Tim Harford's Blog, page 34

What Le Corbusier got right about office space

A century ago, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for factory workers near Bordeaux. The resulting development, Cité Frugès de Pessac, was much as one might expect: brightly hued blocks of pure modernism. The humble factory workers refused to move in. Later residents of Pessac subverted Le Corbusier’s visionary geometry. They added rustic shutters, pitched roofs and gardens with picket fences, adorned with gaudy gnomes.

Modernism can be beautiful, but we humans like to do things our own way. As managers ponder how to lure workers back into the office, they are offering free food, free drinks, free massages and touting the joys of face-to-face conversation. But they should also ponder the lessons of Pessac’s gnomes.

In the minds of many office workers, there is now an unspoken question: if I went back to the office, would I feel like I was the boss of my own desk? That question is easy for managers — enthroned in their corner offices — to overlook, yet it matters more than we think.

In 2010, the psychologists Alex Haslam and Craig Knight set up an experiment in which participants were asked to perform simple administrative tasks in a variety of office spaces. They tested four different office layouts. One was stripped down: bare desk, swivel chair, pencil, paper, nothing else. The second layout was softened with pot plants and almost abstract floral images. Workers enjoyed this layout more than the minimalist one and got more and better work done there.

The third and fourth layouts were superficially similar, yet produced dramatically different outcomes. In each, workers were invited to use the same plants and pictures to decorate the space before they started work, if they wished. But in one of them, the experimenter came in after the subject had finished decorating, and then rearranged it all. The physical difference was trivial, but the impact on productivity and job satisfaction was dramatic. When workers were empowered to shape their own space, they did more and better work and felt far more content. When workers were deliberately disempowered, their work suffered and, of course, they hated it. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted.

It wasn’t the environment itself that was stressful or distracting — it was the lack of control.

Yet there is a long, dismal tradition of disempowering workers. In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

At least the cube farms had a money-saving logic. Many managerial attempts to control the office environment had no logic at all. In the early 1990s, Jay Chiat of the Chiat-Day advertising agency brought on star architects such as Gaetano Pesce and Frank Gehry to provide him with radical, fashionable office spaces over which the actual workers had no control. These workers, who Jay Chiat seemed to view as little more than an aesthetic annoyance, would be granted tiny lockers for “their dog pictures, or whatever”. Or their garden gnomes, I suppose.

The Chiat-Day office redesign has become a notorious cautionary tale, warning what happens when style is put ahead of substance and hot-desking goes too far. Yet pointlessly disempowering office layouts and rules remain far too common. Occasionally the media will mock one of these more extreme efforts. Everyone chuckles nervously at such stories. We all know our workplace could be next.

It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

Le Corbusier’s Pessac is now viewed as an architectural success. The picket fences and the pitched roofs and the garden gnomes are gone, and his original vision is restored. I wonder if Le Corbusier himself would have approved of that. The very fact that his designs were so easily modified was, arguably, their strength. When he was told about the garden gnomes of Pessac, he replied, “You know, life is always right; it is the architect who is wrong.” Managers should remember that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 March 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 Short – When A Plague Struck World of Warcraft

This week’s episode is available to Pushkin+ subscribers only, I’m afraid, but we’ll have another full-length episode available for all next week, and every other Friday thereafter.

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

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

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.

Can maintenance save civilisation?

Nearly two years ago, I made a costly mistake. I’d spent some time trying to fix up my bike at a local bike co-op, when one of the volunteers told me that the chain was worn, and I should come back soon to replace it. A week later, the first lockdown began and I put the chain out of my mind. A few weeks later, it gave way beneath me and I found myself face down in a pool of my own blood.

When I wrote about my mishap, I neglected to mention the most obvious lesson: replace your bike chain at the first sign of trouble. But I am not alone in that oversight. Maintenance is not sexy. When Stewart Brand devoted half an hour of TV to the subject — in the 1997 BBC series How Buildings Learn — he confronted the problem squarely.

“People don’t want to do maintenance for perfectly understandable reasons,” he declared. “There’s nothing positive about it, just expense and hassle and nothing really gained.”

Brand was speaking ironically. He knows what I learnt the hard way, that there is everything to be gained from timely maintenance. So why do we neglect it? It’s a topic of discussion every time a bridge collapses in the US; the recent Forbes Avenue Bridge collapse in Pittsburgh is part of a trend, alas.

A simple diagnosis is that politicians would rather save money now and leave their successors to deal with the consequences. (See also: pandemic preparedness; education spending; climate change.)

Yet the rot runs deeper. Maintenance is a low-status affair: you can confess to being unable to change a tyre in a way that you would never confess to being unable to name a play by Shakespeare.

“I came into this game for the action,” says a gun-wielding, balaclava-wearing Harry Tuttle in Brazil. “Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble.” Tuttle (Robert De Niro) is a rogue maintenance man, a heating systems engineer on the run from the authorities. The very idea is absurd, and that speaks volumes about how we view maintenance.

We understand the expertise of janitors, plumbers and mechanics, and we suffer mightily in their absence, yet somehow we take them for granted. We take for granted, too, the most basic maintenance of all — preparing food, washing clothes, changing dirty nappies. Nobody would boast at a dinner party or on a first date about doing any of this, yet it is essential.

Maintenance is so underrated that we don’t really know how much of a problem we have. In his book The Shock of The Old, David Edgerton writes, “Maintenance has lived in a twilight world, hardly visible in the formal accounts societies make of themselves. In the economic and production statistics, for example, it is invisible.”

This is about more than breaking bridges and breaking bike chains. There is a missed opportunity here to find something rather wonderful in maintenance.

The Maintenance Race is a short audiobook by Stewart Brand about the role of maintenance in the first round-the-world yacht race in the late 1960s. One competitor, Robin Knox-Johnston, has to interrupt his hull repairs by getting out of the water, fetching a rifle and shooting a circling shark.

“Sometimes maintenance means you have to shoot a shark,” Brand says, wryly.

Even on dry land, maintenance is often a varied job — more varied than manufacturing. It requires diagnosis, judgment and improvisation. We can build robots that make dishwashers, but we can’t build robots that repair them. As automation closes in on a world crying out for respected, skilled and fulfilling blue-collar jobs, perhaps we should be taking maintenance more seriously.

And maintenance can build communities. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel memorial prize in economics, once studied Nepalese communities before and after modern dams and irrigation systems were installed by development agencies.

There had always been a bargain between farming communities upstream and downstream: we’ll help keep the canals clear, if you help maintain the dam upstream. But the modern dams needed fewer repairs, and so the bargain fell apart, leaving the modern system less effective than the traditional irrigation. The need to maintain the old irrigation system was also helping to maintain strong relationships between villages.

A few months after my accident, I ventured out to the White Horse of Uffington, a monument in the Oxfordshire countryside that has endured for 3,000 years thanks only to tireless maintenance as villagers from miles around would assemble for “scouring” or “chalking” the horse.

It’s a lot of work, but perhaps that is the point: archaeologists speculate that the horse was created and maintained as a way of bringing a community together with a regular ritual.

Perhaps that is over-romanticising things. Whether we view maintenance as a vital ritual, a kind of meditation, or a tiresome chore, it is inescapable. Without it, everything falls apart.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 February 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 Short – The Balloons That Ate Cleveland

When Disneyland released one million helium balloons to set a new world record, Cleveland, Ohio looked on in envy. Could it top the Magic Kingdom? But what did citizens hope to gain from getting into the record books… and at what cost?

This shorter episode is one of a series of five Cautionary Tales Shorts I’ve made for subscribers to Pushkin+ – subscribers can listen to the other four but this one is for everyone… enjoy!

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 Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

Nathan Truesdell’s delightful micro-documentary is “Balloonfest“. Other sources include Be Amazed, and reporting from the Los Angeles Times, CBS, the Chicago Tribune and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The academic research on why gifts are disappointing is Galak, J., Givi, J. and Williams, E. F. (2016) ‘Why Certain Gifts Are Great to Give but Not to Get: A Framework for Understanding Errors in Gift Giving’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(6), pp. 380–385. doi: 10.1177/0963721416656937.

Cautionary Tales – Death on the Dance Floor

How one tiny error brought 60 tons of glass, concrete and steel crashing down on a packed hotel lobby.

With its splendid modern architecture, the Hyatt Regency was the place to be seen in Kansas City in 1981. Beneath space-age walkways, guests drank, laughed and danced… not realising that the 60 tons of of glass, concrete and steel hanging above their heads was about to come crashing down.

One hundred and fourteen people died. But why? Was it cheap materials? Shoddy construction? Or a tiny error that seemed so insignificant that no one paid it any attention?

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 Morana, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The Kansas City Star’s reporting was an essential source, including Donna McGuire “The Hyatt tragedy: 20 years later; Memories, lessons live on; Fatal disaster remains impossible to forget” The Kansas City Star 15 July 2001, Rick Montgomery “20 Years Later: Many are continuing to learn from skywalk collapse” Kansas City Star 3 Oct 2001, and Kevin Murphy “Hyatt skywalks collapse changed lives forever” The Kansas City Star Magazine 10 July 2011.

The May 2000 edition of the Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities features several articles on the tragedy, by Piotr Moncarz et al; Gregory Luth; Sarah Pfatteicher; and Jack Gillum.

Two essential books covering the tragedy are Henry Petroski’s To Engineer is Human and Levy and Salvadori’s Why Buildings Fall Down.

Why do some great ideas just fail to scale?

Andy Warhol put it best. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too,” he declared in 1975. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

That is true not just for Coca-Cola or, for that matter, Campbell’s soup or Brillo pads. One could say much the same about a Hollywood movie, Gmail, Ikea bookshelves, Microsoft Office, the iPhone, the Uber app, a Big Mac, a Moderna vaccine shot and YouTube. If Warhol were still here to opine, he might object that you can splash out on a private movie screening or pay for a premium subscription to YouTube. True enough. But the broad principle applies: in the unlovely jargon of Silicon Valley, these products and services all “scale”.

But not everything does. Researchers and policy wonks have long studied pilot schemes such as criminal rehabilitation programmes, public health initiatives or innovative schools. They dread the familiar phenomenon of the pilot delivering sensational results, only to fade at a larger scale. This dismaying tendency was called “voltage drop” by the psychiatrist Amy Kilbourne and her colleagues in 2007.

The economist John List has been exploring the causes of this voltage drop, first in a 2019 paper with Omar Al-Ubaydli and Dana Suskind, then in a recent book, The Voltage Effect. List is well qualified for the task, with a mix of theoretical, policy and Silicon Valley experience. He is admired for conducting realistic experiments to shed light on economic theory and policy; he set up a pre-school in Chicago with the aim of “establishing a model that other school districts around the world might some day be able to implement”; and he is chief economist at Lyft, a position he previously held at Uber, two of the companies attempting to scale the process of getting driven around.

So why does the voltage drop for so many promising ideas? One common problem is that the original effect was illusory. Consider a famous experiment, conducted over 20 years ago by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, in which customers in a high-end supermarket were offered free samples of jam from a choice of either six or 24 flavours. The wider choice was dramatically demotivating. Ten times as many people bought jam after being shown the smaller range. It is one of the most famous results in psychology; it has also proved rather difficult to repeat in follow-up experiments. Perhaps the effect is completely non-existent, the result of a statistical fluke. Or perhaps the effect exists but with nothing like the force exhibited in the original experiment. Does anyone seriously believe your local supermarket would sell 10 times as much produce if only it simplified its product line?

Another source of voltage drop is when the original effect does not generalise beyond unusual circumstances. My favourite example is the Arch Deluxe, a gourmet hamburger launched by McDonald’s in 1996 with a marketing fanfare. The fast-food giant had every reason to expect success, because focus groups loved the Arch Deluxe’s bakery-style rolls, peppered bacon and stone-ground mustard-mayo dressing.

The problem, says List, is that the focus group enthusiasts were not a good guide to the attitude of the typical consumer: “A person who signs up to take part in a McDonald’s focus group is probably someone who is crazy about McDonald’s or loves all kinds of burgers, or both. But the average person, it turns out, goes to McDonald’s for the Big Mac, not a fancier version of one.”

Even if the idea is real, and generalises to a wide audience, it may be difficult to repeat the performance once it ventures beyond the control of the original creative team. A pilot school may work well, but it is easier to hire 20 good teachers than 20,000. A brilliant chef can work in only one kitchen at a time. I was once served a meal fresh from the research kitchens of a fast-food multinational. It was vastly better than I would expect on my local high street, which, alas, is a challenge to the whole idea of a research kitchen.

Yet pinning down a single explanation for voltage drops is impossible. Indeed, the wisest sentence in List’s book is the Tolstoy-inspired epigraph, “Scalable ideas are all alike; every unscalable idea is unscalable in its own way”. Quite so.

The world is a big, complex, bewilderingly diverse place. All the Cokes are the same and all the iPhone 13s are the same. But schools and restaurants and police departments and museums and comedy gigs and clinics are not much like Cokes or iPhones. Perhaps the mystery is not that ideas often fail to scale. The mystery is that we ever convinced ourselves that they should.

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

My favourite nerd podcasts

Of course there is 99 Percent Invisible, home of @RomanMars and the beautiful nerds.

And @HelenZaltzman ‘s The Allusionist.

And @NoSuchThing As A Fish. But you knew about those three, right?

I wanted to recommend a few less well-known podcasts (no shade intended – some of these are very professional and very well-established, but all of them deserve further attention).

Try @AProblemSquared in which @BecHillComedian and @StandupMaths deal with listener questions in the most exhaustive and creative ways.

Or the @FOTSN “A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail” featuring the amazing @MouldS @HelenArney and, oddly @StandupMaths again.

Or the Puzzling Maths podcast featuring @RobEastaway and @AJMagicMessage – fun discussions and plenty of maths puzzles.

Or if you want to go even deeper into “set me a puzzle” territory, there’s the Brain Drop Puzzles podcast.

And finally Mathematical Objects, featuring @stecks and @PeterRowlett, from @APeriodical. I’m in one of them!

Enjoy. (Oh, and obligatory plug: Cautionary Tales is back every other Friday – please spread the word.)

Why did we stop building beautiful neighborhoods?

“I wanted to show that you could develop even a very beautiful place without defiling it,” said Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. “In fact, that if you did it with sufficient loving care, you might even enhance what God had given you.”

It was 1969, and Williams-Ellis was talking about Portmeirion, his Italianate, proto-post-modernist “village” on the coast of north Wales. He began work in the mid-1920s, opening a hotel in 1926 to help fund the rest of the project, which continued into the 1970s. (It was the set for the 1960s TV series The Prisoner, and stole the show.)

But did Williams-Ellis succeed? Aesthetically, his village is a delight. Walking around puts a smile on your face. Yet if it was meant to inspire other projects, then the answer can only be no, he did not. Policymakers rightly obsess about urban regeneration, “strong towns” and “levelling up”. Consumers spend significant sums to wear beautiful clothes, drive beautiful cars and cook in beautiful kitchens. And yet somehow I can think of few beautiful communities that have been built, anywhere in the world, in the past century.

Portmeirion is not really a community. You can’t live there; you can only stay overnight as a tourist. In his 1932 book Portmeirion Further Explained, Williams-Ellis noted that he originally envisaged building on an island, “for only so, I thought, should I ever be safe from contamination by speculators, settling like blue-bottles round my delectable morsel”.

The price of this freedom from contamination is that Portmeirion is less a village, more a sculpture park. Pay the £8 entry fee, stroll around, buy your Prisoner-souvenir “I am not a number” T-shirt and go away again. You can get married there, but you can’t raise a family.

There is nothing wrong with building a place so joyful that people will pay just to come and look around. The problem is that the joy does not seem to have rubbed off on the places where people live their lives. This is a puzzle. I asked my friend the economist Tyler Cowen whether he had an explanation, and he responded by sending a recent essay of his, in which he was similarly mystified. To quote a line: “Why has our advanced, modern and wealthy world ceased building beautiful neighbourhoods?”

It is certainly not because nobody cares about beauty. Nor can we entirely blame architects, even if both modernism and post-modernism have often produced unlovely results. Architects do not celebrate places such as Haydon Hill, Aylesbury, an undistinguished housing estate where I spent my adolescence. Nobody admires these mediocre houses on mediocre streets, yet we keep building them.

The automobile must shoulder some responsibility. Portmeirion has no cars; nor does a much older seaside gem, Clovelly in Devon. (Clovelly is “Britain’s Most Instagrammable Village 2020”. Save us.) Nor does Venice, for that matter. Behind the obvious delights of canals and palaces, the car-free environment is an essential part of the Venice experience.

But car-free neighborhoods are rare. My own community, Jericho in Oxford, enjoyed a delightful couple of years with very few cars after a road closure, but it did not last. Oxfordshire County Council reopened the road, explaining that “motorists are proving very resistant to changes”. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is back.

Perhaps Williams-Ellis’s concern about speculators points to the problem. If I build a cheap, ugly house in a beautiful neighbourhood, I pocket the financial savings while my neighbours suffer the aesthetic costs. Williams-Ellis solved the problem by retaining ownership of everything: “No house or land is sold freehold, complete and permanent control of the whole settlement being of course my basic idea.”

Such control seems impractical in everyday settings. Cities thrive on freedom and diversity. The ability to work where you will, shop where you will and wander around alone in a crowd is empowering, thrilling and dynamic — but rarely beautiful.

Indeed, the 21st-century development that most reminds me of Portmeirion is Fidenza Village, a high-end shopping mall between Milan and Bologna. It doesn’t have an ounce of Portmeirion’s charm, but it does at least try to look fun. It turns out that when people are buying Armani, they like to do so in prettified surroundings.

It is easy to dismiss the beauty of where we live as a trivial matter, but how a place looks and feels really matters. Rachel Wolf, one of the authors of the Conservative manifesto in 2019, emphasises the importance of lively, safe, attractive high streets. She is not wrong.

But how to deliver? Governments have the power to co-ordinate aesthetics but seem to lack the incentive to try. (In Aylesbury, the best view in the town was from the massive, brutalist County Hall, as it was the only spot from which you couldn’t see County Hall.) Private businesses have some incentive but usually lack the power. Almost everyone seems to lack the skill.

Somewhere in the centre of this grim Venn diagram is a collaborative overlap that might create beautiful 21st-century neighbourhoods. It is a great shame that the overlap seems so vanishingly small.

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

Putin’s actions make no sense. That is his strength

Is Vladimir Putin mad? Russia’s president has launched a costly and unprovoked war, shocked his own citizens, galvanised Nato, triggered damaging but predictable economic reprisals and threatened a nuclear war that could end civilisation. One has to doubt his grasp on reason. Doubt is part of the point.

In The Strategy of Conflict, written in 1960, the economist Thomas Schelling noted: “It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.”

A madman — or a toddler — can get away with certain actions because he cannot be deterred by threats or because his own threats seem more plausible. But Schelling’s point is more subtle than that: you don’t need to be mad to secure these advantages. You just need to persuade your adversaries that you might be.

The idea is vividly illustrated in The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel and John Huston’s 1941 film. Our hero, Sam Spade, knows the whereabouts of the falcon, a priceless artefact. When the villainous Kasper Gutman tries to intimidate him into revealing the secret, Spade is not intimidated. If Gutman kills him then the precious falcon will be lost forever.

“If I know you can’t afford to kill me, how are you gonna scare me into giving it to you?” Spade challenges Gutman.

“That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgement on both sides,” Gutman says. “Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.”

Spade doesn’t seem too worried by this, perhaps because Gutman appears calm. Gutman might have had more success if he seemed unhinged. Then again, Gutman’s henchmen are pointing pistols at Spade and twitching with rage, so even if Gutman keeps his cool, the threat that someone might get carried away seems plausible.

Schelling was a wonderful writer and thinker, but it gives me little pleasure to be dusting off his books. When I first encountered his ideas on nuclear deterrence, it was the mid-1990s. The cold war was over, the threat of a nuclear exchange seemed largely past and Schelling’s ideas could be enjoyed in much the same way as Hammett’s: as witty, surprising and reassuringly unreal.

When Schelling shared the Nobel memorial prize in economics in 2005, it was with a sense that his clear-eyed ideas about nuclear deterrence had helped human civilisation dodge a bullet. That nuclear bullet is now back in the gun and Putin is waving it around unnervingly. He wouldn’t . . . would he? I don’t know, which is just the way Putin likes it.

There was always something surreal about maintaining nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Surely such weapons could never be used, because the consequences were too horrible? And if the weapons could never be used, what sort of deterrent did they provide? Yet the deterrent is real enough because even a small risk of escalation is a risk worth taking seriously.

That risk can come from a number of sources. There’s malfunctioning equipment: in September 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov’s early warning radar told him that the US had just launched ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. He realised that was unlikely and ignored the warning. Petrov’s heroic inaction was made all the more remarkable because it came at a time of escalated tensions between the superpowers.

Another risk is that a senior decision maker is insane, rather than merely feigning insanity.

Then there is the risk of things getting out of control somewhere down the chain of command. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the US decided to stop and search ships sailing to Cuba — a potential flashpoint if the result was the sinking of a Soviet ship. President Kennedy and defence secretary Robert McNamara asked the US Navy to soften this “quarantine” in a couple of ways.

In fact, as the classic book Thinking Strategically explains, the US Navy told McNamara to mind his own business, and the blockade was riskier than Kennedy had intended. Unthinkable threats become thinkable in such circumstances.

Putin holds a weak hand, except for the one card that no rational person would ever choose to play. But the essence of brinkmanship is to introduce a risk that nobody can entirely control. If the risk becomes intolerable, you may win concessions. I am 99 per cent sure that Putin is bluffing, but a 1 per cent chance of the end of the world is and should be more than enough to worry about.

Faced with Gutman’s warning that someone may get carried away, Spade coolly responds, “then the trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgement”. That is the trick the western world is now attempting to perform. By Putin’s design, it is not going to be easy.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 March 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 make resolutions stick

How are those New Year’s resolutions going? If you’re persisting, good for you. Many people do not.

I began musing on this problem in December when the writer David Epstein’s Range Widely newsletter asserted that “New Year’s Resolutions Actually Work Astoundingly Well”. Epstein pointed to the work of behavioural economist Katy Milkman, author of How to Change and co-discoverer of the “fresh start effect”. (Epstein is the author of the wonderful book, Range.)

The fresh start effect is a tendency to treat certain dates such as birthdays or New Year’s Day as a springboard for personal change. Many other dates can be framed as a fresh start. Milkman and her colleagues, Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis, invited research participants to sign up for email reminders that were designed to spur them towards their goals. Some were told that the reminder would be sent on “the third Thursday in March”. Others were told it would be sent on “the first day of spring”. In both cases it was sent on the twentieth of March, but the uptake was much greater for an email reminder on the first day of spring.

The study didn’t measure whether anyone actually achieved their goals or acquired lasting new habits; all it measured was interest in receiving an email. This is not evidence that New Year’s resolutions work, but an explanation as to why we make our resolutions on the first of January rather than, say, the ninth of October.

A fresh start is just a start. But it is better than nothing. As Milkman argues in her book, if 80 per cent of resolutions fail, that means 20 per cent succeed. Hurrah! Still, given that the real challenge seems to be not making resolutions, but keeping them, I would like to understand more about that challenge.

There is a revealing anecdote at the end of How to Change in which Milkman and her colleague Angela Duckworth discuss the success of a large experiment. This experiment was run with a national gym chain and aimed to get people exercising more. Had it been a success?

“Absolutely!” said Milkman. “No way,” said Duckworth.

Why the disagreement? Because while the experimental persuasions were demonstrably effective at getting people to go to the gym during the four-week experimental period, they were far less effective at getting people to maintain their gym-going habit. If you hope for persistent results, one possible answer is persistent persuasion.

“Achieving transformative behaviour change is more like treating a chronic disease than curing a rash,” writes Milkman. You don’t just give someone with diabetes a 28-day supply of insulin, then walk away — and Milkman muses that forgetfulness, impatience and laziness are also chronic conditions, requiring endless vigilance.

There are other approaches. David Epstein, for example, had been struggling to quit his late-night snacking habit. When moving house, he simply decided that he would leave the old habit in the old house. This approach, he writes, was completely successful. This is a twist on the idea of the fresh start. New Year’s Day is over by January the second, but the day after you move house, you’re still in the new house. The fresh start stays fresh.

Epstein also made a clear plan, something that is often missing from resolutions. Your resolution is to exercise more? Great! Where and how will you exercise, and when will you do it? It is better to sign up for a particular exercise class than for a generic gym membership, because you’re forced to be specific about how you will achieve your goal.

Another idea that has stuck in my mind is that our actions are influenced both by impelling forces and by restraints — the accelerator and the brake, if you like. When we want to move, we instinctively stamp harder on the accelerator, but we often get better results from releasing the brake. (I heard this from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who credits the early 20th-century psychologist Kurt Lewin.)

If you’re thinking of embracing a new resolution, ask yourself, “Why haven’t I been doing this already? What has been stopping me?” Answer those questions, and you might learn something that will help make your new resolution stick.

So look for a fresh start that will last, a change of routine or context to which a new habit can be pinned. Make a specific plan for how you will keep the resolution. And figure out what obstacles have been standing in your way.

There is some empirical backing for these ideas, but “how to continue?” seems less well-explored than “how to start?” That should not be surprising, in part because research into persistent behaviour change takes a lot longer than research into quick wins.

It also reveals a pervasive focus in the way we think. We focus more on new habits than on maintaining old ones, because we focus more on the new than on maintenance in almost every sphere of life. But the challenge of maintenance is a topic for another week.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 January 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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