Tim Harford's Blog, page 28

How to leave Twitter but keep your followers

Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation, a lot of people have taken to Twitter to declare that they are leaving Twitter. They will find it hard. This is not because Twitter is addictive; for most people it is not. It’s because Twitter gives them something they can’t get anywhere else — a set of connections with other users and the ability to reach them and be reached by them.

If you could only get to one supermarket, you wouldn’t describe it as “addictive”. You’d describe it as a local monopoly.

Like many, I have departed for pastures new, namely Mastodon (you can find me on Mastodon’s EconTwitter server). But I’m sure I’ll still be tweeting, because I have nearly 200,000 people following me on Twitter. It’s an annoyance; it would be much better if I could bring them all with me to Mastodon. It’s an outrageous failure of public policy that I can’t.

To see this more clearly, imagine that I decided I didn’t want to stick with my mobile phone provider. After minimal paperwork, I could move to a different network. My friends wouldn’t even know I’d done it; I could keep the same phone and the same phone number. Even if that weren’t true, my mobile phone is already vastly superior to Twitter in another respect: I can phone people whose phones are connected to different networks. It’s completely seamless; they may be on EE or Vodafone or O2, and it just doesn’t matter. A world in which you could only call people who used the same phone network as you would be the proverbial pain in the backside. It would also be, quite likely, a world in which the largest one or two networks became dominant — and in which many people felt obliged to carry two phones. Which, for social media power users who scurry between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, might sound familiar.

The difference here is that the phone networks are interoperable in a way that Twitter simply isn’t. Not just the phone networks, either: Apple and Google make software that will read and write Microsoft Word files; you don’t need an Outlook account to send email to your Outlook friends and a separate Gmail account for your Gmail friends; I can send you a bank transfer even if your bank is different from mine.

Sometimes (as with email) this interoperability is by design. Sometimes (as with banks and mobile phones) it has been strengthened by regulatory rules. Sometimes it is a matter of competitive compatibility: Apple decided to make software that would play nicely with Microsoft Office, and Microsoft couldn’t do much to stop them.

As Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow explain in their new book Chokepoint Capitalism, there is no technical reason why such portability cannot extend to the likes of Twitter and Facebook. A short essay written by Doctorow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation sketches out what it might look like.

First, you sign up for an alternative — a Mastodon server, perhaps. You give it your Twitter password. Twitter checks that you’re happy to allow the connection and that it’s not some hacker; then it notifies your friends that you’ve moved to Mastodon and asks if they’re happy for their tweets to be forwarded to you or not. (If you’d moved to the crazy town of Truth Social or Parler instead, they might refuse.)

Why did you move to a new service? Any number of reasons. Maybe the blue ticks are free over there, or the ads don’t rely on creepy surveillance, or you have more control over the kinds of things you see. Maybe the content moderation is more muscular. Or maybe the content moderation is nonexistent, and that’s what you’d prefer.

The point is, if Facebook and Twitter were interoperable with rivals, it would be easy to move and to bring your digital network with you. If your friends preferred the old social networks, they could happily stay there while still being able to reach you. And the whole arrangement would self-evidently encourage new competitors to enter the market, while pushing established players to raise their game.

Interoperability will often work best with some regulatory muscle behind it, and one approach (not the only one) is to legislate to establish a broad defence for the interoperators. If I, as a Twitter user, wish to sign up for a new interoperating service that uses my password to send my posts from Mastodon to Twitter, and pulls tweets from Twitter to Mastodon for me to view, then Twitter is not allowed to ban me or sue the interoperating service for doing so.

A world of interoperable social media would be unnerving to some. It might boost struggling rightwing platforms such as Parler and Truth Social. It would certainly make it much more difficult for social media companies to act as arbiters of what sort of speech is unacceptable. But it was never a good idea to give social media companies monopoly power over what can and cannot be said. And it was an even worse idea to let them put obstacles in the way of users who wish to bring their friends with them when they leave.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 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.

Cautionary Tales – The Wild Turkeys of Schleswig

There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig’s Cathedral of St Peter – which is odd… since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic.   

How did the creatures come to be added to the medieval Biblical scene? Was this proof that the German’s reached the Americas long before Columbus? Or do the painted birds tell a different story all together? 

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.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The definitive account of the Malskat affair is Jonathan Keat’s Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age (2012), supplemented by Sepp Schuller’s Forgers, Dealers, Experts (1960).

I learned about the tale in Alice Sherwood’s Authenticity (2022).

Bomber Command data on the Lubeck raid

The New York Times on the trial of Lothar Malskat

Farewell to cakeism, and welcome to the age of the possible

You can’t always get what you want, a young man once sang. It’s a simple aphorism, but one worth remembering. Boris Johnson was widely — and rightly — mocked in 2016 for announcing that “our policy is having our cake and eating it”. That was a dishonest refusal to admit that the Brexit referendum had obliged the UK government to make some painful decisions. But it is not always so easy to see when Mick Jagger’s maxim is in play.

Consider the question of whether algorithms make fair decisions. In 2016, a team of reporters at ProPublica, led by Julia Angwin, published an article titled “Machine bias”. It was the result of more than a year’s investigation into an algorithm called Compas, which was being widely used in the US justice system to make recommendations concerning parole, pre-trial detention and sentencing. Angwin’s team concluded that Compas was much more likely to rate white defendants as lower risk than black defendants. What’s more, “black defendants were twice as likely to be rated as higher risk but not reoffend. And white defendants were twice as likely to be charged with new crimes after being classed as low risk.”

That seems bad. Northpointe, the makers of Compas, pointed out that black and white defendants given a risk rating of, say, 3 had an equal chance of being rearrested. The same was true for black and white defendants with a risk rating of 7, or any other rating. The risk scores meant the same thing, irrespective of race.

Shortly after ProPublica and Northpointe produced their findings, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, several teams of academics published papers making a simple but surprising point: there are several different definitions of what it means to be “fair” or “unbiased”, and it is arithmetically impossible to be fair in all these ways at once. An algorithm could satisfy ProPublica’s definition of fairness or it could satisfy Northpointe’s, but not both.

Here’s Corbett-Davies, Pierson, Feller and Goel: “It’s actually impossible for a risk score to satisfy both fairness criteria at the same time.”

Or Kleinberg, Mullainathan and Raghavan: “We formalise three fairness conditions . . . and we prove that except in highly constrained special cases, there is no method that can satisfy these three conditions simultaneously.”

This is not just a fact about algorithms. Whether decisions about parole are made by human judges, robots or dart-throwing chimps, the same relentless arithmetic would apply.

We need more scrutiny and less credulity about the life-changing magic of algorithmic decision making, so for shining a spotlight on the automation of the gravest judgments, ProPublica’s analysis was invaluable. But if we are to improve algorithmic decision making, we need to remember Jagger’s aphorism. These decisions cannot be “fair” on every possible metric. When it is impossible to have it all, we will have to choose what really matters.

Painful choices are, of course, the bread and butter of economics. There is a particular type which seems to fascinate economists: the “impossible trinity”. The wisest of all impossible trinities will be well known to fans of Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City (1980). It’s “Mona’s Law”: you can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can’t have all three at once.

In economics, impossible trinities are more prosaic. The most famous is that while you might want a fixed exchange rate, free movement of capital across borders and an independent monetary policy, at best you must pick two. Another, coined by the economist Dani Rodrik, is more informal: you can set rules at a national level, you can be highly economically integrated or you can let the popular vote determine policy, but you can’t do all three at once. An economically integrated national technocracy is possible; so is democratic policymaking at a supranational level. If you don’t fancy either of those, you need to set limits to economic globalisation.

Much like Mona’s Law, these impossible trinities are more like rules of thumb than mathematical proofs. There might be exceptions, but don’t get your hopes up.

Mathematicians call such findings “proof of impossibility”, or just “impossibility results”. Some of them are elementary: we’ll never find the largest prime number, because there is no largest prime number to be found, nor can we express the square root of two as a fraction.

Others are deeper and more mind-bending. Perhaps the most profound is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in 1931 demonstrated that, for any mathematical system, there will be true statements in that system that cannot be proved. Mathematics is therefore incomplete, and the legions of mathematicians trying to develop a complete, consistent mathematical system had been wasting their time. At the end of the seminar in which Gödel detonated this intellectual bombshell, the great John von Neumann laconically remarked, “it’s all over”.

Nobody likes to be told that they can’t have it all, but a painful truth is more useful than a comforting falsehood. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem was one of the painful truths I studied as a young logician alongside Liz Truss. Perhaps she has finally absorbed the lesson. It is important to understand when something is impossible. That truth frees us from fruitlessly trying to always get what we want and lets us focus instead on getting what we need.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 October 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.

Three thoughts from a Mastodon newbie

I’m not the only one to have hopped from Twitter over to Mastodon in the past few days, I know. But perhaps these three thoughts will be useful to others.

First: it’s not that hard! Come on in, the water’s lovely! I’ve seen quite a lot of scary-seeming stuff about the learning curve but the interface and the experience is really not that different from the good bits of Twitter.

Yes, you need to pick a server but you can always change if you don’t like your first choice – it seems to be very easy to do that. Ask a friend, take a look at what the people you might already follow have done (I’m on the EconTwitter server…), or just plunge in. Learning by doing is the way!

Second: in one particular way it’s outrageously harder than it should be: you can’t bring your Twitter network with you. Think about email; if you switch email, you can autoforward all your old incoming email to your new address. You can port over all your old contacts. There’s absolutely no trouble sending email from Gmail to Outlook and back again. We just take it for granted. Same story with your mobile phone; you can switch service provider AND NOBODY WILL EVEN KNOW.

Similarly, you should be able to send your Mastodon toots to all your Twitter followers, and read all the Tweets you like through the Mastodon interface. The same story should be true for Facebook, Instagram, and all the rest. (Here’s a lovely essay by Cory @Doctorow on this point.) It’s an astonishing failure of public policy that regulators aren’t mandating interoperability from Facebook, Twitter and the rest. This stuff should be so easy, but it’s not a mystery as to why Big Tech would like it to be hard.

Third: stop and think for a moment. If you loved Twitter and hated what it became, or you still love Twitter but fear what comes next, then you should absolutely be trying to re-establish your network on Mastodon. But… did you love Twitter? Or did you just feel it was something you should do?

If you slipped into a Twitter habit by accident, and felt it was a source of anxiety and a time sink that got in the way of what you really valued… this is a wonderful moment to just STOP. The world will still be here.

If you like what I do – for example – my books, Cautionary Tales, More or Less, my FT column, and the RSS feed / email updates of my website will all still be here. The same is true for other creators & commentators you might want to keep in touch with.

Twitter was never the best way to experience any of that, and while I admire Mastodon, it won’t be the best way either. Make an active and deliberate choice, whatever you choose – and good luck!

I’m now on Mastodon

For those switching over to Mastodon – or experimenting with doing so – I’m at @TimHarford@econtwitter.net. Feel free to give me a friendly wave and a follow!

I’m not sure how much I’ll be active there, to be honest. Let’s see.

As always the best way to keep up with what I’m doing is the RSS feed or free email update from this website, but I realise that’s not for everyone. However you follow along, thank you and please spread the word!

How to tax (a guide for governments)

In 1789, an octogenarian Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter containing the famous opinion that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Franklin was mistaken. Many taxes are easily and legally avoided by the simple expedient of not doing whatever it is that attracts the tax.

Our cities have been shaped by such tax-avoiding behaviour. Consider the slender canal houses of Amsterdam. As Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars describe in The 99% Invisible City, these buildings developed in response to a tax code that focused on canal frontage. Furniture hoists were deployed to bypass precipitous staircases. It was a hassle, but people will go to quite some lengths for a tax break.

A less pleasing example of tax-efficient architecture is the bricked-up window, common in London. The window tax was introduced in 1696 and sharply raised in 1797. At first glance it seemed to target the rich, but it also penalised the urban poor in tenement buildings as their landlords simply blocked up the windows to save money.

The cruelty and ugliness of such a tax is self-evident, but there was another cost, less obvious until you think about it: none of those bricked-up windows generated any tax revenue. Not only were the houses ugly, gloomy and airless, but they were also producing less tax revenue than originally hoped.

Economists call this “deadweight loss”; when people distort their behaviour to avoid a tax, nobody wins. The tax-avoider is worse off because the avoidance is costly. The tax authorities are worse off because the tax is not paid.

An old French saying has it that the art of taxation is “to pluck the goose so as to obtain the largest number of feathers with the least hissing”. But the experience of Dutch canal houses and the window tax suggests something else: the art of taxation is to pluck those feathers without prompting the goose as a species to evolve into a featherless fowl.

Unless a featherless fowl is what is desired, of course. In 1698, Peter the Great required Russian nobles to purchase a “beard token” if they wished to retain their beards. The aim, it seems, was less to raise revenue than to push the Russian nobility into the clean-shaven fashions of western Europe. (The story is told in Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod’s delightful Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue.)

Many governments have given tax incentives for bearing children. One clumsy example, introduced in Australia in 2004 at short notice, caused the birth rate to drop precipitously the day before the baby bonus came into force, as C-sections and inductions were postponed.

Unfortunately, the easiest way to earn a tax break is to make some change on paper. Governments have long offered tax incentives in the hope of encouraging businesses to relocate, but it is all too easy to move accounting profits around in search of low taxes, while letting factories and offices stay exactly where they are.

An alternative is to resort to legal manoeuvrings. Are tomatoes a fruit or a vegetable? Are Jaffa Cakes a cake or a biscuit? The answer seems to be: whatever means less tax. Tomatoes are a tax-efficient vegetable (according to the US Supreme Court in 1893) and Jaffa Cakes are a tax-efficient cake (according to a UK tribunal in 1991).

The model for tax-cutting governments, whether they know it or not, is the British prime minister Henry Pelham’s halving of import duties on tea. In 1745, Pelham cut tea duty from more than 100 per cent to about 50 per cent. The result: less smuggling, a tripling of the legal tea trade and higher tax revenues. As the English boiled more water for tea, the death rate fell, according to research by the economist Francisca Antman.

It is quite a result for the tax-cutters: less crime, less disease, more tax and more tea. Alas, as Keen and Slemrod note, there are few opportunities to copy him. “Pelham’s triumph has become a fool’s errand . . . there is little evidence that major taxes around the world are often above levels at which revenue would be increased by cutting rates.” In the case of exceptions such as cigarettes, we have good reasons not to follow Pelham’s example.

Having surveyed the tax-avoiding horizon from canals to Jaffa Cakes, I draw three lessons.

First, taxes shape behaviour. Governments could do more to use tax incentives for good and pay too little attention to the wasteful distortions that taxes can produce.

Second, if you want to tax something like income or spending — and most governments do — then make the tax as broad-based as possible. Society does not profit from court rulings as to whether tomatoes are a vegetable.

Third, even the power of a tax incentive has limits. Pregnant Australians delayed births by hours, but not by months. Dutch canal houses grew tall, but the Dutch did not develop 17th-century skyscrapers.

When inheritance tax was abolished in 1979 in Australia, some Australian deaths were postponed — or registration of the deaths was postponed — in a highly tax-efficient way. Of course, these deaths were postponed only by a few days. Franklin may have been wrong about taxes, but death is not so easily cheated.

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

Announcing my next book, The Truth Detective

Do you have what it takes to be a Truth Detective?

Did you know that a toy spaceship can teach you about why prices keep rising?

Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money?

And that even the greatest minds have been fooled by fake news and dancing fairies?

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my first children’s book, The Truth Detective: How To Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up. It’s illustrated by the fabulous Ollie Mann, aimed at children aged 10 years old and up, and was wonderfully fun to write.

The book is out in March 2023 – and you can imagine what I’m going to ask now. Please do spread the word – retweet, repost, tell your friends, and please do pre-order (from Amazon, Bookshop, Waterstones or your local bookshop) because it’s those pre-orders that are all-important in determining whether the book gets noticed.

Thank you in advance!

Cautionary Tales – The inventor who almost ended the world

Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. 

Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs – but while these dire consequences were unintended… could they have been anticipated? 

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

On Thomas Midgley

Charles Kettering “Biographical Memoir of Thomas Midgley Jr”

Fred Pearce “Inventor hero was a one-man environmental disaster” New Scientist 7 June 2017

Edelmann, F.T. 2016 (31:viii): The life and legacy of Thomas Midgley Jr. Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania 150(1): 45–49.

On CFCs and the Ozone Layer

Sharon Roan Ozone Crisis

Press Release on the award of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina, and F Sherwood Rowland

New York Times obituary of Joseph Farman

On Lead

Mark Sutton “Pb or not Pb: the toxic question of leaded fuel” Chemistry World 20 December 2021

Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, 1987

UNEP press release on leaded petrol

Tom Whipple “Leaded Petrol reduces intelligence decades later” The Times March 2017

On Unanticipated Consequences

Robert K Merton The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action. American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 894-904

Frank de Zwart, Unintended but not Unanticipated Consequences, Theory and Society 44(3), April 2015

Nitin Nohria and Hemant Taneka “Managing the Unintended Consequences of Your Innovations” Harvard Business Review 19 January 2021

Uncertainty delays investment. Please can the Conservative party take note?

Liz Truss overlooked it. So did poor Kwasi Kwarteng. So did the Nobel Prize committee in awarding Ben Bernanke a share of the Nobel prize in economics last week. The “it” is an elegant and underrated academic paper that Bernanke published in 1983 titled “Irreversibility, uncertainty, and cyclical investment”. Although unmentioned by the Nobel committee, it has proved quietly influential in academic circles. Perhaps somebody should explain it to the UK government.

To understand the basic idea, consider the following unusual bet. You pay $5 for a ticket to play. Then I toss a coin. If it comes up heads, you get $10, for a $5 profit. If it comes up tails, you get $4, for a $1 loss. Would you like to play? Most people would be tempted by these attractive terms.

But let’s change the game a little by offering an extra choice: you can pay that $5 for your ticket or you can pay 10 cents to reserve the option to buy the ticket after I toss the coin and you see the result. Now do you want to buy the ticket? Of course not. Just pay 10 cents and wait. If the coin comes up heads, buy your ticket and walk away with a fat profit. If it comes up tails, you’ve only lost 10 cents.

It would be a strange casino that offered either game. But entrepreneurs and managers face similar decisions all the time, even if they have to guess at the probabilities and pay-offs. Businesses are often faced with the chance to make an investment that may or may not pay off, and they also often have the option of waiting and watching before committing. That costs a little, but if waiting and watching resolves much of the uncertainty, waiting and watching is what they will do.

“Investor behaviour in recession,” wrote Bernanke in 1983, “is . . . a cautious probing, an avoidance of commitment until the longer run status of both the national economy and the investor’s own fortunes are better known.” He added: “by waiting, the potential investor can improve his chances of making a correct decision.”

Bernanke was not the only economist to investigate the impact of uncertainty on irreversible investments. It was first discussed in 1948 by the Kyiv-born economist Jacob Marschak and has been developed at length by Robert Pindyck, Avinash Dixit and others. But the fundamental point is all too simple: uncertainty delays investment.

It’s obvious enough that when governments enact damaging policies, businesses will want to steer clear. But Bernanke was making a more subtle argument that when governments enact policies which may be good or may be bad, businesses will want to wait until the dust settles. Alas, the difference between discouraging investment and delaying it over and over again may turn out to be trivial.

There’s another surprising insight in Bernanke’s paper, which he calls the bad news principle. In situations where businesses can wait and see, the risks that matter are the downside risks. Uncertainty about just how wonderful the good news is is irrelevant. You can see that in my odd casino game. Instead of offering $10 for heads, I could offer $8. Or I could offer $20. But it wouldn’t make any difference; you’d still pay your 10 cents to wait and see. And if heads came up, you’d buy that ticket. Changing how good the good news is doesn’t change your decision to wait.

On the other hand, if I made the bad news less bad, that could make a difference. If, instead of $3 for tails, I offer $5, or $6, then you wouldn’t want to pay a penny to wait. You’re guaranteed not to lose money, so you’d buy a ticket and hope for the best, knowing that the worst is also just fine. Truss learned this lesson the hard way. Two of her flagship tax cut ideas were to lower corporation tax and abolish the highest rate of income tax. But these are efforts to make the good news better for the corporate decision makers who might help fuel that sought-after growth; they do not alter the fundamental problem that businesses would rather wait and see what happens next.

If we want investment now, the government needs to do more to reduce downside risks. At the very least, it should try to stop being the leading source of those downside risks. Business investment in the UK peaked in 2016, just after the Brexit referendum, and has stuttered ever since. That is partly the result of the pandemic, which caused a slump in investment.

But it is also the result of endless uncertainty. UK business investment was substantially lower in 2019 than it was in France, Germany or the US. And it is barely higher today than it was in 2007, 15 years ago. Truss railed against the “anti-growth coalition”, which she claimed has held the UK back — some combination of trade unions, podcasters and people who think the UK should not have left the EU. But the most obvious brake on growth is feeble business investment, the most obvious cause of feeble business investment is uncertainty, and right now, the most obvious cause of uncertainty was Liz Truss.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 21 October 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.

Five ideas that might actually boost UK growth

Last week, I made the case that economic growth matters and raising the rate of growth is an admirable goal for any politician. I also complained that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng didn’t seem to know how to go about it. Tax cuts for the rich, a crude, open-ended subsidy for energy spending, all in the teeth of a surge in inflation . . . it was always a half-baked plan, made no more palatable by being generously seasoned with wishful thinking.

It’s easy to criticise, especially if you’re criticising this pair, but there was one important insight amid all their hubris and recklessness: growth matters. The UK economy has been cursed by more than a decade of stagnation, and if policies could be found that would boost the rate of growth, even back to the quarter-century preceding the global financial crisis, that would solve many of our basic economic problems.

So what could be done? One possibility is to shrink the state, leaving more room for private entrepreneurship. This sounds good to some, but Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” merely feinted at this goal. Tax cuts do not shrink the state; spending cuts do. If the government merely borrows money to cut taxes, the private sector knows the bill will come due eventually.

In recent years, a number of serious-minded attempts have been made to think about what would be required to boost the UK’s rate of growth. One of them was the Growth Commission at the London School of Economics, which published a comprehensive review in 2012. More recently, the LSE’s economists teamed up with the Resolution Foundation to produce a report under the auspices of The Economy 2030 Inquiry. At the risk of being seduced by the blandishments of economic orthodoxy, curious readers may be intrigued to hear some of the recommendations.

Upgrade the skills of the UK population, focusing in particular on improving schools. This sounds good, but the record of the past 12 years is not wholly encouraging. Free schools were introduced in 2011 and, according to the Education Policy Institute, have been underwhelming at primary level, although they have worked better at secondary level. That’s the good news. The bad news is that spending on schools has slipped back since 2010 in real terms. UK education spending is also reliant on private sector spending, which is unlikely to boost the skills of the most deprived. Improve the UK’s infrastructure and create an independent body with the power to advise parliament and to compensate those who lose out from new developments. Again, the record here is mixed. A National Infrastructure Commission was established in 2015, but it is not independent and has been reduced to warning the government not to make “vague promises”. Speaking of vague promises, I wrote recently about the Transpennine railway, and how years of vacillation have led to delays, wasted money and, ultimately, a hugely scaled-back plan. Londoners can enjoy the Elizabeth Line, at least, but London is hardly the source of the UK’s growth problems. Foster innovation. The received wisdom used to be that the UK’s world-class universities produced a string of invaluable breakthroughs but, lacking finance for risky ventures, those breakthroughs were often not commercialised. That was frustrating enough, but now the question is whether those world-class universities can continue to thrive against Brexit-induced headwinds that make it harder to recruit faculty from the EU, and which threaten to exclude the UK’s scientific research community from the EU’s much-admired Horizon Europe funding programme. In principle, the UK has access to Horizon; in practice, it has become a casualty of disputes over the Northern Ireland protocol. Encourage business investment. Business investment is substantially lower in the UK than in the US, but also much lower than in Germany or France, countries with much higher tax burdens. Could it be that the UK’s chronically poor investment is not simply a response to high taxes? Kwarteng is right to look to the tax system for opportunities to encourage business investment, but he might also consider one thing that businesses value even more than tax cuts: political and economic stability. That is not something the UK has been able to offer for the past 15 years. Treat Net Zero as an opportunity to increase growth and create high-quality jobs. Insulating the UK’s ageing housing stock would have been excellent preparation for a brutal winter, as well as being a source of skilled jobs in the building trade. Alas, the rate of home insulations has plummeted since 2012. And the Net Zero project hardly seems to have a champion in Liz Truss, who says there are few more depressing sights than fields full of solar panels.

You might think that none of these worthy ideas will really solve the UK’s growth problem, and you might be right. One does not simply raise the long-term growth rate of an economy. But it might be worth trying some of them out. There are certainly worse ideas for boosting growth; look around.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 7 October 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.