Tim Harford's Blog, page 30

Cautionary Tales – A leap of faith from the Eiffel Tower

Inventor Franz Reichelt wants to test his novel “parachute suit” from as tall a structure as possible – and the Eiffel Tower seems ideal. Previous trial runs used a mannequin strapped to the chute and have not ended well. Despite this, his plan is to make the Eiffel Tower jump himself. Can he be persuaded to see sense?

Self-experimentation – particularly in the field of medicine – has a long and checkered history. Can we learn anything useful from such unorthodox experiments, or are they reckless acts of egotism and hubris? 

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 self-experimentation

Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine by Lawrence Altman

Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research, Allen B. Weisse

Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, and Views Among Ethics Committees and Prominent Scientists. Brian P. Hanley, William Bains, and George Church

On Franz Reichelt

Reporting in Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, Le Petit Journal, La Presse, Liberation and Le Petit Parisien.

On Barry Marshall

Nobel Prize Autobiography

Interview with the Academy of Achievement

Interview with Discover Magazine

It’s the uncertainty, not the delay, that gets you in the end

I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across Gare du Nord in 35C heat. The problem was not the delay, but the discomfort, the anxiety and the uncertainty. It was impossible to read or even think because the queue moved and bunched; it was dammed and redirected at unpredictable points for unknown reasons. There was nearly a nasty accident as an escalator pumped people into a space that was already crowded.

It was not the most delayed I’ve ever been, not by a long way. Thanks to an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, I was once five days late for my wife’s birthday. But the Eurostar experience somehow packed a season of stress into a few hours.

It was a fitting climax to a less-than-smooth attempt to tour the sights of Europe by train. Our train from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Innsbruck was replaced by two bus journeys. The train from Innsbruck to Verona was late and, despite booking months ago, we weren’t given seat reservations. We spent an hour in a 40C waiting room at Verona, watching as our train to Milan was repeatedly postponed: just another 15 minutes, the departure board promised, over and over again. And the journey from Milan to Paris was threatened by a cancelled connection, giving us a couple of hours to fret over whether or not we’d be allowed on the later train. I love the idea of rail travel, but reality sometimes disappoints.

The curious thing is that, when we were actually travelling, everything was a pleasure. Even a bus replacement is not too shabby when you’re driving through the Alps. Although we spent an inordinate amount of time trying and failing to confirm seat reservations, we rarely had any trouble actually getting the seats themselves. The problem, in essence, was not the travelling; it was the queueing and the waiting and, more than anything, the anxiously never knowing.

This is true not just for holiday travel but for le train-train quotidien (even “daily routine” sounds cool in French). A famous study by Daniel Kahneman and the late Alan Krueger found that one of the least pleasant parts of anyone’s day was the morning commute, with the evening commute not far behind.

The reason may be that the commute is not only unpleasant, but fraught enough that one could never quite get used to it. Commuters cannot afford complacency; they must always keep one eye on the grimness of their journey, lest it become grimmer.

None of this would be news to Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland, the authors of a delightful book called Transport for Humans. They cite various studies to back up some obvious-yet-overlooked ideas. For example, time flies when you are travelling but drags when you are waiting (subjectively, a minute of waiting feels like three minutes of travel). One Dutch study found that journeys on clean trains feel about 20 per cent briefer. I have nothing against faster trains, but running clean trains is cheaper and we could start doing it tomorrow.

Dyson and Sutherland argue that transport providers should attend to the neglected task of explaining what is happening and reassuring people. How long is the queue? How late is the train? If I miss this train, what happens then?

If Eurostar had said, “Sorry, you’ll have to queue for a couple of hours, and you’ll get to London two or three hours late, but we do promise to get you on a train tonight,” the time spent queueing would have been easier to bear. Instead, we were told why there had been some disruption, but nothing about the implications for us as travellers, so we had no idea what to expect or what to do.

I asked Eurostar for an interview to discuss why it seemed so hard for transport providers to provide information to passengers, but nobody could be made available to answer my questions. At least they are consistent.

Travellers find explanations useful even when there is no delay. It is easy to take some guesswork out of travelling by providing large clocks, having departure boards display countdowns or simply telling people which direction the train is coming from.

There is also the question of what to provide passengers with while they wait at the station. Clean seats, tables, perhaps even a power socket: a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. No doubt space in older stations is at a premium, but it would be helpful if some small fraction of the budget and attention devoted to high-speed rail links was diverted to relaxing and productive waiting rooms.

As I draft this conclusion, it’s four hours after we arrived at Gare du Nord, and two and a half hours after we were due to have left. I’m still waiting, but I’m on a stationary train. I have (fitful) air conditioning, a comfortable seat, and power and a table for my laptop. As a result, my mood has hugely improved. It turns out there is more to the art of travel than actually moving.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 26 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.

My former tutorial partner is now Prime Minister. Here’s my advice to her

We all pass certain milestones in our lives that cause us to stop and reflect. The death of a parent; a child finishing school; one’s former tutorial partner becoming the prime minister. Your humble Undercover Economist is having to deal with all three in the space of a few months.

I don’t remember much about Liz Truss from studying mathematical logic alongside her at Oxford. I was too busy wrestling with Peano’s axioms; I suspect she felt the same. And I doubt she trembled to read the recent revelation in The Economist that, while the Conservative grassroots venerate her, the Liberal Democrats are targeting “the Tim Harford voter”. Truly, the narrative arc of my life story has taken a disturbing twist.

But what on earth does the Tim Harford voter actually want? After a few weeks of chewing it over, I’ve realised that if anyone is in a position to speculate, it must be me. Perhaps the best I can come up with is that the Tim Harford voter is worried that the very foundations of British policymaking seem to be shallow and prone to crack. The bad policies are just the clumsy fondant icing; it’s the cake itself that is rotting away.

Consider Brexit. It’s a foolish policy, to be sure, but much more than that. It was enabled by a vaguely worded referendum that was introduced by a prime minister who crossed his fingers and forbade preparation for the outcome. It was sold to the British people on false pretences. A member of parliament, Jo Cox, was murdered during the campaign. Three of the prime ministers leading the project — Cameron, May and Truss — voted against it, and the other, Johnson, was notoriously ambivalent. Ever since the vote, the process has been mired in vitriol, contempt and denial. One does not have to be a diehard Remainer to look at the entire decision-making process and fear that the British polity is not really up to the grown-up job of running a country.

What does the Tim Harford voter want when they look at this? First, a trivial-seeming thing: calm. We live in an age of outrage, sometimes justified and sometimes manufactured. But nobody ever thought more clearly because they were angry. Nor is outrage the only way to succeed at the political game. Proven winners from Blair to Merkel to Obama have thrived while trying to set a constructive tone.

Truss has been trying to provoke outrage, but judging from her infamous rant about how cheese imports are a disgrace, she is not very good at it. Perhaps she will decide that calm problem-solving suits her better.

Secondly, British institutions need buttressing rather than undermining. The Leave campaign scorned the UK Statistics Authority. Boris Johnson’s administration — if that is not an oxymoron — was at pains to define itself against parliament, the civil service and the Supreme Court. Truss has taken aim at the Bank of England, the Treasury and the untrammelled power of, um, the Financial Times. Meanwhile, the NHS is never criticised, but it is being allowed to fall apart under the strain of the pandemic.

The UK has had a Conservative prime minister for 12 years, so it is easy to see why Truss wants to suggest that the rot starts not in Downing Street but Threadneedle Street or Whitehall. Perhaps she can still blame Brussels? The voters may swallow this story, although I wonder. But the country would be in a much better place if institutions from the Bank of England to the Office for National Statistics were treated as essential parts of the policymaking state, rather than as seething pits of incompetence and treachery.

A third demand from the Tim Harford faction is that facts should matter more than “vibes”. The UK has not — yet — succumbed to the delusional paranoia so widespread in the US, but all too many policy arguments take place in a fact-free environment.

Take the cost of living crisis. Truss’s team has attacked the Bank of England for not being tough enough on inflation. But as a matter of simple arithmetic, when wholesale gas prices rise tenfold, average price rises cannot plausibly be kept at two per cent. (My colleague Martin Sandbu observes that if energy prices triple, all other prices would have to fall by an average of about 20 per cent to keep overall prices stable. Good luck with that.)

It is surprising how often political arguments in the UK, whether over taxes, crime, immigration or the pandemic, take place without any reference to whether the numbers are small or large, rising or falling. It might seem dull and grey to request policymaking with a sense of direction and proportion. So be it. Dull and grey it is.

I don’t envy Truss her new job. But I hope she doesn’t forget the Peano arithmetic we studied together. For too long, British political discourse has been based on intuition, inconsistency and hand-waving bluster. Peano arithmetic is the opposite: an attempt to set logical thought on the most solid of foundations. Politics is a different game, of course, but solid foundations would still be useful. Sometimes the plodding basics matter more than anything.

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

Cautionary Conversation – Flying on empty

A meter is shorter than a yard. An ounce is heavier than a gram. We harmlessly mix them up sometimes, but a “unit conversion error” when you’re filling up the fuel tanks of an airliner can be fatal. Which is exactly what happened to Air Canada Flight 143. 

Tim Harford talks to mathematician and comedian Matt Parker about how the aircraft came to take off without the proper fuel load, how no one noticed until it was too late, and why such errors give us an insight into just how important maths is to keeping our complex world working as it should. 

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

Humble Pi by Matt Parker. Matt Parker’s YouTube channel is Standup Maths.

How can the UK improve its productivity? I went to Legoland to find out

Few parts of the British economy are as meticulously observed by this columnist as Legoland, a theme park within sight of Windsor Castle. Each July, my son and I have sampled the delights of the Dragon rollercoaster and the Viking River Splash, endured the rigours of long queues, and over the years have had ample opportunity to ponder what Legoland can teach us about economic productivity.

Productivity is one of those things that you can’t have too much of, like competent politicians or pleasant weather, and which the UK lacks more than most. Output per hour has been lacklustre in many countries since the financial crisis, but the UK has stagnated more than its peers. So how can the UK improve its productivity? I didn’t expect to find the answers at Legoland, but I did hope that it would help me to ask better questions.

First, where are the bottlenecks? For Legoland, the key constraint is the capacity of the rides. If (hypothetically) 20,000 people buy tickets to spend the day at the park, but Legoland’s attractions can only deliver 10,000 rides an hour, then one way or another visitors will have to wait two hours between each ride. That isn’t likely to prove sustainable.

The most obvious way to improve capacity is to invest in new attractions. Legoland does this, but Helen Bull, the boss of the Legoland Windsor resort, told me that there is a cycle of investment in the resort: a year or two of high investment will be followed by years with lower capital spending. As Legoland opened its fancy new Sky Lion ride last year, this implies that we may be waiting for a while before the next big attraction is built.

Could British businesses invest more? The Bank of England certainly thinks so; in 2017, it found that UK businesses persistently aimed for (and achieved) a nominal return on capital investment of 12 per cent, despite the fact that the cost of debt fell after the financial crisis from around 6 per cent to 3 per cent. When a business can borrow at 3 per cent to earn 12 per cent, one has to wonder what is stopping it from borrowing and investing a little more.

The Bank of England’s research blames inertia, excessive risk aversion after the trauma of the financial crisis and, above all, uncertainty. When businesses have no idea what is around the corner, they tend to wait and see before investing heavily. The past few years of economic shocks and political tomfoolery cannot have helped.

Even without another big investment, Legoland could get more out of the site with more workers. On my recent visit, the ice-cream kiosks were closed for most of a hot day, and the minor rides were often stationary because only a single staff member was present to supervise loading. But it cannot be easy to recruit a seasonal workforce, particularly since British politicians have been so keen to emphasise restrictions on immigration.

Could Legoland get a productivity boost from new technologies? Perhaps. The most obvious example is the Sky Lion ride, which adds a large digital projector to some judiciously choreographed physical effects (tipping, vibrating, squirts of water and blasts of hot air) to produce the illusion of dramatic swoops. It’s a credible rival to the large physical rollercoasters, and presumably will be vastly easier to refresh after a few years.

Legoland is also trying to use smartphone apps to organise both staff and visitors more efficiently. Staff no longer monitor the park from desktop computers in a nearby office; they can see how the park is doing in real time on a tablet. Visitors can also use apps to buy tickets, reserve rides or find shorter queues. (The app also offers augmented reality, but I have not been able to make it work.) Ultimately, though, all this computing power seems as marginal for productivity growth at Legoland as it has been in many other parts of the economy. Radical change is often required to unlock new technologies.

Or perhaps we are thinking about productivity all wrong? After all, it is reductive to measure the “output” of Legoland in terms either of pounds spent or even rides provided. The desired output is a fun day, fondly remembered, for as many people as possible.

Diane Coyle, professor of public policy at Cambridge, and Leonard Nakamura of the Philadelphia Fed have recently been advocating an alternative measure of economic progress that focuses on how people spend and enjoy their time. Their perspective sheds light on the blurring of work and home life. In the case of Legoland, it suggests that since queues at theme parks are an inevitability, perhaps more should be done to make the queues themselves pleasant.

Fortunately for theme parks everywhere, behavioural science tells us that a long queue for the rollercoaster will be largely forgotten; we recall instead a few thrilling moments right at the end. For Legoland that is perfectly satisfactory. It is just a shame that “focus on the good stuff and shove the rest down the memory hole” now appears to be the central plank of the UK’s economic strategy.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 29 July 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 – “But You’re Not Howard Hughes”

By the 1970s Howard Hughes was the “invisible billionaire”. A business tycoon, a daring aviator and Hollywood Lothario, Hughes had an amazing life story… but hiding away in luxury hotels he wasn’t sharing his memories with anyone.

Then the recluse told a respected publishing house – via intermediaries – that he was collaborating on an authorized biography. The book would be a blockbuster… but it was all a lie.

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

Hoax by Clifford Irving

The Hoax by Stephen Fay, Lewis Chester and Magnus Linklater

The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova

Jeffrey Goldberg “Liar, Liar” The New Yorker 16 April 2007

Transcripts and statements archived in the New York Times 10 January 1972

Abortion and women in America: what the numbers tell us

“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision,” wrote Samuel Alito in explaining the reasoning of the US Supreme Court as it reversed the constitutional right to an abortion. Perhaps not, but some facts are clear enough.

First, the ruling is more than just a symbol. The right to a legal abortion is one that has been used by tens of millions of women, and the ruling will curtail that right in meaningful ways. One in four American women will have an abortion at some stage in their lives. (This estimate is based on patchy data, because the US government has shown a revealing lack of interest in collecting solid numbers.) Nearly half of pregnancies are unintended and nearly half of those unintended pregnancies are terminated; overall about one-fifth of pregnancies end in termination.

There are nearly 30 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 living in states that have already banned abortion, or are likely to do so soon. If they are not facing a medical emergency, these women may still travel to states where abortion is legal. The evidence, however, suggests that many cannot or will not. (An amicus brief filed with the court by a group of pro-choice economists is a good guide to this and other evidence.)

Second, women who choose to abort a pregnancy generally do not regret their decision and often avoid economic distress as a result. Our best evidence for this is from the widely reported Turnaway Study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Francisco. For a decade, these researchers studied women who had wanted terminations but were close to the gestational limits for the clinics they had sought out. Some made the cut-off and were given the abortions they chose; others missed the cut-off and were turned away. Not quite a randomised trial, but nearly so.

The Turnaway researchers found that women who were denied an abortion were much more likely to experience financial distress, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to end up with an abusive partner and less likely to say they were in a “very good” romantic relationship a couple of years later. Two of them died in pregnancy. None of the women who received an abortion died.

Broader research suggests that the very position of women in society is at stake, because women’s lives are profoundly affected by their ability or inability to control their fertility. For example, the economist Amalia Miller once published a study about the impact of random factors delaying motherhood by one year for a woman in her twenties. (These random factors included failure of birth control, delays in being able to conceive, and the timing of miscarriages.) In each case, the unplanned one-year delay in motherhood was associated with a rise in lifetime earnings of 10 per cent.

Similarly, the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz tracked the growing availability of the contraceptive pill to young women, state by state. They found that as each state opened up access to the pill in the late 1960s, young women were more likely to enrol in professional courses, and their wages increased. The reason? The pill allowed women to delay both marriage and motherhood.

Access to contraception and access to terminations are not the same thing, but, when we are looking at the impact on women’s careers and relationships, lessons learnt in one case carry over to the other. No surprise, then, that the evidence suggests that the expansion of abortion rights in the 1970s reduced teen motherhood and increased women’s access to college and professional careers.

To those who assert that the foetus has an absolute right to life under almost any circumstance, none of this evidence will matter. But anyone who believes there are competing rights to be balanced should take a close look at the likely effect of a major change to a right that many millions of women have relied on.

In any case, the argument for absolute rights cuts both ways. I have never forgotten reading Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion”. Thomson asks her reader to imagine waking up one morning in hospital to find you have been plumbed into someone else’s circulatory system. He has a severe but temporary kidney condition, but you alone have the right blood type; your kidneys are now cleaning both your own blood, and his. Not to worry, though: all you need to do is wait nine months and you can safely unplug and be on your way. Thomson’s point is that while it might be nice, even heroic, to keep this fellow alive, you are not obliged to do so. Unplugging yourself immediately is not murder, even though he will die as a result.

I am now a very rusty moral philosopher, so all I will add is that Thomson’s essay brought me up short because it made me try to imagine something for the first time: what is it like to be pregnant when you don’t want to be? We have moved beyond the philosophers now. For better or worse, the question is now in the hands of the voters.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 22 July 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 – South Pole Race: When Limeys get scurvy

Polar exploration is dangerous… but trudging hundreds of miles in subzero temperatures isn’t made any easier if you’re suffering from scurvy. The deadly vitamin deficiency destroys the body and will of even the strongest and most determined adventurer – and it seems that scurvy stuck down the ill-fated expedition of Captain Scott. 

But scurvy… in 1912? Hadn’t the Royal Navy to which Scott belonged famously cracked the problem of scurvy a century before, with a daily dose of lime juice? How did the ‘Limeys’ seemingly unlearn that lesson? 

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

Stephen Bown The Last Viking

Alfred Bollet Plagues and Poxes

David Crane Scott of the Antarctic

Apsley Cherry-Garrard The Worst Journey in the World

Malcolm Gladwell David and Goliath

Ranulph Fiennes Captain Scott

Roland Huntford The Last Place on Earth

Edward Larson An Empire of Ice

Diana Preston A First Rate Tragedy

Robert Scott The Voyage of the Discovery

—

Kristin Asdal, Contesting the Animal Model: Axel Holst and the Controversy over Scurvy and Beriberi, Social History of Medicine, Volume 27, Issue 3, August 2014, Pages 577–593, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hku007

Butler AR. The role of scurvy in Scott’s return from the South Pole. J R Coll Physicians Edinb. 2013;43(2):175-81. doi: 10.4997/JRCPE.2013.217. PMID: 23734365

Maciej Cegłowski “Scott and Scurvy” Idlewords 6 March 2010

LUND CC, CRANDON JH. HUMAN EXPERIMENTAL SCURVY: AND THE RELATION OF VITAMIN C DEFICIENCY TO POSTOPERATIVE PNEUMONIA AND TO WOUND HEALING. JAMA. 1941;116(8):663–668. doi:10.1001/jama.1941.02820080003002

Jeremy Hugh Baron “Sailors’ scurvy before and after James Lind – a reassessment” Nutrition Reviews Vol. 67(6):315–332 315 doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2009.00205.x

Koettlitz, “The British Antarctic Expedition” British Medical Journal 8 Feb 1902

“Captain Roald Amundsen and the Society” The Geographical Journal Dec 1927 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1782920

We need a bolder approach to next generation vaccines

At the risk of sounding like a newlywed presenting my spouse with a list of pointers for improvement, these once-miraculous Covid vaccines could do better. It wasn’t long ago that I celebrated the anniversary of being fully vaccinated, but that first flush of immunity started to wane very quickly. I’ve even been flirting with some exciting new variants.

I shouldn’t joke. The vaccines were indeed spectacularly effective, as well as being as safe as one could hope. But the virus has adapted so quickly that it is at risk of leaving us behind. The current vaccines were tuned to induce immunity to early strains of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but more recent variants have proved adept at evading both the vaccines and the immunity from earlier infections.

The vaccines still dramatically reduce the risk of severe symptoms. But they do not eliminate the risk of infection, illness or lasting side-effects. Infection rates in the UK today may well be higher than they have ever been. The result: short-term illness, the risk of long-term illness and, for the unlucky, hospitalisation or death.

We can cope with that, if we have to. But there is clearly a risk of something nastier down the track. The UK has been hit by three consecutive waves of Omicron variants, each one appearing in a matter of weeks. If a future variant proves much more dangerous, we will not have much time to brace for impact.

So what can be done? The answer: develop better vaccines. The simplest approach is, as with flu, to try to predict where the virus will be four to six months ahead, and to make booster doses accordingly. That looks feasible. After scaling up to meet demand for vaccines in 2021, the world has “unprecedented production capacity”, says Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder of Airfinity, a health analytics company — enough to produce another 8bn doses this year.

But better, if we can figure out how to do it, is to make a vaccine that targets all Sars-Cov-2 variants, or a wider family of coronaviruses including Sars or, even more ambitiously, all coronaviruses.

“It’s a riskier and more aggressive approach,” says Prashant Yadav, a vaccine supply-chain expert at the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think-tank. There are several such vaccines in development; if one of them works, that’s a huge step forward.

Another approach that has recently been in the spotlight is a nasally administered booster. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, leads one of several laboratories working on such an approach, which she calls “prime and spike”. The nasal spray promises to produce antibodies in the nose, thus preventing infection before it starts and breaking the chain of transmission. But this vaccine is still at an early stage.

Other delivery mechanisms include patches and pills. It would be vastly easier to store and distribute a vaccine in tablet form, and many people would prefer to swallow a pill than have a jab. A final consideration, says Yadav, is to develop new ways of manufacturing vaccines — for example, growing them in plant or yeast cultures. Having such alternatives available would avoid bottlenecks the next time a vaccine is urgently needed.

This is all very exciting, and Bech Hansen says there are around 400 different Covid vaccines at various stages of development, along with more than 100 new flu vaccines and over 250 vaccines for other diseases. There is far more urgency than there was before Covid, but less urgency than we need. Given the risk of a further dangerous variant (not small) and the social benefit of an effective vaccine against it (huge), governments should be investing much more to accelerate the next generation of vaccines.

In 2020, government programmes such as Operation Warp Speed in the US aimed to subsidise research, testing and production of vaccine candidates, as well as dramatically accelerating the process of regulatory approval. The idea was that governments, rather than private companies, would accept the risk of failure. This made sense, because it was society as a whole that would enjoy most of the rewards.

A vaccine manufacturer certainly profits from a successful vaccine but those profits are dwarfed by the wider benefits. By accelerating vaccine development and production, Operation Warp Speed “saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars”, says Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University.

The stakes are lower now but still unnervingly high. While there is plenty of interesting science happening in the vaccine pipeline, it will not be fast enough if we are unlucky with the next variant. To move next-generation vaccines beyond promising studies into clinical trials then large-scale production will take money, as well as a greater sense of regulatory urgency. It is possible these new vaccines will all fail or that they will succeed but provide only a modest benefit.

Or they may prove essential. Investing more money in the next Covid vaccine is not only likely to create scientific spillovers for other vaccines but is the best way we have of reducing the risk of disaster. Such insurance is worth paying for. Politicians have been keen to declare that the pandemic is over but the virus pays no attention to such proclamations. We need even better vaccines. We should be willing to pay for them.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 15 July 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.

How to really change someone’s mind

I’ve been thinking recently about three debates. In the first, which took place in January 2016, two Harvard students, Fanele Mashwama and Bo Seo, proposed that “the world’s poor would be justified in pursuing complete Marxist revolution”. In the second, in October of the same year, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debated which of them should be the next president of the United States. In the third, author David McRaney discussed the shape of the planet on which we live with Mark Sargent, a man best known for his popular YouTube videos asserting that the Earth is flat.

I have my own views about all three topics, but what intrigues me here is form rather than content. What does it mean to have an argument with someone? What goals are served by different styles of debate? And, most importantly of all, if you hope to persuade someone else to change their mind, how should you do it?

Mashwama and Seo were debating in a formal contest, the world championship, no less. They won, but not because they convinced anyone that a Marxist revolution was justified. (I suspect they did not even convince themselves of that.) You win a debating contest in much the same way that you win a figure-skating competition: by convincing the judges that you have produced a superlative performance, judged against established standards and rules.

The Clinton-Trump debate also had rules, but not the same kind. Trump arguably broke those rules more than Clinton, but if moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz had declared that Trump had been disqualified, and that Clinton was therefore president-elect, everyone would have concluded that Cooper and Raddatz had lost their minds. In politics, the rules of debate exist to be broken, and they often are broken deliberately for calculated effect.

McRaney’s discussion with flat-Earther Sargent was different again. McRaney did not offer evidence or argument that the Earth is near-spherical, neither did he mock Sargent in the hope of turning the audience against him. Instead, he largely gave the floor to Sargent, asking him to explain his reasons and gently inviting Sargent to reflect further on whether the evidence supported his ideas. It was a radically different view of what a disagreement might look like.

So what was McRaney trying to do? His new book, How Minds Change, explores why some world views seem so stubbornly immune to reason and why people will nevertheless change their minds in the right circumstances. McRaney suggests that most people believe what they believe based on social cues and that this is a reasonable way for social primates to conduct themselves.

One consequence of this tribalism is that we rarely examine in detail any of the reasons that we believe anything. In principle, that problem should be solved by the kind of logical, good-faith debate that Bo Seo advocates in his book Good Arguments (US) / The Art of Disagreeing Well (UK). In practice, most people do not react well to having their beliefs dismantled by a skilled debater. No matter how civilised, it feels like a frontal assault and the cognitive drawbridge is quickly raised.

Hence McRaney’s softly softly approach, inspired by conversational techniques such as “street epistemology” and “deep canvassing”, which sometimes trigger remarkable conversations.

McRaney describes a deep canvassing interview conducted in California before same-sex marriage was legal. It begins when a campaigner for equal marriage rights knocks on the door of a septuagenarian gentleman and begins a conversation. At first, the man is sceptical. The “gay community” make such a ruckus demanding more rights, he says, but the country has enough problems without all that.

But as they talk, the canvasser asks the man about his own marriage. Married for 43 years, says the man. His wife died 11 years ago. He’ll never get over it. The canvasser listens as the man talks about his wife, how much he misses her, and the way she died. They were so happy together. And then, unprompted, he says, “I would want these gay people to be happy too.”

During deep canvassing interviews, says McRaney, people “talked themselves into a new position so smoothly that they were unable to see that their opinions had flipped”.

Not always, of course. McRaney’s conversation with Sargent was friendly and thoughtful, but he had no more success in prompting Sargent to reject flat-Earthism than he would have had in prompting the Pope to renounce Catholicism. So did McRaney fail? Perhaps. But the conversation ended in a tone of mutual respect; the door was open for McRaney to try again. I have seen many disagreements go worse.

Debate feels like it should work the way Seo wants it to work. I share his love of the ideals of debate: logic, turn-taking, listening as well as talking, non-violence. I am not optimistic that it often works in practice. Perhaps the deep problem is that formal debate is a performance, like professional wrestling. Audiences pick a side and enjoy the show.

But people do not usually change their minds because they enjoy a show, nor even because of a dazzling display of logic. People change their minds because they persuade themselves. Rapport, listening and inviting people to elaborate can all open a space for that self-persuasion to happen. But a world champion debater cannot change your mind; only you can do that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 July 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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