Tim Harford's Blog, page 27

The seven types of email you should never send

Another year, another inbox stuffed with junk. So let’s get 2023 off on the right foot, with my opinionated guide to bad email etiquette. Whether you’re a cubicle dweller or a corporate communications supremo, here are the seven types of email you should never send.

1. The redundant reminder email. Surely I do not need an email from an airline or train company or theatrical impresario reminding me to bring my ticket? A helpful reminder to the hopelessly inept, they are a colossal annoyance to everyone else. Given that the Covid rules might have changed, or the departure time rearranged, it’s risky to delete them without careful scrutiny. But when that careful scrutiny merely reveals that I will not be allowed on the plane if I don’t bring my passport, then you’re wasting the time of your 99.9 per cent least incompetent customers. Truly debased individuals can also be guilty of the redundant reminder, as in “Just re-upping this email to the top of your inbox.” Begone, Satan! My inbox has no top or bottom. It is empty, because I block psychopaths like you without mercy.

2. The omnibus email. We’ve all received missives that ramble and digress like a pub storyteller. A long and comprehensive email has its place, but if it turns out to contain four unconnected requests it is better to send four separate emails, each with a clear subject line. On which point . . .

3. The bad subject line email. I get it, you’re too busy to write good subject lines, so you’d like me to do the work instead. Do better. Also, a word to the wise: if the subject line is “Meeting on 1 March” but the meeting has moved to 8 March, then change the subject line.

4. The midnight email. Do not send an email at midnight unless you need — and have reason to expect — a response at midnight. If you’re clearing out your own inbox at night, hit “schedule send” to ensure it arrives first thing in the morning. Same applies to work emails sent at the weekend. (Also, examine your life choices.)

5. The “donotrelpy” email. This is named in honour of the emails I receive from Oxfordshire County Council from the email address donotrelpy@oxfordshire.gov.uk. The typo provides some light relief whenever I check my “waiting for” folder to note that a month ago they have promised action within 10 days. The real problem is that they’re sending emails while refusing replies (or relpies). This is common — and a false economy. Making it hard for people to reach you annoys them while sweeping your own organisational problems under the rug. Does anyone really believe that the solution to receiving angry emails is to prevent customers sending the emails?

My current crusade is against the customer service team at British Airways. It’s one thing to cancel an expensive flight, and another to stall for months on the question of compensation. But the real crime is to send me no-reply emails warning that not only is there no news about the compensation, but if I tried to contact them it would only delay my claim further. The result? They never seemed to understand the problem, never fully resolved it, and now any enemy of British Airways is my friend.

In contrast, when I recently had a problem with the financial services company Wise, every interaction with them invited me simply to reply to the email I had received. The problem was annoying and mysterious and seemed to be entirely their fault, but they fixed it. And they fixed it because I was able to exchange more substantive messages with Wise in a week than I did with British Airways in months. You might think individuals do not send “do not reply” emails, but some unusual types try, by permanently maintaining an autoreply which smugly declares that they rarely check email. Dude, switch it off when you’re sending out messages. Nothing galls like an electronic butler sneering at my prompt reply.

6. The “should have been a process” email. People on automobile production lines do not send each other emails which read “Just attached the doors, would be great if you could spray paint the car soonest”. There’s a process and people follow the process rather than talking about it over email. In A World Without Email Cal Newport argues that a lot of back-and-forth email is a tedious substitute for figuring out what the process actually should be.

7. The “please see attached” email. Why would you send this email? Maybe you are a hacker and you think “please download this virus” is too obvious? My children’s schools are not staffed by hackers, yet they seem convinced that I prefer emails which contain nothing but links to mysterious documents. As a result, if I want to check the details of a school trip, a health visit, a vaccination, exam dates or anything else, I have to click on one “please see attached letter” email after another. It’s like a lucky dip in my own inbox, except that somehow I never win the chocolate bar.

So there we have it. We all complain about email, but the problem is often not its quantity but its quality. Let us all resolve to do better.

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

The paperback of The Data Detective is now available in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

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.

Signed copies of The Truth Detective

I’ve finally received a finished copy of my first children’s book, The Truth Detective – and thanks to Ollie Mann’s fabulous illustrations it’s a thing of beauty – aimed at children aged 9-13, it’s fun, it’s feisty, and it contains statistical heroes and villains from Florence Nightingale to Darth Vader, Sherlock Holmes to Gullros the precognitive pooping cow.

In the UK you can pre-order copies from all the usual places, including signed copies from Waterstones – links and more details here. Please do consider a crafty pre-order: they’re very helpful in getting some momentum behind the book, which means it is more likely to be placed somewhere where others can see it. The book will also be available in places such as Australia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa. Alas not yet in translation or in the US or Canada – but watch this space.

The book will be out in mid March. Thanks!

Cautionary Tales – The Myth of the Million Dollar Tulip Bulb

RECORDED BEFORE AN AUDIENCE AT THE BRISTOL FESTIVAL OF ECONOMICS (17 November 2022)The Dutch went so potty over tulip bulbs in the 1600s that many were ruined when the inflated prices they were paying for the plants collapsed – that’s the oft-repeated story later promoted by best-selling Scottish writer Charles Mackay. It’s actually a gross exaggeration.

Mackay’s writings about economic bubbles bursting entertained and informed his Victorian readers – and continue to influence us today – but how did Mackay fare when faced with a stock market mania right before his eyes? The railway-building boom of the 1840s showed he wasn’t so insightful after all.

Shownotes

The essential source on this story is the work of Andrew Odlyzko, particularly “Charles Mackay’s own extraordinary popular delusions and the railway mania“.

On the tulip mania, see Anne Goldgar Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age and Mike Dash Tulipomania.

On the railway mania, see Odlyzko “Collective Hallucinations and inefficient markets” and William Quinn and John Turner’s Boom and Bust, supplemented by Christian Wolmar’s Fire and Steam and John Francis History of the English Railway.

Charlotte Bronte’s letter to Ellen Nussey is quoted in M. Hope Dodds “George Hudson and the Brontës” Brontë Studies Vol 38 No 4 Nov 2013

Your absurd hypothetical questions, answered

One of my favourite books of the year was Randall Munroe’s What If? 2, which like its predecessor offers serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. For example, “What would happen if the solar system was filled with soup out to Jupiter?” The short answer is nothing good. Munroe’s extensively researched answer begins simply with “Please make sure everyone is safely out of the Solar System before you fill it with soup.”

Or, what would happen if you installed a large iron cube cooled to absolute zero in your living room? (If you can avoid the risk that liquid oxygen collects like dew on the cube’s surface, then sets your house on fire, you’ll be fine. Just don’t lick the cube.)

Inspired, I took to Twitter to ask people for their absurd hypothetical questions about the economy, to which I might attempt serious answers. This column is too short — and this columnist insufficiently gifted — to do justice to Munroe’s books. Yet I must try; those absurd hypothetical questions aren’t going to answer themselves.

What does the world look like if all monetary transactions are now conducted with only penny coins? — Stuart Langridge

The obvious problem is that your purse would become rather heavy. The British penny weighs 3.56 grammes; put another way, £2.81 weighs a kilogramme. Most products would weigh substantially less than the coins required to buy them. A supermarket shop costing £100 will require 35.6kg of pennies, so make sure you park next to the shopping trolleys. All this would be inconvenient. People might start to figure out workarounds. What might they do? History offers a clue.

About a thousand years ago, the citizens of Sichuan, China, were ordered to use coins made of iron. (Sichuan was a frontier province, and China’s rulers didn’t want gold and silver circulating around Sichuan, possibly leaking into foreign lands.) Sichuan’s citizens immediately faced the penny problem, namely that hardly anything weighed more than the iron coins you would need to lug around to buy it. Rather than pushing around wagonloads of iron coins, merchants would write IOUs, promising to settle their bills later when it was more convenient for everyone.

Then — this step is obvious in hindsight — people started paying for things by passing around the IOUs. If the widely respected Mr Zhou bought something from my shop and wrote me an IOU, then when I went to your shop later, I could write you an IOU in turn. But you might prefer it if I gave you Mr Zhou’s IOU instead. After all, we both know that Mr Zhou always pays his debts. Now you and I, and Mr Zhou, have together created a kind of paper money. It’s a promise to repay that has a marketable value of its own that can be passed around from person to person without being redeemed with those tiresome iron coins. I suspect that if we were forced to adopt Stuart’s “pay in penny coins” system, we would invent paper or digital alternatives just as the Sichuanese did, and be back where we started.

What if we had not a minimum wage but a maximum wage? — Rachel Wrangham

The perennial concern with a minimum wage is that it might destroy jobs. Oddly, the maximum wage could have the same effect. In both cases, workers and employers need to find a sweet spot in wage negotiations: a wage that is high enough to attract the worker, but low enough to be profitable for the employer. A problem with both minimum and maximum wages is that the sweet spot may be illegal — in which case the job won’t exist. Either it is unprofitable for employers, or unattractive for the workers. Oops.

Wage rules also change the power dynamic in the workplace. Minimum wages put more bargaining power into the hands of workers. A legal wage maximum would put more bargaining power into the hands of employers. It might well increase corporate profits while reducing superstar salaries. I suspect that highly paid workers would try to find loopholes, for example, in the form of self-employment. But then self-employment has been a loophole for avoiding the minimum wage, too.

What would happen if tax wasn’t a thing? — John Cronin

The immediate consequence would be that we’d have to find another way to pay for, or go without, things such as the army, the police, roads, the NHS, schools, state pensions and repaying public debt. For a hint at what this might look like, pick up a British newspaper this month. Of course it would be more intense than that. UK government debt would be repudiated, pensioners would go back to work or beg for alms, and healthcare and schooling would be paid for in the same way as food and housing — out of people’s own pockets.

Many people might be surprised at how little difference such a radical change made to their lives. What they saved in taxes, they’d pay instead on visits to the doctor or school fees. But a huge amount of redistribution is quietly conducted through public spending, so the country would be full of people who couldn’t afford healthcare, schooling, road pricing, pensions or much of anything else.

And some things just don’t lend themselves to user fees. The Meteorological Office could probably pay for public weather forecasts through voluntary contributions, but it’s unclear that you could pay for the army, navy and air force simply by having a whip-round.

A radical alternative is to pay for public spending by printing money. This would cause inflation, and eat away at everyone’s spending power. At a first approximation, it should cost citizens about as much as their taxes would have done. The burden would fall differently, though. People with large cash holdings or nominally fixed incomes would lose most. Those who held tangible assets or were easily able to hold their wealth in foreign currencies would lose the least.

Trying to pay for all existing public spending by printing money would be disastrous fairly quickly. In the UK, the government is responsible for about half of all spending in the economy, so firing up the printing presses would soon cause chaotic hyperinflation. But if public spending were dramatically reduced, and health, education and other services were provided on a fee-for-service basis, then perhaps the printing presses could solve that nagging question of how to pay for the army. In summary: make sure everyone is safely out of the country before you abolish all taxation.

What would happen if everyone in Coventry was given £1mn on condition they didn’t leave Coventry? — Neil Pattinson

Coventry would become the Qatar of the West Midlands. With everyone in Coventry suddenly becoming a millionaire, it would be hard to persuade anyone to do unpleasant work. However unpleasant work would need to be done. That would mean persuading a new class of non-resident workers to commute into the city to do it — an arrangement that is likely to prove inefficient and expensive. Within the city’s boundaries, it would be absurd to try to produce anything other than Michelin-starred restaurant meals or luxury spa treatments for Coventry’s original residents. And the whole thing would end in tears if the money ran out. On the upside, Coventry would host a fantastic World Cup.

With apologies to Randall Munroe. Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 December 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

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Cautionary Tales double header – When a Plague Struck World of Warcraft, and Blood on the Tracks

I have a special start to the year for you: two cracking shorter Cautionary Tales, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers. (Pushkin+ remains the place to hear other exclusive titbits, and perhaps most obviously to listen to the show uninterrupted by any advertising.)  

Happy New Year – and I hope you enjoy these Cautionary Tales Shorts.

Shownotes

When a Plague Struck World of Warcraft

Our sources included reporting from PC Gamer, Wired, the Washington Post, GamaSutra and Engadget. I do recommend checking out the Imaginary Worlds podcast both on this particular story, and in general. It’s great.

Also see: The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics Lofgren, Eric T et al.The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 7, Issue 9, 625 – 629

Blood on the Tracks

A major source was, of course, the inquest report. Another key source was a long piece in the Guardian by Michael Simkins, in which Simkins interviewed the elderly survivor Peter Stoddart. Eric Hollnagel’s research into “work as imagined” and “work as done” is published in, for example, Resilient Health Care, Volume 2, The Resilience of Everyday Clinical Work 2015.

Storage is one of the least sexy words around. That’s a problem

In January 2020, the Harford family filled a spare cupboard with pasta and tinned food. Our “Brexit cupboard” was intended to protect us in case there were disruptions to trade after the UK left the EU on January 31. As I pointed out to my wife, it was probably pointless: any issues would be minor and were more likely to affect perishables than pasta. Still: the Brexit cupboard cost little and afforded some gallows humour, so why not?

A few weeks later, the Brexit cupboard became the pandemic cupboard, and we felt lucky to be sitting on a small mountain of tagliatelle.

Storage is one of the least sexy words in the English language. This is a problem, because when a crisis hits, it’s too late to start building an extra cupboard, then filling it with supplies. Modern economies have shown themselves to be remarkably adaptable in a crisis, but not infinitely adaptable. Some stockpiles of medical supplies would have been invaluable during the early stages of the pandemic.

More recently, the price of natural gas in Europe went negative: you could get paid to burn gas. This was an astonishing development given how exorbitant gas prices were over the summer, but it is easy to explain. Households and businesses have been saving energy, while European nations have been desperately trying to fill their gas reservoirs, from tanks to underground caverns. The capacity to conserve and import gas briefly outpaced the capacity to store it.

This is good news. It would be better news if a few more of those underground caverns were available. (The UK has little such storage, even now that the decommissioned Rough facility off the coast of Yorkshire has been reopened. It is unlikely to be able to operate anywhere near its pre-closure capacity.)

It is tempting to conclude that we simply don’t invest enough in storage; that everyone should have their own Brexit cupboard, that governments were grossly culpable in not maintaining good stocks of medical supplies, and that closing the Rough facility was utter foolishness. But is this clamour for more storage simply hindsight talking? Storage is often expensive, and there is no end to the list of things that could be stored — pasta when the need is for vegetables; ventilators when the need is for bioreactor linings to make vaccines. Whenever a crisis emerges, we regret not taking more precautions, but the cost of taking every possible precaution might be more than the cost of the occasional shortfall.

Still, there are reasons to believe we do underinvest in storage. First, the market for storage is stigmatised. Consider the following simple business model: I build a storage facility, and when times are good I fill it with tanks of cooking gas, sacks of rice, shelves of bottled water, and bundle after bundle of toilet paper. Then, when the crisis hits, I triple the prices and sell my stock. To an economist, this is a noble endeavour. I’m taking a risk. I’m encouraging the producers of gas, rice, water and loo paper to keep going when prices are low. I’m meeting the needs of consumers who otherwise face empty shelves. Because of my investment, the low prices are a little higher, and the high prices a little lower — in other words, my speculative profiteering is actually reducing volatility. But will anybody thank me for any of this? Of course not.

In a landmark 1986 study, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler gathered evidence that most people find this sort of behaviour unacceptable. (For example, 82 per cent of respondents thought it was unfair for a hardware store to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm.) We could argue over whether these feelings of outrage at “profiteers” are simply mistaken or tap into some deeper wisdom, but the practical point is that firms know that they will be criticised if they build up stores and try to sell them at a profit in a crisis. As a result, they will spend less on storage than they should.

A second problem is that supply interruptions have a large social cost. The cost of a blackout falls partly on the electricity supplier but mostly on customers, and so the supplier is likely to skimp on storage, backups and other ways to improve reliability.

Then there is the third problem, which is that some kinds of storage are extremely expensive. Electricity storage is a particularly urgent example given the rapid and welcome shift of electricity generation to intermittent wind and solar. The price of batteries has plummeted, but they are still costly and work only briefly. Pumped hydroelectric power is cheaper, but no trivial feat — it involves pumping whole reservoirs uphill when electricity is plentiful.

Could the storage problem be solved? Governments could subsidise some forms of storage and stockpiling, from gasfields to battery factories. They could do more to encourage trade and collaboration, as these are — sometimes — substitutes for storage. And they could invest more in early warnings of trouble. They will need to stand ready to resist the inevitable grumbles that the stockpiles constitute a waste of taxpayers’ money. But to list this set of ambitions is to understand that the storage problem will always be with us.

For now, the Brexit cupboard remains well stocked. I just wish it was well stocked with electricity and gas.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 December 2022.

The paperback of “The Next 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy” is now out in the UK.

“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises — exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“Witty, informative and endlessly entertaining, this is popular economics at its most engaging.”- The Daily Mail

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Quitting is underrated

“I am a fighter and not a quitter,” said Liz Truss, the day before quitting. She was echoing the words of Peter Mandelson MP over two decades ago, although Mandelson had the good sense to speak after winning a political fight rather than while losing one.

It’s a curious thing, though. Being a “fighter” is not entirely a compliment. It’s a prized quality in certain circumstances, but it’s not a word I’d use on my résumé or, for that matter, my Tinder bio.

There can be little doubt about the term “quitter”, though. It is an unambiguous insult. That’s strange, because not only is there too much fighting in the world, there’s not nearly enough quitting. We are far too stubborn, sticking with an idea, a job, or a romantic partner even when it becomes clear we’ve made a mistake.

There are few better illustrations of this than the viral popularity of “quiet quitting”, in which jaded young workers refuse to work beyond their contracted hours or to take on responsibilities beyond the job description. It’s a more poetic term than “slacking”, which is what we Gen-Xers would have called exactly the same behaviour 25 years ago. It’s also a perfectly understandable response to being overworked and underpaid. But if you are overworked and underpaid, a better response in most cases would not be quiet quitting, but simply quitting.

I don’t mean this as a sneer at Gen-Z. I remember being utterly miserable at a job in my twenties, and I also remember how much social pressure there was to stick it out for a couple of years for the sake of making my CV seem less flaky. A flaky CV has its costs, of course. But if you’re a young graduate, so does spending two years of your life in a job you hate, while accumulating skills, experience and contacts in an industry you wish to leave. Most people cautioned me about the costs of quitting; only the wisest warned me of the costs of not quitting.

Everything you quit clears space to try something new. Everything you say “no” to is an opportunity to say “yes” to something else.

In her new book, Quit, Annie Duke argues that when we’re weighing up whether or not to quit, our cognitive biases are putting their thumb on the scale in favour of persistence. And persistence is overrated.

To a good poker player — and Duke used to be a very good poker player indeed — this is obvious. “Optimal quitting might be the most important skill separating great players from amateurs,” she writes, adding that without the option to abandon a hand, poker would not be a game of skill at all. Expert players abandon about 80 per cent of their hands in the popular variant of Texas Hold’em. “Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time.”

What are these cognitive biases that push us towards persisting when we should quit? One is the sunk cost effect, where we treat past costs as a reason to continue with a course of action. If you’re at your favourite high-end shopping mall but you can’t find anything you love, it should be irrelevant how much time and money it cost you to travel to the mall. But it isn’t. We put ourselves under pressure to justify the trouble we’ve already taken, even if that means more waste.

The same tendency applies from relationships to multi-billion-dollar mega-projects. Instead of cutting our losses, we throw good money after bad. (The sunk cost fallacy is old news to economists, but it took Nobel laureate Richard Thaler to point out that if it was common enough to have a name, it was common enough to be regarded as human nature.)

The “status quo bias” also tends to push us towards persevering when we should stop. Highlighted in a 1988 study by the economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, the status quo bias is a tendency to reaffirm earlier decisions and cling to the existing path we’re on, rather than make an active choice to do something different.

Duke is frustrated with the way we frame these status quo choices. “I’m not ready to make a decision,” we say. Duke rightly points out that not making a decision is itself a decision.

A few years ago, Steve Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, set up a website in which people facing difficult decisions could record their dilemma, toss a coin to help them choose and later return to say what they did and how they felt about it. These decisions were often weighty, such as leaving a job or ending a relationship. Levitt concluded that people who decided to make a major change — that is, the quitters — were significantly happier six months later than those who decided against the change — that is, the fighters. The conclusion: if you’re at the point when you’re tossing a coin to help you decide whether to quit, you should have quit some time ago.

“I am a quitter and not a fighter.” It’s not much of a political slogan. But as a rule of thumb for life, I’ve seen worse.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 November 2022.

The paperback of The Data Detective was published on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: How To Make The World Add Up.

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.

Struck by the power of the simple invention

“I was really taken aback,” Dr Dilip Mahalanabis recalled of arriving at Bangaon’s city hospital in 1971. Bangaon is now on the border between India and Bangladesh. At that time, though, it was in the middle of a refugee crisis and a vicious cholera outbreak precipitated by the Bangladesh Liberation war.

A treatment for cholera’s deadly vomiting and diarrhoea — intravenous saline — had been discovered back in 1906. But the conditions in Bangaon hospital made the use of saline drips all but impossible. Patients were tightly packed into rooms that were swimming in excrement. “In order to treat these people with IV saline, you literally had to kneel down in their faeces and their vomit,” Mahalanabis explained to the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2009.

There weren’t enough trained staff and there wasn’t enough IV fluid, so Mahalanabis tried something else. He gave people glucose and salts dissolved in boiled water. He kept drums of this oral rehydration solution nearby and told patients’ relatives to keep giving them mugs of the stuff. If they were properly rehydrated, it would taste unpleasant but, for as long as their bodies needed it, it would taste wonderful.

It’s a simple idea and Mahalanabis didn’t invent it. Water with sugar and salt was tried back in 1832, during an outbreak of cholera in Britain, but infighting doctors and a lack of rigorous evidence meant that the treatment did not catch on. David Nalin and Richard Cash, two American researchers, conducted a small and promising clinical trial of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) in Dhaka in the 1960s. But scepticism continued: gulping down salty, sugary water seemed so crude in contrast to the controllable IV drip.

Mahalanabis demonstrated that ORT could work at scale and without the need for highly trained medical professionals. His ideas were then taken up by BRAC, a local relief organisation, which mastered the process of teaching ordinary Bangladeshis to mix and administer the oral rehydration solution to anyone who needed it.

The simplicity of the treatment was deceptive. ORT is widely reckoned to have saved 50 million people over the past half century. And yet, Mahalanabis’s death on October 16 passed almost without notice outside India. The Financial Times published an obituary a fortnight after, but I have searched without success for any mention of his passing in any other newspaper in the UK or the US.

I heard about Mahalanabis’s death from Steven Johnson, the author of Extra Life. There is no mystery as to why Johnson was interested: Extra Life describes the extraordinary increase in life expectancy over the past two centuries, and much of that increase is down to simple inventions. Oral rehydration therapy stands alongside soap, pasteurisation and the S-bend waste pipe as ideas that have contributed vastly more to human health and longevity than brain surgery or gene therapy.

That pattern is not unique to human health. While researching my book Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy I was repeatedly struck by the power of the simple invention. Nobody doubts the importance of the printing press, but few people celebrate paper, which was its essential precursor. There is no point in being able to mass produce writing if you cannot mass produce something upon which to write.

The postage stamp revolutionised written communication. The tin can allowed safe food to travel through time and space. The brick, which is beautiful, flexible and reusable, remains hard to beat as a building material. The bicycle works so well that it is hard to believe that, in its modern form, it is barely older than the automobile. The Sinclair C5 and the Segway, meanwhile, have fallen by the wayside. The contraceptive pill was revolutionary, but for women seeking independence from domestic life, cellucotton menstrual pads were transformative, too.

Of course, our lives have also been revolutionised by complex inventions from the aeroplane to the electricity grid to the computer. Those inventions, however, are hardly undercelebrated.

No, it is the simple ideas which we overlook. Sometimes they are so venerable as to have no origin story. Nobody knows who invented the brick or paper. Often, they seem so obvious that we take them for granted. They are sometimes developed by outsiders: cellucotton was a cheap, highly absorbent material that seemed ideal for bandages in the military hospitals of the first world war. It was, of course, the female nurses who realised that the material could be used for menstrual pads. But outsider inventions are often treated with snobbery — just as when doctors couldn’t quite believe that mugs of sugared, salted water could really do the job of an IV drip.

The power of simple inventions has a straightforward economic logic behind it. Simple things are cheap, and cheap things can be ubiquitous. We might call it the Toilet Paper Principle. If something is cheap enough to wipe your backside with, it’s cheap enough to change the world. Mahalanabis never received the Nobel Prize for medicine. I doubt that worried him, but it should give the rest of us pause. If there is no room in our stories of success for the tin can, the menstrual pad and oral rehydration therapy, then we are missing something which matters.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 November 2022.

The paperback of “The Next 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy” is now out in the UK.

“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises — exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“Witty, informative and endlessly entertaining, this is popular economics at its most engaging.”- The Daily Mail

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Cautionary Tales – The Company That Cancelled Christmas

More than 100,000 families – many of them amongst the poorest in Britain – put money aside for Christmas gifts and other seasonal treats in a savings club called Farepak. It wasn’t a bank, and it wasn’t great value for money… and it went bust. Kids went without toys, and festive dinner tables were left bare. 

Why would someone put their hard-earned money into such a scheme? And what does it tell us about the way we often view Christmas as a time for frenzied spending? 

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 Morano, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

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Further reading and listening

Much of Joel Waldfogel’s research on the economics of Christmas is gathered in his brief and witty book, Scroogenomics.

In describing the Farepak case, I’ve relied on reporting by Anna Burnside in The Sunday Times (16 December 2007), Steve Bird in The Times (15 November 2006), Chris Tighe in the Financial Times (11 November 2006), Adam Jones in the Financial Times (16 November 2012), Rupert Jones in the Guardian (18 April 2022) and Rob Sharp in the Observer (19 November 2006). The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, along with Unison, interviewed Farepak customers after the firm’s collapse. Penelope Visman’s letter was published in the Financial Times on 30 December 2006.

The academic research on the different perspectives taken by givers and receivers is:

Francesca Gino, Francis J. Flynn, Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange,
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Volume 47, Issue 5, 2011.
Francis J. Flynn, Gabrielle S. Adams, Money can’t buy love: Asymmetric beliefs about gift price and feelings of appreciation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 45, Issue 2, 2009.

The one thing we all get wrong when choosing Christmas presents

“Christmas is coming”, laments Ellen Stuart, “and I have got to think up presents for everybody . . . Dear me, it’s so tedious!” Her aunt sympathises and recalls her youth, a time before gift-giving became excessive. “Presents did not fly about in those days as they do now.”

These familiar sentiments are older than we might guess. Ellen is a character in Christmas; or, The Good Fairy, a short story written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1850.

In The Battle for Christmas, historian Stephen Nissenbaum argues that Beecher Stowe, born in 1811, was correct in her childhood recollections. The custom of giving gifts at Christmas took off in the US in the 1820s. By the 1830s, newspaper letters pages contained complaints about commercialisation, and Macy’s in New York was open until midnight on Christmas Eve as early as 1867.

Gift-giving became popular when Christmas evolved into a primarily domestic holiday. Before then, it was a riotous public bacchanal, more like Halloween. Of course, at Christmas the trick-or-treaters weren’t children in fancy dress but gangs of inebriated young men demanding beer, mouldy cheese and money. No wonder Clement Clarke Moore, writing in the early 1820s, was keen to rebrand Christmas Eve as a time for hushed domesticity when “all through the house, not a creature was stirring”.

After two centuries of Christmas commercialisation it seems pointless to resist. But we could at least aspire to become better gift-givers. Social psychologists have been investigating this challenge in recent years. Francis Flynn and Francesca Gino found that picking a gift from a wishlist may seem joyless and unimaginative from the perspective of the giver, but recipients see such gifts as thoughtful. A giver who consults the wishlist is a giver who takes the trouble to pick something you actually wanted after all.

Jessica Rixom, Erick Mas and Brett Rixom found, surprisingly, that a sloppily wrapped present from a friend may be more appreciated than something more Instagrammable. The reason seems to be that scruffiness lowers expectations. If the gift appears to have put up a fight while being wrapped, the contents are more likely to be a pleasant surprise.

And in a study that will surprise nobody, four (male) researchers advise men not to give conspicuously luxurious gifts to women too early in a relationship; it seems that women do not always appreciate men’s efforts to make them feel a sense of obligation.

But the study that most caught my eye this year comes courtesy of Jeff Galak, Elanor Williams and the aptly named Julian Givi. Givi and colleagues argue that there is a single, simple mismatch underlying many of our mistakes. Gift-givers tend to focus too much on the moment that the gift is unwrapped, while for recipients that moment is merely the start of the gift’s story.

This mismatch does explain many of the things that go wrong when presents are opened. The most obvious type of bad gift is the “novelty” — a golfing tchotchke for someone known to like golf, perhaps, or a T-shirt with a logo too bawdy to wear in public. These gifts are all sizzle and no steak. They elicit an immediate laugh or howl of recognition, but thereafter simply raise the question of whether the local rubbish tip opens before New Year.

But there are more subtle errors too. For example, many people enjoy experiences such as a night out at a concert, but a concert ticket is probably just a piece of paper with a QR code on it, and there is nothing fun about unwrapping that. So gift-givers tend to lean towards something physical instead.

Another bias is to favour a complete gift over something partial. Let’s say the recipient wants a food processor and the gift-giver can’t afford a good one. Most gift-givers prefer to give a cheap model that fits the budget, while many recipients would rather have a contribution towards the cost of higher quality gear.

Gift-givers rarely think about practicality — for example, when will the recipient actually get a chance to use this? Even a gift card can be practical or impractical, depending on circumstances. (I know people who’ve received gift cards that are valid only in stores a few hours away.) In 2007 the economist Jennifer Pate Offenburg studied the resale value of gift cards on eBay. Cards from Home Depot, OfficeMax and Starbucks did well. Those from Tiffany & Co and Victoria’s Secret sold at a substantial discount. Tiffany’s might seem more special, but the Starbucks card is the one that people will find easy to use.

Above all, surprise is overrated. In the rare instances where a surprising present is well-chosen, the surprise is a fleeting delight that benefits the giver as much as the recipient. When the surprising present is a flop, the recipient is then stuck with it.

Beecher Stowe’s Christmas story concludes with one character noting, “There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of the year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” It’s been that way for 200 years. But thanks to social science, we can do better.

Focus on what the recipient will actually do with the gift, rather than aiming for effect at the moment of unwrapping. Romance, surprise and delight are nice, but don’t be ashamed to be practical. And if you’re not sure what gift might be appreciated, ask.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 December 2021.

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