Tim Harford's Blog, page 29
October 27, 2022
Cautionary Tales – The Halloween Poisoner
Candy laced with cyanide and needles in marshmallows, we’ve long been warned to be suspicious of the sweet treats handed out by strangers at Halloween. But it seems that most stories of “Halloween sadism” are just that, stories. No child seems to have been killed by adulterated Halloween candy… well… there is one terrible exception. The poisoned Pixy Stix of Pasadena, TX.
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.
Further reading and listening
Joel Best’s original research paper with Gerald Horiuchi is “The Razor Blade in the Apple” Social Problems Vol 32 No 5, June 1985; Professor Best’s updated data and discussion is at his website.
On William Shyne, check out Useless Information (and consider subscribing to the Useless Information podcast).
On the murder of Timothy O’Bryan, I relied on Michael Segalov “The True Story of the Notorious Trick-or-Treat Murderer” at Vice, David Skal’s book Halloween, Joel Best, Snopes, and contemporary press (UPI).
On understanding data and misinformation around child abduction see Michael Hobbes at the Huffington Post.
Other data on risks to children from the BBC’s More or Less program, the US Children’s Bureau, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the CDC.
Liz Truss’s growth delusion
There is a fashionable line of attack against Liz Truss’s single-minded focus on growth: what about the poor? What about the planet? In chasing GDP growth, this critique runs, Truss shows herself to be a politician who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
This criticism is misguided. The UK’s new prime minister is absolutely right to believe that economic growth should be her top priority. The problem is that she seems to have no idea how to go about it.
Let’s start with the case for economic growth. Gross domestic product is not, and never has been, an attempt to measure the wellbeing of a society. It is easy to list activities which promote wellbeing but not growth, and plenty more which promote growth but not wellbeing. Nevertheless, it is striking how countries with a high GDP also have flourishing citizens. Pick your issue, from life expectancy to child mortality, from opportunities for women to the protection of basic human rights, cleaner streets, lower crime, even better-quality art, from TV to opera. Somehow, people who live in richer countries are likely to be enjoying more of the good stuff.
Of course, causation probably runs both ways in many of these cases. Healthy people, safe cities and empowered women are all both causes and consequences of economic growth. When one looks through the lens of complex, sophisticated, multidimensional efforts to measure wellbeing, there is plenty to suggest that growth is good.
For example, the Social Progress Index combines “60 social and environmental outcome indicators” to produce “a nuanced picture of what a successful society looks like”. This valuable effort throws up few surprises. The 25 most “successful societies” are the Nordics, western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan and South Korea. Aside from a few petrostates, the list of the countries with the highest GDP per capita contains much the same names.
Focus on less fortunate places and you’ll see that Burundi, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Chad are in the bottom ten. The bottom ten by GDP per capita, or according to the Social Progress Index? Both, of course.
GDP per capita is not a measure of social progress. It just happens to be extraordinarily closely correlated with social progress.
Nor should we forget Benjamin Friedman’s prescient argument, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005), that “economic growth — meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens — more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” Stagnant growth — which many rich countries, particularly the UK, have seen since 2008 — clearly risks the reverse. If you doubt that, look around.
Economic growth promotes all these good things, and it has one further benefit: it tends to last. The best predictor of which economies will be complex, sophisticated, productive and rich next year is the list of economies which were complex, sophisticated, productive and rich last year. Grow faster now, and there is reason to expect you’ll be richer indefinitely.
That, then, is the case for prioritising economic growth — not to the exclusion of all else, but as a central goal of policy. Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng deserve credit for recognising this. Prioritising growth in the recent past would have avoided some obvious policy blunders, such as Theresa May’s insistence on leaving the EU’s customs union and single market, or George Osborne’s disastrous obsession with balancing the budget in the teeth of a deep recession.
But while recent governments have demonstrated how to depress growth, we know far less about how to increase it. And Truss’s statements so far do not inspire confidence. Her rant about the “disgrace” of cheese imports suggests someone who hasn’t appreciated the importance of free trade in goods to a prosperous modern economy.
Her sorrow at seeing solar panels on agricultural land speaks of a soul who values bucolic tradition over a vital technology that is growing more productive at an astonishing rate — not to mention a strange taste for heavy-handed intervention.
Her vast and open-ended energy price cap is a kick in the teeth for market forces. By some measures the largest fiscal event in living memory, it feels closer to Mao than Thatcher. And it is unnecessary: a truly pro-growth government would have achieved the same social goal by letting prices rise, but giving an offsetting cash grant to each household. That would let the price system encourage the efficient use of old technology and the embrace of the new.
It may be that her tax cuts and enterprise zones will boost growth, but the currency and debt markets appear to disagree. Most policy wonks suspect that fundamental reforms of housebuilding, infrastructure and education are likely to be required. Better access to large markets on our doorstep might also help, but that ship seems to have sailed.
It is good to have a prime minister focused on the goal of growth, but what we really need is for her to show signs of being able to stick the ball in the back of the net.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 September 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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October 21, 2022
Cautionary Conversations – The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind
October 20, 2022
How much money will actually make you happy?
When I was a student, a friend of mine fantasised about earning £100 a day. It felt like an incomprehensibly large sum of money; he simply could not conceive of spending enough to exhaust such riches. This was almost 30 years ago — the equivalent fantasy today would be more than £200 a day.
My friend, who lived with his parents, was simultaneously naive and wise. His dream income is about twice the average UK salary, several times the global average, and about a hundred times more than the global poverty line. How much does anyone truly need?
Economists have offered various answers over the years. In his famous essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes argued that, if incomes increased eightfold from 1930s levels, “the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution”. Incomes have increased much as he anticipated, and yet no solution is in sight. That may be because, as Keynes also noted, there is an insatiable desire for needs which make us “feel superior to . . . our fellows”.
Just over a decade ago, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, each winners of the Nobel memorial prize in economics, found that $75,000 a year (more than $100,000 today — roughly my friend’s dream income) was enough to optimise day-to-day experiences. More money than that did nothing to reduce the amount of time people felt anxious, stressed or sad. However, there is another measure of happiness: do people evaluate their lives as satisfactory? By this definition, Deaton and Kahneman found no limit to the uses of money: extra income, at any level, was correlated with higher levels of life satisfaction.
More recently, psychologists Paul Bain and Renata Bongiorno changed the focus: instead of asking how much money was enough, they invited survey participants to envisage their absolutely ideal life. Then they asked how much money would be required to achieve that life, if it came in the form of a lottery win. Those lottery prizes ranged from $10,000 (for those whose absolutely ideal life involves replacing the curtains and upholstery) to $100bn (for those whose absolutely ideal life involves a great deal of drama about buying Twitter).
Most people, however, did not favour the top prize. A $10mn lottery prize was a popular choice. Why? One possibility is that nobody really has a clue how to answer the survey question, and $10mn was the central answer, a thousand times more than the minimum and a thousand times less than the maximum. Another is that people are as naive as my friend. They don’t realise that — after buying a nicer house and a nicer car, paying off their debts and setting up an ample pension — they would discover that they could really use another couple of million dollars.
The writer Malcolm Gladwell has another theory. As a guest on the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast, Gladwell argued that the problem with a hundred billion dollars is that you have unlimited choice. Simple decisions (pack a lunch, or buy a sandwich?) become impossibly complex (dine in Paris, or Copenhagen, or just have my personal chef prepare something on my plane?). Life is cognitively overwhelming.
Another problem, says Gladwell, is that all the challenge is removed from life. You like collecting stamps, or key rings, or Beanie Babies? Forget it! You can buy them all, before that lunch in Copenhagen if you wish.
My own take is slightly different. I don’t want $100bn, but cognitive overload is not the problem. I am fairly sure that billionaires are not overwhelmed by the prospect of lunch. And, while projects are important, they are also scalable. If you enjoyed collecting key rings, switch to collecting fine art: even with $100bn to spend, the project of establishing the world’s greatest private museum is likely to have legs.
The real problem is that being a multibillionaire would change your relationship with every other human being. Keynes knew that we often desire to feel a little “superior to our fellows” but, when the superiority becomes extreme, you become a target for kidnappers, terrorists, fraudsters and gold-diggers of every kind. Few of your relationships are likely to survive. Can you really trust those that do?
Bain and Buongiorno, the researchers who found that people would rather have $10mn than $100bn, argue that their result offers hope for sustainable development, because it suggests that people don’t have unlimited material wants. Perhaps. I draw a different conclusion. The richest people in past societies had material wants which they could not satisfy, but which we can: air conditioning, air travel and antibiotics. Our descendants may well have material wants which we rarely even think of because they are beyond our grasp, from teleportation to eternal youth.
The best hope for sustainable development is not that we will stop desiring things we currently cannot have. It is that most of what we value is not a matter of money. My friend, with his fantasies of earning £100 a day, enjoyed drinking beer and listening to music with the rest of us. It was a convivial lifestyle. In contrast, life with $100bn must be so terribly lonely.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 September 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.
October 13, 2022
Economists must get more in touch with our feelings
Feelings matter. That is obvious enough. Less obvious is what social scientists and policy wonks should do about it. I’ve written many times about efforts to measure happiness, but such efforts have delivered insights that sometimes seem underwhelming. It turns out that people are less satisfied with their lives when they are in poor health or unemployed or their marriages are falling apart. These are hardly revolutionary counterintuitions.
A common question to measure wellbeing is simply to ask people to evaluate their own lives: how satisfied are they, on a scale of 0-10? A sensible question, but it seems crude compared with the battery of data we can collect on prices and incomes. Indeed, I once gently teased the happiness research community by suggesting we wouldn’t learn much about how to reform a nation’s economic institutions by asking citizens, “Overall, how rich do you think you are these days, on a scale of 0-10?” The question seems silly and a reminder of how little we really know about wellbeing.
Well, the joke is on me. Perhaps that is precisely the question we should be asking. A recent study by Federica Liberini, Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto and Michela Redoano looked at the impact of how people feel about their finances. Liberini and her colleagues looked at a question from a long-running academic survey, Understanding Society: “How well would you say you yourself are managing financially these days?”. Answers varied from 1 (living comfortably) to 5 (finding it very difficult).
The researchers found that people who said they were living comfortably were more likely to support the Remain campaign in the UK. Those who found their finances very difficult tended to sympathise with Vote Leave. Indeed, write the researchers, “UK citizens’ feelings about their incomes were a substantially better predictor of pro-Brexit views than their actual incomes.”
Then there is inequality. Objectively speaking, it is far from clear that income inequality is rising. In the UK, income inequality rose to high levels during the 1980s and has broadly stayed there ever since. Globally, there is no obvious cause for alarm either. Incomes have risen much faster in China and India — two large, poor countries — than in the US or Europe, putting downward pressure on income inequality.
But people’s feelings? They tell a different story. Jon Clifton, the head of Gallup, which has been tracking wellbeing around the world for many years, notes a polarisation in people’s life-evaluations. Compared with 15 years ago (before the financial crisis, smartphones and Covid-19) twice as many people now say they have the best possible life they could imagine (10 out of 10); however, four times as many people now say they are living the worst life they can conceive (0 out of 10). About 7.5 per cent of people are now in psychological heaven, and about the same proportion are in psychological hell.
Does this reflect our subjective realities, or have we all just learnt to hype up everything, good or bad? I am not sure, but Gallup is not alone in finding clear evidence of widespread psychological distress.
“This looks like something that is getting ready to explode,” said Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, speaking at a recent conference in Oxford on wellbeing research and policy. Oswald, one of the authors of the Federica Liberini study, was also speaking there and presented a grim series of slides on mental distress and trust in government. “We need detailed data on feelings of human resentment, frustration, anger and falling behind,” said Oswald.
But we should not forget to collect data on more hopeful emotions, too. At the same conference, Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution focused on hope. It’s important, said Graham, because “people who believe in their futures are far more likely to invest in them”. Hope triggers positive action.
For example, a study conducted by Graham and Kelsey O’Connor found that in the US, people who are hopeful for the future have tended to live longer — and that this optimism is a better predictor of low mortality than income. Another study (by Graham and Julia Pozuelo) found that in a low-income neighbourhood in Lima, Peru, young people had high aspirations. Most aimed to go to university, even though none of their parents did.
The higher the aspirations for the future, the more promising the actions in the present. For example, aspiring students were less likely to abuse drugs and spent more time on schoolwork. Meanwhile, in St Louis, Missouri, Graham and O’Connor found that young, low-income African Americans had higher educational aspirations and more support for those aspirations than young, low-income white people. This was despite the fact that, objectively, the white respondents seemed in a better situation. They had more income, more access to health insurance, were more likely to have both parents living in the home and more likely to have a parent with some college experience.
As in other fields, there is a gap between people’s objective circumstances and how they feel about those circumstances. By studying that gap, we can hope to make better, more responsive policies. If we do not, then there is a flip side to optimism, clearly expressed in the title of Graham’s forthcoming book: Hope and Despair.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 5 August 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.
October 6, 2022
Cautionary Tales – The Online Date That’s Too Good To Be True
Single and looking for love, Dr Robert Epstein found himself chatting with a slim, attractive brunette online. She seemed perfect… perhaps even too good to be true.
Dr Epstein is an expert on artificial conversation – so surely he’d be the last person to fall for a computer? Chatbots fool us more often than we think… especially when they replicate our worst conversational habits.
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.
Further reading and listening
A wonderful overview (and one of my favourite ever books) is Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human.
Robert Epstein “From Russia, with Love How I got fooled (and somewhat humiliated) by a computer” Scientific American Mind 17
Eugene Goostman’s victory was reported here by the BBC, here by the Huffington Post, and here in a Coventry University press release.
Mark Humphrys describes the MGonz conversation in detail here.
Jason Fagone describes the story of Joshua Barbeau and the Jessica Simulation in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Gary Marcus Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years.
The New York Times and Replika describe the Replika chatbot.
What we keep getting wrong about inflation
What is inflation? The answer seems obvious: when things get more expensive, that’s inflation, and it’s bad. But an alternative view is Milton Friedman’s. In a talk in 1963, the hugely influential economist defined inflation as “a steady and sustained rise in prices” and added that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”.
The distinction matters. Consider two scenarios that might illuminate it. In both of them, consumer prices have increased by 10 per cent over the past year.
In Inflation World, there’s too much money around. Everything is getting more expensive at much the same rate, including labour. With your wages rising at the same rate as prices, the situation is disorienting and slightly inconvenient, but it’s not a crisis. The main risk is that inflation becomes self-perpetuating, and the main responsibility for solving the problem lies with the central bank.
In Energy Crunch World, the cost of energy has doubled. About 10 per cent of spending used to go into energy; that’s now about 20 per cent. In Energy Crunch World, the consumer price index has still risen by 10 per cent, and the situation is described by all reputable reporters as “inflation of 10 per cent”, just as in Inflation World. But the increase in prices is not “steady”; it’s not widespread; and it is unlikely to be “sustained”.
The risk of a self-perpetuating energy shock is small. It is hard to imagine that we would be spending 30 per cent of income on energy next year, 40 per cent the year after and 50 per cent the year after that. But the damage is bad enough; rather than being mildly disorienting, this is a crisis. A basic necessity has become unaffordable for many.
In Inflation World, stuff only seems more expensive because the price tags keep changing. That’s inflation. In Energy Crunch World, stuff really is more expensive. I’d venture to suggest that’s not inflation — it’s much worse.
The same distinction applies when things get cheaper thanks to technological progress. Music is much cheaper than it used to be, as are laptops and solar panels. And by “cheaper” I don’t mean in the almost-meaningless sense that there are fewer digits on the price tag. I mean cheaper in the only way that really matters, which is that they require fewer resources to produce and are therefore affordable in greater quantities to more people.
Perhaps I am doomed to fail in my project to disentangle real price changes from inflation. The real world, of course, contains elements of both, so confusion is inevitable. We are dealing with a temporary but very painful increase in the real cost of energy and food, as in Energy Crunch World, but we have also seen loose money and broader increases in prices, as in Inflation World.
But the two sources of higher prices require quite different policy responses. In Inflation World, inflation is a monetary phenomenon and needs a monetary response such as higher interest rates. In Energy Crunch World, the rise in prices needs a real-world response in the form of support for struggling households, and every effort to reduce demand and to find new sources of supply.
Look around and you’ll see plenty of confusion on this point. In the US, the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act is no such thing. It promises to squeeze the price of expensive pharmaceuticals, give tax credits for low-carbon energy sources and tighten some tax loopholes. These are promising policies, but if they work they will work by improving the structure of the real economy, not by tightening monetary conditions.
The same logic applies to US proposals to toughen competition policy. If a monopoly is broken up and its fat mark-ups reduced, the result should be that prices fall and incentives to improve quality and service increase. That should mean a one-off boost in real living standards, arguably far more important than any impact on inflation. If it affects inflation at all, it will be a temporary blip — and “reduces inflation” never was, and never should be, the test of competition policy.
Or consider the idea of a universal basic income. It’s often attacked on the grounds that it is inflationary, but there is nothing particularly inflationary about raising taxes and using the money to fund a basic income. The case against a basic income is nothing to do with inflation: it’s that those higher taxes plus the availability of unconditional cash might produce too much of a disincentive to work for too many people.
Friedman was oversimplifying when he declared that inflation was always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. But the statement is not far wrong and has a bracing clarity. If you try to evaluate clean energy subsidies, support for cutting edge research, competition policy or tax reform through the lens of inflation-busting, you’re missing the point. These policies stand or fall on their real-world merits.
Meanwhile, the best long-run prediction of inflation is that five years out, the inflation rate will be whatever independent central banks want it to be. Even if elected governments could help, they have plenty of serious economic problems to keep them busy. Perhaps they should start there.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 September 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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October 3, 2022
What We Owe The Future – A review
The moral philosopher Jonathan Glover tells a story about attending a conference of ethicists in Poland. The itinerary included a visit to Auschwitz. On the coach ride there, the academics earnestly discussed topics such as whether it could ever be morally justifiable to tell a lie. Then they toured the camps where more than a million people were murdered and saw a display of 25,000 pairs of shoes taken from the victims — the result of a single day’s work in the gas chambers. On the return journey, the coachload of moral philosophers was silent.
I have never forgotten Glover’s philosophy lectures, and his insistence that the discipline must have something to say about the questions that really matter.
William MacAskill, a young philosopher at Oxford university, shares Glover’s conviction that moral philosophy needs to explore the big questions. He is a vegetarian, having concluded that the suffering of animals matters too much to be eating cheeseburgers. After realising that what is pocket change to him might save a life in Somalia or Afghanistan, he gives much of his money away. He has become a figurehead for the “effective altruism” movement, which aims to identify the very best charitable causes and ensure they are well funded. Philosophy changed his life; he hopes it will change yours.
Having taken seriously the moral value of animals, and of very poor people who live far away from us, What We Owe the Future argues that there is another group whose interests we must consider: those who have not yet been born. This claim seems plausible enough. What makes it radical is the realisation that future people may dramatically outnumber us. If the planet sustains 10bn people for another 2,000 years, then the cumulative future population will be about 20 times larger than the current one. If the human race lasts much beyond that, future people will outnumber us by 10,000 to one or more. All of this assumes we don’t wipe ourselves out.
That becomes one of the imperatives of the book as MacAskill ticks off some of the apocalyptic scenarios — a bioengineered pandemic, an asteroid, a robot takeover — but his book is much more than a list of potential disasters. It is also a profoundly optimistic exploration of the opportunities our descendants might enjoy, and the steps we might take to help them.
The optimism is justified. The human population of 2022 CE is healthier than that of 22 CE. It is both vastly richer and vastly larger. Despite many injustices there is clear moral progress in many countries: slavery is illegal; democracy is widespread; torture is rare and shameful; sexism and racism are deplored; there is more freedom of religion, sexual identity and personal expression. It is not hard to imagine that many of these positive trends might continue.
While some of the conclusions of the book flow immediately from the premises, there are plenty of insights and surprises along the way. MacAskill argues, for example, that we are living at a decisive moment. The past century has seen unprecedented economic growth and the globalisation of culture. Such growth rates cannot continue indefinitely, which suggests the growth spurt of the 19th and 20th centuries may prove an anomaly. Our globalised culture — providing a single point of cultural failure — may also prove anomalous on a very long timescale: if humans colonise the stars, instant communication between colonies will be impossible. MacAskill makes plausible the idea that the current century may prove unusual — and pivotal — given a 10,000-year view.
Though admirable, this book is not without flaws. MacAskill acknowledges his “extensive team of consultants and research assistants”, but they have tempted him to make digressions into topics such as evolutionary fitness landscapes. While not wordy or tedious, it could have focused more sharply on its core claims.
Such indulgences contrast with the brisk treatment of some fundamentals. MacAskill does not seriously engage with the question of the human propensity to discount the future. Given the choice between some immediate pleasure and the same pleasure 10 years’ hence, most people feel that sooner is better. We pay a premium for that preference. Why does the same logic not apply to future generations?
“Harm is harm,” says MacAskill. That is true “whether it’s a week, a decade, or a century from now”. This suggests a discount rate of zero, although the term does not appear in the book’s index. It is a radical suggestion, but he offers no argument in favour of this view, declaring it “intuitive”. I’m not sure he’s wrong, but I’m not sure he’s right, either.
If he is right, how could I justify giving £10 to a food bank today when I could set up a charitable trust, let the money accumulate centuries of compound interest before lavishing the proceeds on future generations? Are we morally obliged to live at subsistence levels to maximise the resources available for investment and research so our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will thrive? Such questions have been discussed and analysed at great depth in the literature on climate change. It is surprising to see them waved away with a few sentences here.
Still, in focusing on the interests of future generations stretching into an indefinitely long future, MacAskill has thrust an important and neglected argument into the spotlight, while making it vivid and fun to read. He hopes this book will change the world, and it might.
Whether discussing the abolition of the slave trade or an alternate history in which the Nazis won the second world war, and the shoes pile up at Auschwitz for a thousand years to come, this is a writer who believes that one of the greatest opportunities is moral progress, and one of the greatest risks is that we lose our way, ethically — perhaps forever. MacAskill, like Glover, never stops believing that moral thinking matters.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 20 September 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.
September 29, 2022
How to waste a couple of hundred million pounds
In between summer holidays and the arrival of a new prime minister, few people will have noticed that, by dithering for a decade, the government has quietly wasted nearly £200mn. Even fewer will have been surprised. But we should be paying attention, not just in the UK, but around the world, because this sort of waste is both ubiquitous and perfectly avoidable.
The loss in question is the result of endless changes to a plan to upgrade the 76-mile Transpennine line, a notoriously unreliable, overcrowded and outdated railway linking York and Leeds to Manchester and, by extension, Liverpool. The initial plan, set out 11 years and three or four prime ministers ago, was to electrify the line to reduce operating costs and carbon emissions. It was supposed to cost £289mn and be finished by the end of 2019. Instead, the National Audit Office says that the project is still on the drawing board. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, somehow £190mn has been spent on unnecessary work.
How did this happen? Ministers have vacillated endlessly over the specifics as personnel and budgets changed. Work was started in 2015, then paused almost immediately while waiting for Network Rail’s investment programme to be reviewed. When it restarted later that year, the aims of the project had changed: the line now needed to accommodate more passengers on faster, more frequent and more reliable trains. A further rethink committed the upgrade to laying extra track, enhancing the station platforms and introducing digital signalling.
Other commitments were not necessary for the Transpennine line itself, but designed to help it co-ordinate with Northern Powerhouse Rail, an ambitious proposal to build a new high speed line from Leeds to Manchester and perhaps on to Liverpool. This would all seem more encouraging if the high speed line had not itself been radically scaled back in late 2021.
The estimated cost for the Transpennine project has ballooned from under £300mn in 2011, to 10 times that number in 2019, before more than tripling again to around £10bn in 2021. This is not a classic cost overrun; if it was, at least northern cities would have the satisfaction of knowing the project was in progress. Instead, it’s a constant change of scope.
“The project has been all over the place during this decade,” Bent Flyvbjerg told me. He is an expert on megaprojects, a management professor at Oxford university and co-author of a forthcoming book, How Big Things Get Done. Flyvbjerg suggested a plausible explanation: a decade ago, the government announced that it would take action; it has spent the intervening time trying to figure out what action to take. He added that “the £190mn on unnecessary work could be seen as the price you pay for making announcements before you know what you’re talking about”.
If the story feels familiar, it’s because projects often unfold in this haphazard way. Anyone who has remodelled their kitchen is familiar with the temptation of rethinking the work halfway through; all too many of us know the costs of giving in to that temptation. One would hope for better from the vast, professionally managed projects that Flyvbjerg studies, but usually in vain.
Long planning periods are not the problem. Flyvbjerg argues for a “think slow, act fast” approach to large projects: explore all the options; extensively prototype, test and plan; only then, start to build, but build quickly. All too often, we start building first, and plan later. And before the planning itself begins in earnest, it is a good idea to figure out why the project is supposed to be happening. There is no doubt a plausible case to be made for investments to reduce emissions and costs, increase reliability and capacity, cut journey times and interconnect with other rail projects. But the government started not with any of those, but with the sense that it would be a jolly good idea to promise some investment up north.
“Political announcements without action, and without much thinking, are common, and not only in the UK,” says Flyvbjerg. Quite so. A few years ago, I argued that Brexit was also a megaproject, and it’s one that makes Transpennine rail look like a masterpiece of advanced planning. David Cameron held a referendum while forbidding civil servants to prepare for what turned out to be the outcome; Theresa May scrambled to trigger Article 50 before asking what she wanted to achieve in the negotiations that followed; Boris Johnson was never able to plan anything more complex than an illegal drinks party.
Over a decade late, the Transpennine upgrade finally has a budget, goals and a plan. In the interim, says the National Audit Office, “capacity for passenger services on the route has been reached, and journeys are increasingly unreliable and crowded”.
Large projects are complex and difficult, but the basic principles are not. Take your time planning. When the plan is complete, execute it as quickly as possible. Keep things as simple as you can, using repeated modular elements and avoiding eye-catching world firsts. Above all, ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish before you start. One only has to list these principles to understand why politicians so often fail to respect them.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 September 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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September 26, 2022
A history and defence of opinion polling
Strength In Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them. By G. Elliott Morris. W.W. Norton; 224 pages; $28.95 and £21.99
In the 1920s, George Gallup sought to expand the circulation of his student newspaper. To gain readers’ attention, he published a misogynistic article entitled “The Unattractive Women”; it won his student rag so many new fans that the Daily Iowan quickly became a profitable newspaper. Readers claimed to be interested in editorials and news, not comics or gossip columns, but Gallup was right to suspect otherwise.
He began more careful studies, literally looking over readers’ shoulders to observe which pieces truly seized their attention. It was the beginning of his journey from journalist to father of modern opinion polls. G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist at The Economist, has written both a history and a defence of opinion polling; his story about George Gallup hints at many of the topics this lively book explores.
There is a fundamental problem with polls: when pollsters ask questions, the answers they receive may be less than candid. There is also the easily overlooked fact that opinion polling has always been about making money, with discovering the truth as an secondary motive. And there is the disheartening truth that, while opinion pollsters try to discern what people think and feel, what people think and feel can be ignoble. Gallup debased his student newspaper to please his readers, and politicians may debase policymaking to please the voters.
Gallup himself was unabashed. In 1940 he co-wrote “The Pulse of Democracy”, a book which argued that successful governments would be “responsive to the average opinion of mankind”, an opinion which “for the first time in democratic history” could now be continuously and objectively measured. Mr Morris concurs. “Polls are a distillation of the general will first,” he writes approvingly, “and everything else second.”
While most people think of polls as a prediction of election results, Mr Morris shows how they became a constant input to political decision-making. Gallup’s near-forgotten contemporary, Emil Hurja, was famous in the 1930s as the “Wizard of Washington”. His data on public opinion shaped the decisions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The Simulmatics Corporation, run by social scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, and armed with the latest computers, offered precise (if not always accurate) predictions as to how each of John F. Kennedy’s positions would affect his popularity with different voter segments. Richard Nixon was a prolific procurer of polls.
Pundits then and now worried that if politicians obsessed over opinion surveys, policymaking would become an act of followership rather than leadership. Mr Morris suggests instead that it is better to have a political class that attends to public opinion than one which ignores it, and declares that “public opinion polling has been one of the most democratising forces in American political history.” He even speculates that the Vietnam war might have ended far earlier if only Lyndon Johnson had been as interested in polling as Nixon was.
Mr Morris does not shy away from the horror stories. He eviscerates some influential but misleading surveys of mortality in Iraq and grumbles about partisan push pollsters, who ask loaded questions such as: “Would you still vote for [John] McCain if you knew he had sex with prostitutes and gave his wife venereal disease?”
Given the subtitle of the book, it is surprising that Mr Morris waits until the second half to properly discuss sampling, the most fundamental idea in polling. When he describes the fallout of Donald Trump’s win in 2016 for pundits and pollsters, Mr Morris mixes a vivid journalistic account of modern polling failures with a learned but challenging range of acronyms and technical details.
Polling is flawed, and some of those flaws seem unfixable. But Mr Morris’s repeated refrain is that the critics of opinion surveys overstate their case. If you think polls can mislead, just try understanding the electorate without them. Alas for pollsters, they will always be expected to forecast elections. From an early fiasco in 1936, through Gallup’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” humiliation in 1948, to Mr Trump’s allegedly impossible triumph in 2016, Mr Morris sorrowfully reminds us that pollsters are judged by results. Those results may vary.
Written for and first published in The Economist on 26 August 2022.
