyk even bother going to a Manhattan office if everyone else is dialling in from Brooklyn, upstate New York or even Mexico?

As someone who rarely used to visit the FT offices even before the pandemic, the fact that others have shifted has noticeable effects on me. I can easily drop into London seminars, office training sessions or even an exercise class from my study in Oxford. These events would rarely be streamed in the past. It would have seemed strange to do so. Now it seems strange not to.

Some implications of all this have been well-explored: the property market will have to adjust, perhaps with more apartments and less office space in previously prime locations; restaurants, shops and gyms in smaller towns are likely to enjoy the benefits of providing to residents working remotely in distant cities; managers will have to figure out how to manage at a distance, and how to navigate the complexities of hybrid working arrangements.

Yet there is another lesson to be learnt — a lesson about our own inertia. Most of the people working from home are no longer doing so out of caution or social responsibility. They’re doing it because they like it. They could have been working from home back in 2019, but most of them weren’t. It raises the question: what other personal and cultural habits have we acquired that we should be rethinking? It shouldn’t take a global pandemic for us to find better ways to live our lives.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 24 February 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.

Most Budget-day tweaks make the tax system worse. These wouldn’t

The tired metaphor is that the chancellor will try to pull a rabbit out of the hat on Budget day. The sleight of hand is usually less delightful: he’ll stuff some frozen prawns behind the radiator and a turd underneath the sofa, and hope to make a getaway before anyone notices the stink.

The game is so predictable and such useful theatre for the ­government (and the press) that it is easy to lose sight of the absurdity. Each Budget day, the chancellor shuffles taxes, tweaks rules, makes surreptitious changes to allowances and promises to come back and do the same thing in 12 months — or sooner, if we are unlucky. This is no way to run a tax system.

The endless fiddling has a political logic, but it is both a symptom and cause of a shambolic patchwork of taxes. That patchwork is unfair, distorts the economy and promotes the crime of tax evasion as well as levels of paperwork that should also be deemed criminal.

“It’s hard to think of a tax that doesn’t need serious reform,” says Helen Miller, deputy director and head of tax at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

One common problem is that fundamentally similar things end up being taxed differently. The eye-catching examples — are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or cakes? — are less important than distortions to how we all earn money. A person can do much the same work in the same conditions whether employed, ­self-employed or incorporated as a small business, but the tax implications are very different. There is no justification for this (muttering about entrepreneurship included) and considerable effort is squandered by accountants trying to figure out how to help clients squeeze through this income tax loophole — and by HMRC trying to work out how to stop them.

With some sensible allowances for capital investment, it is possible to tax all income on the same basis. But we don’t. And this is just one of ­hundreds of examples of clumsy taxation.

A government with brains and stomach would scrape away the decades of bodging and rebuild the tax system on firmer foundations, but it’s been a while since such a government was seen around here.

For an achingly nerdy vision of what a better tax system could be, skim “Tax by Design”, the conclusions of a review conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies under the leadership of Nobel ­laureate James Mirrlees in 2010. (Mirrlees died in 2018, having seen his review almost completely ignored by the government.)

“Tax by Design” argues that a good tax system should strive to be as simple as possible and neutral between similar activities, such as buying cakes or biscuits, or earning income from different sources. It should also be progressive, in the sense that the rich should pay a larger share of their incomes.

But — and this is something almost everyone gets wrong — having a progressive tax system overall does not require progressivity in each detail. For example, in a gesture towards promoting social goals, the UK system has a long list of VAT exemptions and discounts on everything from food to children’s shoes to tampons to chartering helicopters. Helicopters notwithstanding, many of these seem appealing. Who wants to tax a poor family’s efforts to buy potatoes?

Yet if we honestly ask about the best way an entire tax system could help the poorest in society, the answer would not be cheaper food and children’s clothes for all but more generous benefits and better-quality public services.

Going down a list of products and tax-exempting the ones that seem like Good Things — from “magnetic tape adapted for recording speech for blind people together with the apparatus for making and playing the adapted tape and certain low-vision aids” to, um, helicopters — is not the foundation of a fair and progressive society. You may feel it’s impossible to have a progressive tax system with a broad, high rate of VAT, yet Denmark seems to manage it.

Not that Denmark, or anywhere, is perfect. US income taxes appear to be designed to maximise the pain of compliance, something which suits tax preparation companies and small-government propagandists but is simply absurd. Miller told me the UK’s messy system is not exceptional.

There are some radical ideas around for tax reform. A land value tax is a perennial idea, for good reasons. Or what about a universal marginal income tax rate of 50 per cent, pivoting at an income of £10,000 a year? If you earned nothing, you’d be £10,000 below the pivot point and would thus receive 50 per cent of that, or £5,000, as a ­negative income tax. If you earned exactly £10,000 you’d pay no income tax. If you earned £110,000 you’d pay £50,000. The same marginal tax rate for everyone, but a progressive system overall. Cute.

But one needn’t be cute to make the system fairer, simpler, more transparent and less distorting. And while the list of possible reforms is long, the list of sensible principles is bracingly short:

Levy VAT on as many products as possible Merge National Insurance with income tax, and tax all income on the same basis regardless of source Reform council tax to make it less regressive and based on ­property valuations from the ­current century Automatically update thresholds and allowances with inflation Spend the proceeds of all these reforms to help those in need.

Will it happen? Simplifying reforms are sometimes introduced, from the introduction of universal credit to the introduction of VAT. But not often. Rather than discussing the ­broad principles of fair and effective taxation on Budget day, we’ll be trying to sniff out those prawns before they start to rot.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 10 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 Vigilante and the Air Traffic Controller

Air traffic controllers are meant to stop aircraft flying into one another… and if they fail, computer systems are installed to warn pilots of a coming collision. But sometimes these humans and computers give conflicting and confusing advice. Who to believe?

When a cargo plane and a Russian airliner collided in just such a situation, the authorities scrambled to work out how to prevent a repeat of the disaster… but a grieving father decided to seek revenge on those he held responsible.

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Further reading

Accident investigation report outline concerning Boeing  747-400D JA8904 is the English translation of the official report into the Japanese near-miss incident, which was also reported at the time by the BBC. 

The trainee air traffic controller Hideki Hachitani and his supervisor, Yasuko Momii, published an open letter in the June 2006 edition of The Controller, the Journal of Air Traffic Control. The conclusion of their legal case was reported in 2010 by outlets including Flight Global.

German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation Report AX-001-1-2/02 is the English translation of the official report into the crash over Uberlingen. Another valuable source was Identifying the Factors that Contributed to the Ueberlingen Midair Collision, a paper published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 2004.

Alastair Gee travelled to North Ossetia to report for The Times on the aftermath of Vitaly Kaloyev’s murder of Peter Nielsen. The Irish Times also covered the case in depth.   

The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad?

Elon Musk has given us someone to blame for the fact Twitter seems so terrible nowadays, but it’s far from being the only internet platform that seems terrible. Facebook is a mess. Young people tell me that Instagram has ruined itself in the quest to be like TikTok and that TikTok is a shadow of its former self.

I wouldn’t know about any of that. What I do know is that Amazon, once famous for providing an amazing internet shopping experience, now boasts a website groaning with spammy ads. Musk loves to be at the centre of every drama, but there is something bigger and broader at work than his travails.

The writer and activist Cory Doctorow has coined a memorable term for this tendency for platforms to fall apart: enshittification. “Here is how platforms die,” he wrote in January. “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

Perhaps this is just nostalgia and such complaints are the disaffected grumbling of an out-of-touch cohort of early adopters. Or it could be the “headwinds” effect, familiar to any cyclist, which is that you always notice headwinds but take tailwinds for granted. Similarly, whenever a platform changes, we obsess over what is worse and quickly forget what is better. This negativity makes evolutionary sense: the secret of happiness may be to focus on what’s going well, but the secret of survival is to pay attention to what’s going badly.

Nevertheless, I’m quite sure enshittification is real. The basic idea was sketched out in economic literature in the 1980s, before the world wide web existed. Economic theorists lack Doctorow’s gift for a potent neologism, but they certainly understand how to make a formal model of a product going to the dogs.

There are two interrelated issues at play. The first is that internet platforms exhibit network effects: people use Facebook because their friends use Facebook; sellers use Amazon because it’s where the buyers are, while buyers use Amazon because it’s where the sellers are.

Second, people using these platforms experience switching costs if they wish to move from one to another. In the case of Twitter, the switching cost is the hassle of rebuilding your social graph using an alternative such as Mastodon, even if all the same people use it. In the case of Amazon, the switching cost includes saying goodbye to your digitally locked eBooks and audiobooks if you move over to a different provider. Doctorow is fascinated by the way these switching costs can be weaponised. His short story, Unauthorized Bread, describes a proprietorial toaster that only accepts bread from authorised bakers.

Both switching costs and network effects tend to lead to enshittification because platform providers see early adopters as an investment in future profits. Platforms run at a loss for years, subsidising consumers — and sometimes suppliers — in an effort to grow as quickly as possible. When switching costs are at play, the logic is that companies attract customers who they can later exploit. When network effects apply, companies are trying to attract customers because they will draw in others to be exploited. Either way, exploitation is the goal, and the profit-maximising playbook will recommend bargains followed by rip-offs.

Now for the question only an economist could ask: is this bad? It might not be. “Bargain, then rip‑off” is an annoying narrative arc for any customer, but if those early bargains are good enough then the customer may end up ahead on the deal. Competition for the market can be as vigorous, dynamic and customer-focused as competition in the market. It will all seem the same to customers. Even if an early adopter has been showered with free goodies, or with products and shipping provided well below cost, what they will perceive when the laws of economic gravity reassert themselves is — well, enshittification.

While it’s possible in theory for competition to work well even when network effects and switching costs exist, it’s probably best to assume that they are gumming up the works. Paul Klemperer, one of the pioneers of switching-cost models, has argued that antitrust authorities should try to ensure compatibility between rival platforms, reducing switching costs and pushing against the ability of any one company to monopolise a network.

That means maximising interoperability: the ability to send posts to your Facebook friends, and read their posts, even if you’ve decided to leave Facebook and use a different social network; the ability to take your eBooks and audiobooks out of Amazon’s ecosystem (you paid for them, after all); the ability to put any kind of ink in your printer, any kind of razor blade on your handle and any kind of bread in your toaster.

Interoperability cannot be guaranteed by law. There are too many hard cases, too many grey areas, too many legitimate technical obstacles. But regulators can operate with a presumption in favour of interoperability, as they do for switching phone providers or making transfers between banks.

Market forces cannot solve every problem, but they can do a lot. And they work much better if users are free to come and to go. Everything in a market economy has the potential to be enshittified: the taxi company can be late every time; your local bistro can serve you microwaved ready meals; the coffee shop can double its prices. They don’t, because they know you’ll leave and never come back. There’s a lesson in that for the platforms — and those who regulate them.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 3 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.

Why children can be better than adults at spotting misinformation

I’ve spent years trying to help people make sense of the world around them and particularly to make sense of the numbers that describe that world. But for the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with a new challenge: can I do the same thing for nine- to 13-year-olds? I’m hoping that I can help these young people become “truth detectives”, discerning what’s true and what isn’t in a time that can seem bewildering.

This might seem an unpromising task. Most adults struggle with complex statistics and many feel powerless to evaluate almost any claim in the form of a number. An unnervingly large minority doubt straightforward claims. For example, the fact that the main Covid-19 vaccines are effective and have a very low risk of serious side-effects, or that the Earth is a near-spherical body orbiting the sun. If the adults can’t cope, what hope do pre‑teens have?

Children, after all, can be pretty gullible. Take the widespread belief in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s a charming fiction invented by an advertising copywriter in the 1930s, designed to make children with few friends feel better about themselves. It’s transparently absurd. Santa Claus is magical enough to deliver presents all round the world in a single night, so he is hardly likely to need some kind of strange nasal fog-lamp. Yet, young children believe in Rudolph.

It’s easy to lose hope and to conclude that those impressionable young brains will be helpless in a world full of disinformation. I take a different view. Children may not have the reflexive cynicism of many adults, but that’s a strength, not a weakness.

Many of the most corrosive lies currently circulating have taken hold not because the conspiracy believers will believe anything, but because they start by trusting nothing. In order to believe that Covid-19 was a con or that the 2020 election was stolen, one must first disbelieve traditional media outlets, scientific journals and institutions of longstanding. All three, alas, sometimes give us reasons to doubt them, but those reasons shouldn’t lead people into a dogmatic rejection of anything the “mainstream” says. That defensive doubt might feel smart, but it’s really a cognitive surrender born out of a sense of helplessness and despair.

Young people think very differently about the world. They ask questions — so many questions! — listen to the answers they receive and are constantly trying to make sense of it all. Like adults, they can sometimes twist their logic to win arguments or to fit in. But while many adults do this all the time, children are actually trying to understand the world, something some grown-ups stopped doing a very long time ago.

When advising people how to make sense of the world, I emphasise three C’s: calm, context and curiosity. Calm, because our emotional reactions to the numbers we see in the news are often stronger than rational thought; we should notice those reactions and try not to let them overwhelm us.

Context, because numbers are meaningless without it; we need to understand whether they are large or small, rising or falling and the methods behind them.

And curiosity, because the most important step in understanding the world around us is to want to understand. All too often we seize on factual claims to win an argument or signal loyalty to a viewpoint, rather than because we are eager to know more.

So how do kids fare in the quest for calm, context and curiosity? They often lack context, it’s true. But that helps with the calm: they tend not to invest so much emotion in arguments that make adults frightened or angry. And they’re wonderfully curious: they want to understand what’s going on, they hoover up new ideas and they never stop asking who, how and above all why.

We adults underrate the value of this curiosity. We find those questions by turns cute, irritating and perilous. What if children stumble upon facts that might scare them? But children can handle the truth; even my excellent book editors occasionally needed to be reminded of that. At one stage, for example, in my new book The Truth Detective, I discussed the lessons we’ve learnt about information and disinformation from research into the health risks of cigarettes. My editors worried that young readers with parents who smoked would be frightened or upset to hear cigarettes cause cancer. I’m pleased to say I was able to persuade them that the truth was more important than a comforting silence.

Nor is the information ecosphere quite as fiendish as we adults sometimes fear. There are online echo chambers of hate and rabbit holes of conspiracy thinking, it’s true. But there are also vivid, accessible guides to every topic imaginable, from the trolley problem in moral philosophy, to the ingenious engineering of how petrol pumps automatically switch themselves off. It’s never been easier to find fun, clear and deep perspectives on the complex world around us.

The chief obstacle is deliberate ignorance: we don’t ask questions because we don’t care to know the answers. That’s why I’ve long argued that curiosity is so important — and why young readers are often better equipped to be truth detectives than their parents.

Michael Blastland, the statistically savvy journalist who co-created the More or Less programme I now present on BBC Radio 4, recently reminded me why it’s useful to think of our quest for understanding as being detective work.

“The sleuthing is part of the joy,” he wrote, “something I think journalism can miss.”

Trying to understand the world can indeed be a joy. And journalists are not the only grown-ups who sometimes forget this.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 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 – Office Hell: The demise of the playful workspace

In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They would sweep away corner offices and cubicles and replace them with zany open spaces, as well as innovative portable computers and phones. A brand new era of “hot-desking” had arrived.

Problems quickly began. Disgruntled employees found themselves hauling temperamental, clunky laptops and armfuls of paperwork all over the office; some even had to use the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets. Soon, the unhappy nomads had had enough.

Bad execution was to blame for the failure of this “playful” workspace. But Chiat/Day had made another mistake here, too – one that was more serious, more fundamental and altogether more common.

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Further reading

Warren Berger’s brilliant Wired article about Chiat/Day was published on 1 February 1999 as “Lost in Space“. Other sources on Chiat/Day include Herbert Muschamp “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Ad World” in the New York Times, 16 October 1994, and Planet Money’s podcast “Open Office“.

On Pessac, see Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, Philippe Boudon’s Lived-In Architecture and my own book Messy. On the Pixar HQ see Catmull & Wallace Creativity, Inc and Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs.

Haslam and Knight’s research is written up as “Cubicle, Sweet Cubicle” in Scientific American Mind Sep/Oct 2010. Data on working from home is at WFH Research.

Can gamers outplay rapacious capitalists?

Forty years ago, a kid from down the street told me about this cool new game, Tunnels & Trolls. Something about his explanation kept eluding my grasp. Was it a computer game, like Pac-Man or Chuckie Egg? A board game, like Risk or Monopoly? No. There was no computer and, usually, no board. Much of the game took part in the imagination, with the players assuming the roles of heroic warriors or powerful wizards. A “game master” described the setting, used a combination of dice and judgment to decide what was possible, and even improvised all the bit parts in the drama. It was a “role-playing game”, a radically new way of having fun. At the age of 11, I was spellbound.

Role-playing games are having a moment in the spotlight — a moment that offers valuable lessons to the rest of the economy. The oldest and by far the most popular game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), boasts tens of millions of players — including celebrities such as Vin Diesel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert and Deborah Ann Woll. A big-budget movie is imminent, with D&D hoping to join Marvel and Star Wars as a major entertainment brand.

But with increasing power comes increasing responsibility, and the hobby has been convulsed in recent weeks by a question: who owns our game? The answer to that question is not obvious. D&D is owned by Wizards of the Coast, now a subsidiary of the toy-and-game behemoth Hasbro. Hasbro clearly owns the trademarks and many of the creative expressions of the game’s monsters, imaginary worlds and fantastical spells.

But the basic idea of a role-playing game itself, while closely associated with D&D and its 1970s creation by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, is uncopyrightable. My gateway to the hobby, Tunnels & Trolls, winked at its intellectual debt to D&D. The rules were different but the fundamental idea was the same.

More to the point, that fundamental idea means that the fun of the game is created in play. The players invent their own characters, while the game master will typically develop the scenario from scratch. To suggest that Hasbro owns what happens around the gaming table makes about as much sense as suggesting that a dinner-party conversation sparked by a New Yorker article is the property of Condé Nast.

Hasbro, of course, has not tried to claim ownership of gaming experiences. But it has made a clumsy lunge for a bigger slice of the pie. Back in 2000, Wizards of the Coast published an Open Gaming Licence (OGL), allowing other publishers to create material that was compatible with D&D. (Intellectual-property nerds suggest that this compatible material was always legal, but having it down in black-and-white was reassuring to the sprawling cottage industry of role-playing publishers.)

The OGL seemed irrevocable, but in January this year the journalist Linda Codega reported on a leaked proposal that suggested Hasbro was about to rip up the OGL and replace it with something far more onerous. After a huge outcry from players and small publishers, Hasbro relented and even adopted a more standard and more permissive Creative Commons licence. Ten thousand semi-professional game writers breathed a sigh of relief.

While I have little sympathy for Hasbro, I do understand the impulse behind their ill-fated land-grab. To use an unlovely word, these games are hard to “monetise” — or as an economist would put it, they produce a huge consumer surplus. For example, my all-time favourite game is Dragon Warriors. It cost me £10.50, which even for a teenager in the 1980s wasn’t a lot of money. For that, I acquired a game that 40 years later I still love and play. The publisher, Corgi, and authors, Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson, benefited financially from my purchase of the game — but their gain was tiny compared with mine.

Hasbro does a better job of squeezing money out of gamers, but faces the same challenge. You can download the rules free of charge, or pay about $25 for a starter set. For less than $200, gamers can own all the core publications in glossy hardback, and they need never spend another cent to enjoy a lifetime of gaming.

So what is a rapacious capitalist to do? The real money lies in repeat purchases. Football is hugely profitable, but not from the business of selling footballs. Instead, sell tickets to see famous people play, along with branded shirts, TV subscriptions and bets on who might win.

The table-top gaming hobby is smaller, but the same principle applies. Wizards of the Coast made a small fortune selling collectible cards for a card game, and it provides digital gaming tools on a subscription basis. Games Workshop, the game retailer that sold me my first copy of Tunnels & Trolls, dropped role-playing games in favour of wargames, a hobby conducive to the selling of countless miniature figures.

In games, as in so many other parts of life, the good stuff is free (or nearly so) and businesses make money selling us the accessories. From internet search to penicillin to the flush lavatory, the world is full of products that are of huge value but which cost very little. It’s reason to be grateful, and watchful too: right now, someone, somewhere is trying to figure out how to sell you a monthly subscription to your own toilet.

But watchfulness can work. Hasbro’s attempt to squeeze more money out of gamers has alerted younger players to something we grognards have been insisting on for decades: we own the games. Once you’ve grasped the idea of a role-playing game — as you might once have learnt the idea of football or a conversation — you don’t need anything expensive to keep playing for ever. You just need some friends and some imagination.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 February 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is OUT THIS WEEK! (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.

Foolproof by Sander van der Linden

Rukmani and her family were driving to a temple in Tamil Nadu, India, in May 2018, when they stopped to ask for directions from an elderly local lady. It seemed a safe enough thing to do.

The family hadn’t realised that almost every local with access to WhatsApp had been receiving dire warnings of “child lifters”, forwarded from group chat to group chat. The local lady thought these over-friendly strangers matched the description and raised the alarm. A crowd descended on the family car and began a vicious mob beating, which killed Rukmani and left the others close to death. Misinformation can be fatal.

There are plenty of people trying to fool us these days — and plenty of people happy to be fooled. Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge university, has been studying the problem for years, and promises to help us “build immunity” to misinformation.

This is a noble goal. But why are we susceptible to misinformation? As Foolproof (US) (UK) explains, there are many answers to that question. Consider the “illusory truth effect”, discovered in the 1970s. If you ask people to evaluate the truth or falsehood of a series of statements, such as “potassium is the lightest of all metals” or “Lake Superior is the largest lake in the world”, then they are more likely to rate statements as true if they’ve seen them before. Familiar statements feel true. This is an unfortunate cognitive shortcut; neither example statement is true, and alas you may now start to feel otherwise.

The illusory truth effect is an instructive example of the perils of fighting misinformation. It is all too easy for journalists, educators and fact-checkers to amplify and reinforce falsehoods while attempting to debunk them. But the illusory truth effect is just one of dozens of factors to consider in understanding misinformation and disinformation. “Identity-protective cognition”, for example, where we place a higher value on defending our place in a social group than on discovering the truth, and “nano-targeted dark posts”, where some political campaign uses your psychological profile to show you a Facebook advert designed for you and you alone. Some of these factors are as old as human nature, and some are as new as the latest app.

There is a great deal to chew over here, and the good news is that Foolproof provides an overview that is authoritative, comprehensive and chatty. You won’t find a better survey of what is now a vast interdisciplinary landscape, and that alone is a great service.

The bad news is that the attempt to replace academic obfuscations with clear, compelling prose is not wholly successful. Van der Linden’s use of parentheses is sometimes (hard) to parse. His “helpful schema” on page 36 was beyond my understanding and contains terms which seem important but do not appear in the index. He is also too fond of recounting the occasions on which he or his ideas were featured in important places with important people.

Still, what really matters is whether his “psychological vaccine against fake news” is effective. Foolproof offers a range of ideas for fighting misinformation, but places most emphasis on the technique for which van der Linden is best known: inoculation against lies. The idea is to “pre-bunk” the false claim by mentioning it and warning against it in advance. This is not a completely new idea, but van der Linden makes a persuasive case that it works, it lasts, and it is practical. For example, YouTube could run pre-bunking messages ahead of conspiratorial videos in the spot usually reserved for adverts.

Those hoping for silver bullets will be disappointed. Could Rukmani’s life have been saved by technical changes which slowed down the rate at which WhatsApp messages were shared? Maybe. Foolproof explains that such changes are “useful”, four pages after warning that they are “rarely sufficient”.

That is a frustrating equivocation; it’s also true. In the battle against misinformation, tools which are useful but rarely sufficient may be all we can expect.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 22 February 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is now out (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 – LaLa Land: Galileo’s Warning (Classic)

Galileo tried to teach us that when we add more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster, those layers of complexity may eventually be what causes the catastrophe. His basic lesson has been ignored in nuclear power plants, financial markets and at the Oscars…all resulting in chaos.

Featuring: Archie Panjabi, Mircea Monroe, Enzo Cilenti, Ed Gaughan and Rufus Wright

Producers: Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. Sound design/mix/musical composition: Pascal Wyse. Fact checking: Joseph Fridman. Editor: Julia Barton. Recording: Wardour Studios, London. GSI Studios, New York. PR: Christine Ragasa.

First released November 22nd, 2019

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading

Among many, many journalistic accounts of the LaLa Land / Moonlight mix-up, try the Hollywood Reporter’s oral history and the BBC’s Truth Behind Envelopgate.

Benjamin Bannister on typography at the Oscars.

Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences.

Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents introduces the idea of complex, tightly-coupled systems and has good accounts both of the Three Mile Island and the Fermi reactor accidents. Just after we’d recorded the episode, I heard the sad news that Charles had died on November 12th. He’ll be missed.

The official report of the commission investigating Three Mile Island, chaired by John Kemeny.

Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcik first drew the link between Perrow’s work and the La La Land fiasco. It’s a great book; check it out.

Dowell and Hendershott’s classic article about backfiring safety systems is No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Case Studies of Incidents and Potential Incidents Caused by Protective Systems.

Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things discusses confusing instrumentation.

My previous article What Banks Should Learn From A Nuclear Reactor uses Charles Perrow’s ideas to draw parallels between banking and nuclear accidents.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail has the scoop on what happened when Bob Willumstad met Tim Geithner.

The new three-envelope system was described in Vanity Fair.

Why Chatbots are bound to spout bullshit

Much has changed since 1986, when the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an essay in an obscure journal, Raritan, titled “On Bullshit”. Yet the essay, later republished as a slim bestseller, remains unnervingly relevant. Frankfurt’s brilliant insight was that bullshit lies outside the realm of truth and lies. A liar cares about the truth and wishes to obscure it. A bullshitter is indifferent to whether his statements are true: “He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Typically for a 20th-century writer, Frankfurt described the bullshitter as “he” rather than “she” or “they”. But now it’s 2023, we may have to refer to the bullshitter as “it” — because a new generation of chatbots are poised to generate bullshit on an undreamt-of scale.

Consider what happened when David Smerdon, an economist at the University of Queensland, asked the leading chatbot ChatGPT: “What is the most cited economics paper of all time?” ChatGPT said that it was “A Theory of Economic History” by Douglass North and Robert Thomas, published in the Journal of Economic History in 1969 and cited more than 30,000 times since. It added that the article is “considered a classic in the field of economic history”. A good answer, in some ways. In other ways, not a good answer, because the paper does not exist.

Why did ChatGPT invent this article? Smerdon speculates as follows: the most cited economics papers often have “theory” and “economic” in them; if an article starts “a theory of economic . . . ” then “ . . . history” is a likely continuation. Douglass North, Nobel laureate, is a heavily cited economic historian, and he wrote a book with Robert Thomas. In other words, the citation is magnificently plausible. What ChatGPT deals in is not truth; it is plausibility.

And how could it be otherwise? ChatGPT doesn’t have a model of the world. Instead, it has a model of the kinds of things that people tend to write. This explains why it sounds so astonishingly believable. It also explains why the chatbot can find it challenging to deliver true answers to some fairly straightforward questions.

It’s not just ChatGPT. Meta’s shortlived “Galactica” bot was infamous for inventing citations. And it’s not just economics papers. I recently heard from the author Julie Lythcott-Haims, newly elected to Palo Alto’s city council. ChatGPT wrote a story about her victory. “It got so much right and was well written,” she told me. But Lythcott-Haims is black, and ChatGPT gushed about how she was the first black woman to be elected to the city council. Perfectly plausible, completely untrue.

Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI, explained on Ezra Klein’s podcast: “Everything it produces sounds plausible because it’s all derived from things that humans have said. But it doesn’t always know the connections between the things that it’s putting together.” Which prompted Klein’s question, “What does it mean to drive the cost of bullshit to zero”?

Experts disagree over how serious the confabulation problem is. ChatGPT has made remarkable progress in a very short space of time. Perhaps the next generation, in a year or two, will not suffer from the problem. Marcus thinks otherwise. He argues that the pseudo-facts won’t go away without a fundamental rethink of the way these artificial intelligence systems are built.

I’m not qualified to speculate on that question, but one thing is clear enough: there is plenty of demand for bullshit in the world and, if it’s cheap enough, it will be supplied in enormous quantities. Think about how assiduously we now need to defend ourselves against spam, noise and empty virality. And think about how much harder it will be when the online world is filled with interesting text that nobody ever wrote, or fascinating photographs of people and places that do not exist.

Consider the famous “fake news” problem, which originally referred to a group of Macedonian teenagers who made up sensational stories for the clicks and thus the advertising revenue. Deception was not their goal; their goal was attention. The Macedonian teens and ChatGPT demonstrate the same point. It’s a lot easier to generate interesting stories if you’re unconstrained by respect for the truth.

I wrote about the bullshit problem in early 2016, before the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. It was bad then; it’s worse now. After Trump was challenged on Fox News about retweeting some false claim, he replied, “Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic?” ChatGPT might say the same.

If you care about being right, then yes, you should check. But if you care about being noticed or being admired or being believed, then truth is incidental. ChatGPT says a lot of true things, but it says them only as a byproduct of learning to seem believable.

Chatbots have made huge leaps forward in the past couple of years, but even the crude chatbots of the 20th century were perfectly capable of absorbing human attention. MGonz passed the Turing test in 1989 by firing a stream of insults at an unwitting human, who fired a stream of insults back. ELIZA, the most famous early chatbot, would fascinate humans by appearing to listen to their troubles. “Tell me more,” it would say. “Why do you feel that way?”

These simple chatbots did enough to drag the humans down to their conversational level. That should be a warning not to let the chatbots choose the rules of engagement.

Harry Frankfurt cautioned that the bullshitter does not oppose the truth, but “pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Be warned: when it comes to bullshit, quantity has a quality of its own.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 10 February 2023.

My first children’s book, The Truth Detective is out on 15 March (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.