Tim Harford's Blog, page 37

The books you need for your 2022 New Year’s Resolutions

The self-help genre gets a bad press, and not without reason, but there are a few self-help books that I’ve read, enjoyed, and felt wiser as a result.

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. I found this wise, witty little book served as a touchstone throughout my years as a student. “You’d be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.”

TED Talks by Chris Anderson is the best book on public speaking I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of books on public speaking. While I admire what Chris has done with TED, I expected to disagree with a lot of his advice. Nope; he won me over.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a modern classic with a cult following. The book feels a bit fussy, full of jargon, and over-complex. But the truth is that GTD wouldn’t have so many fans (including me) if it didn’t work on some basic level. The key idea of GTD is that you need to write down what’s on your mind, somewhere where you trust yourself to check at the right moment – and as a result, you’re more relaxed and more confident that at any particular moment you’re focusing on something sensible rather than leaving a time-bomb ticking away in your inbox. The rest is detail but the details do seem to matter. A strong recommendation from me.

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. A superb book about creativity and the effort involved. Some great stories and advice – and it’s an intensely pragmatic guide to living a creative life.

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Measured by the number of copies I’ve given away this must be my favourite book. It’s humane and practical, proposing that we use designers’ methods such as prototyping and brainstorming to create better, more fulfilling lives and careers. Full of good-yet-unusual ideas.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. A challenging and immensely practical book which asks us to step back and make much more deliberate decisions about which digital tools are worth the amount of attention and energy they cost. Forget the clever hacks and tricks: instead, use only the tools that are essential.

How To Have A Good Day by Caroline Webb – charming, evidence-based, wide-ranging and full of straightforward good advice.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo. Yes, the stuff about being kind to your socks is insane. So is the stuff about covering up brand names on cleaning products because they are shouty. But there’s a reason this book sells so well; it recognises two truths. First, most of us would appreciate our stuff more if we kept only the best of it; second, stuff has an emotional weight that must be dealt with if you want to throw it away.

How to Change by Katy Milkman. This is the definitive, evidence-based guide as to how to keep those resolutions…

The paperback of “The Data Detective” is out on 1 February in the US and Canada. Title elsewhere: “How To Make The World Add Up”.

“One of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time… fascinating.”- Steve Levitt (Freakonomics)

“If you aren’t in love with stats before reading this book, you will be by the time you’re done.”- Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women)

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

Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

Readers with long memories may recall the brief, inglorious UK fuel shortage of a few weeks ago, which was mostly caused by the rush to refuel for fear the pumps would run dry. Some petrol stations imposed a limit on how much you could buy — say, £25 of fuel and no more. It seems sensible enough, but a friend of mine (an economist) suggested this was the opposite of what was really needed. A maximum purchase encouraged more visits and more queues. Instead, petrol stations should’ve imposed a minimum purchase: nobody was allowed to buy fuel if their tank was more than a quarter full.

One can imagine snags and problems with implementing this rule, but the principle is delightfully elegant. Queues would disappear, as only people who actually needed fuel would be allowed to buy it. The self-fulfilling shortage would disappear. The solution is not to demand that drivers buy less fuel, but to insist they buy more.

All this set me wondering about other problems we could fix by reversing the usual logic and doing the exact opposite of what one might expect. Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines. Coal is the most carbon-intensive of all mainstream fuel sources, so any response to climate change is going to involve closing coal mines. An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them.

This idea was proposed in 2012 by the economist Bård Harstad. Another economist, Alex Tabarrok, recently pointed to a coal mine for sale for less than $8m in West Virginia. It had 8 million tons of coal reserves, capable of producing about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide. Preventing the emission of several tons of CO2 per dollar spent is an insanely good deal. The idea only works if people don’t open new coal mines in response to the demand, but why would they? Coal mining is a dying industry. If you can mothball a mine for a few years, the chances are it will stay closed for ever.

During the switchover to electric vehicles, a similar logic applies to old cars. If you drive, but only a little, there is something to be said for buying an ageing gas-guzzler. Better for a thirsty old car to do 1,000 miles a year in your hands than 10,000 miles a year in someone else’s. Yes, an electric car would be better, but until the electric car industry is fully scaled up, let that Tesla go to someone who will use it every day.

If you want to take reverse logic still further, let’s talk about queues. The problem with queues is obvious: they waste time. Less obvious is that each queuer is getting in the way of everyone behind them. If someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits. Imagine a line of Christmas market stalls serving hot chocolate, mulled wine, mince pies and other seasonal comestibles. People stroll along the row of stalls, keen to enjoy a warming treat on a winter’s day.

The problem is that every stall has a queue. One person a minute is served, and people are willing to wait for up to 10 minutes. If there are already 10 people in line, they keep walking. This common-sense way of queueing is a disaster. Each queue will be near the maximum length, otherwise people would quickly join it. Each stall operates at capacity, but nobody gets their mulled wine without waiting around until the very limits of their patience.

What does reverse logic tell us about this problem? Steven Landsburg, the author of the classic The Armchair Economist, proposes an alternative rule: those that are last shall be first. Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back.

Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute, but the queues are short. Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. But you might consider applying a dose of Landsburg’s logic to your own “to do” list: don’t add a new item to the list unless you’re willing to do it immediately. A little impractical, yes, but also bracingly realistic. If it’s not important enough even to be the top priority right now, maybe it will never be the top priority, and it shouldn’t be sitting on your “to do” list at all.

Is there something about economists that makes them particularly attracted to reverse logic? Perhaps. Two classic ideas in economics are Frédéric Bastiat’s “things seen and things not seen” and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. These ideas point to the way in which economists think: obvious and direct changes unleash indirect and less-than-obvious consequences. Let the psychologists keep their reverse psychology; we’ll enjoy our reverse logic.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 26 November 2021.

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

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

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

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

What parking tickets teach us about corruption

It’s probably not a good sign when a nation’s leader is deflected from hosting a vast global summit to deny that his country is corrupt. But it underlined how far Boris Johnson’s efforts to shield his disgraced ally Owen Paterson have backfired. Paterson has been forced to resign, Conservative MPs are furious and the media are on the hunt for further scandals.

“I genuinely believe that the UK is not remotely a corrupt country,” insisted Johnson last week. Voters may need to be persuaded that the same is true of Conservative MPs.

The track record here is not wholly encouraging. Leave to one side Johnson’s own breaches of parliamentary rules (the Commons Standards Commissioner found his repeated offences suggest “a lack of attention to or regard for the House’s requirements”). There is a longer history.

In 2009, the American Political Science Review published a study of the earnings of former members of the UK parliament, covering the postwar period. Andrew Eggers and Jens Hainmueller compared MPs with candidates who had narrowly lost elections, and found “that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs”. These ex-MPs were typically being well paid for serving as directors of listed companies. The authors speculated that former Labour MPs were unable to take up these lucrative posts because trade unions frowned upon it.

There is nothing illegal about becoming a company director after leaving parliament, but it is interesting that companies greatly prefer politicians who served in parliament rather than those who just missed out. One might ask why these well-connected former politicians are so valuable?

Then there is the question of whether the post-Brexit shift in British politics has changed the calculus for a politician who wants to break the rules. From a Remainer viewpoint, it is tempting to note that there seems to be one rule for Johnson’s Brexiter allies (Paterson, or Priti Patel, who was found to have breached the ministerial code by bullying civil servants) and another rule for everyone else.

But the point is not that Brexiters are corrupt and Remainers are saintly. It’s that a highly polarised political system gives cover to the corrupt, the incompetent and the unfit for office on both sides. When parties are politically adjacent, voters may grumble that there isn’t a real choice — but they do have the luxury of being able to reward character, competence and honesty.

If instead the choice is between, say, Corbyn or Johnson, or Biden or Trump, voters could be forgiven for turning a blind eye to corruption on their own team. The stakes just seem too high, whichever side you’re on, to be switching allegiance over some trifling venality.

Corruption is a function of many things: political incentives, formal legal institutions and culture. One of my favourite studies, by the economists Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, teased apart these different factors by examining the behaviour of diplomats in New York City. With most consulates located near the UN building in midtown Manhattan, diplomats lived a daily parking nightmare. Or at least they did if they felt any obligation to pay parking fines — but diplomats faced no legal consequences for ignoring those fines. Since all diplomats faced similar incentives, any difference in behaviour was most plausibly explained by a difference in cultural attitudes to breaking the rules.

This may seem petty, but as Fisman and Miguel note in their 2008 book Economic Gangsters, corruption is often defined as “the illegal use of public office for private gain” — which certainly includes parking illegally while hiding behind diplomatic immunity.

Fisman and Miguel studied parking violations between 1997 and 2002, finding a strong correlation between unpaid tickets and more general perceptions of corruption. The worst offenders were Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan and Bulgaria. One Kuwaiti diplomat managed to accumulate two unpaid parking fines every working day for a year.

In contrast, the entire consulates of Denmark, Norway and Sweden did not pick up a single unpaid parking ticket — not one — in the entire six-year period. Given the temptations, that is impressive.

But no less impressive were the British diplomats. They, too, accumulated no unpaid fines. So we must not despair. The recent outcry suggests that there is still a price to be paid for breaking the rules, or for trying to rewrite them when convenient. And the evidence from New York is that British civil servants are beyond reproach.

The same may not be true for all British politicians. A certain Boris Johnson once worked as GQ magazine’s motoring correspondent. His editor noted that Johnson had cost GQ “£5,000 in parking tickets”, but he wouldn’t have him any other way.

Well, indeed. And if Johnson faced no consequences then, why would he expect consequences now?

That is a final lesson from the Fisman-Miguel study. Late in 2002, New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg won the backing of the US state department to ruffle some diplomatic feathers. New York revoked the nearly 200 diplomatic plates and threatened to go further. Parking violations immediately dropped by 95 per cent. It is a reminder that while culture matters, rules matter too.

Boris Johnson is no doubt right to insist that the UK is not a corrupt country. But if we want to keep it that way, punishing politicians who break their own rules would be a good start.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 19 November 2021.

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

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

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

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

The best books about the pandemic

I don’t think it’s too early to provide a list of some of the best books about the pandemic – several of these books, in fact, were written before Sars-Cov-2 ever made the leap to humans.

Covid-19 by Debora Mackenzie came out very early in the crisis and some of it has been left behind by events, but it’s a terrific guide to the early weeks of the crisis, and more broadly to the world of dangerous viruses – Sars, Mers, Flu – and what we might do about them.

Shutdown by Adam Tooze is a magisterial guide to the economic response – and consequences – of covid and the lockdowns. Tooze is (of course) comprehensive and easy to read.

Covid by Numbers by Anthony Masters and David Spiegelhalter gives a concise, humane, data-driven guide to all the big covid questions of the day in a series of crisp chapters.

Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green is a vivid insider account of the scramble to create the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

How To Make The World Add Up (UK) / The Data Detective (US/Canada). Ah, yes, well – this is my book. It is an effort to explain just how vital numbers can be in trying to make sense of the world – and also to help us get past our own biases and filters when we look at the data. Covid arrived as I was finishing the first draft and it was, alas, a heck of a way to be proved right about things.

The Premonition by Michael Lewis is exactly as compelling as you would expect from one of the greatest non-fiction storytellers on the planet. Lewis tells the story of the pandemic from the viewpoint of the US scientists who were trying to warn us.

Catch Your Breath by Ed Patrick is an insider account of life in the National Health Service as Covid hits. Patrick is an anaesthetist but also a stand-up comedian, so while some of this is harrowing, much of it is hilarious. A great read.

Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski was written before the pandemic – but is incredibly timely. It’s a guide to all the interesting ideas in epidemiology and where they came from. Great popular science writing.

Spike by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja is an excoriating insider account of how the UK mishandled the early months of the pandemic.

The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley – nearly a decade old, but this is the book I kept coming back to when trying to understand our psychological responses to impending disaster. Vivid and horrifying but full of important insights.

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

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

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

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

How to Take Back Control, one street at a time

“We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration.” — Boris Johnson, October 6

“British meat producers have begun sending carcasses to the EU for butchering and then shipping the meat back to the UK, after post-Brexit staff shortages led to the culling of more than 10,000 healthy pigs.” — Financial Times, November 2

It seemed like a good idea at the time. As my neighbours and I talked on the doorstep, we all agreed how moved we had been by witnessing the grandeur of Brexit Getting Done, not just once, but good and hard every week or two.

Then there was an evening at the community centre watching that old movie, Passport to Pimlico (1949). The film’s conceit is that a small part of postwar London is discovered to be part of the late medieval Duchy of Burgundy and, thus, exempt from the tyranny of the ration book. Jolly good stuff.

And then, after a little too much booze at the bonfire night fireworks display, the whole neighbourhood agreed it was time for the Oxford neighbourhood of Jericho to declare independence. Get Jerxit Done! The next day, through the mulled wine headache, I tried to remember the details. Something something take back control . . . something something restrict immigration . . . something something high-skill, high-wage economy. How hard could it be?

Step one, obviously, is sack the cleaner. She’s very lovely, but she’s not local and allowing her to vacuum the house and change the bedsheets in a completely uncontrolled way was enabling a low-skill economy. I told the children to get busy. They objected that scrubbing the toilets would divert them from A-level maths and GCSE physics, and that training in STEM subjects was crucial to the development of a high-wage, high-productivity economy.

I could not deny the truth of this, but those lavatories weren’t going to scrub themselves. I returned a book advance to my publishers, telling them I didn’t have time to write it. Instead I devoted a day a week to getting the house spick and span. There are pros and cons to this. We have less money now, true. But because I am cleaning the house for free, measured output per hour of paid work is actually up. And the loos are spotless.

More tricky is what to do with Grandad. His dementia is pretty bad these days, but because most of our neighbours are researchers, it’s proving hard to employ any of them to help him eat and get dressed. Hopefully my wife will be up to the challenge. The family gossip is that he did once change her nappy, so fair is fair.

Some people with a political axe to grind blame this situation on our post-Jerxit immigration controls. That’s clearly Remoaner nonsense. This is a global issue; all over the world, women are quitting their jobs to look after elderly relatives. My wife having to do likewise has nothing to do with Jerxit, unless of course it is all about creating a high-wage, high-skill economy, in which case it’s what we planned all along.

There is, admittedly, the difficult issue of food. None of us actually knows how to pluck chickens, although Nigel at number 12 is having a jolly good try. He is a barrister, so it’s an unusual use of his time and talent, but his chicken-plucking-productivity is on the up.

Meanwhile we have cut through the tiresome old red tape and arranged to have some nutritious protein wafers delivered from a new Silicon Valley start-up. Made from ocean plankton, they say. That is what a high-wage, high-productivity economy looks like! (Palo Alto, I mean, not Jericho. But we’ll get there.)

When I say the protein wafers are “delivered”, obviously that part is a bit tricky since we started demanding visas from anyone coming down Little Clarendon Street. The upside is that on this side of passport control, the neighbourhood is traffic-free and delightfully walkable. The downside is that all those boxes of Soylent Green get dumped in a big pile of wet leaves by disgruntled delivery drivers, and the wafers go soggy.

We are trying to sort that out. Delivery drivers need a concession from the business and skills office (but that’s Nigel and he’s busy with the chickens) plus a visa from the home affairs department (Jenny at number 3, but her broadband is down and the engineer doesn’t have a visa). Lest we drown in the uncontrolled flow of Yodel drivers, all the permits expire on Christmas Eve. For some reason we haven’t yet had many applicants.

If Johnson was correct when he compared immigrants with intravenous drugs, I suppose these transitional snags are the painful withdrawal symptoms. Cold turkey, if you like. Not that I am confident about the turkey this Christmas. Nigel has one strolling around his garden but he says he has no plans to pluck it: it’s intimidatingly big. If we could cosh it then get it outside the Little Clarendon Street roadblock, we might find an itinerant butcher and offer them cash in hand to dress it for Christmas lunch.

Otherwise I suppose that while we wait for our wages to rise, a decorative arrangement of protein wafers will look festive. A high-productivity Yuletide awaits!

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 12 November 2021.

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is now out. US title: “The Data Detective”.

“One of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time… fascinating.”- Steve Levitt (Freakonomics)

“If you aren’t in love with stats before reading this book, you will be by the time you’re done.”- Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women)

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

My favourite newsletters

Now we live in the substack era, I thought I’d share a few newsletters I enjoy receiving… Admittedly, the line between newsletter and RSS feed is rather blurred (and personally I like to consume things via RSS when I can). But here are a few recommendations…

David Epstein’s Range Widely is a weekly essay. The topics (appropriately) range widely, but often reflect Epstein’s interest in sports, expertise, and generalisation vs specialisation. David Epstein’s latest book, Range, is outrageously good.

Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist tends to be shorter and scarcer – perhaps appropriately for the author of a book about the finitude of life, Four Thousand Weeks. The newsletter contains reflections and consolations on the art of getting things done, and more often on the art of not beating yourself up too much when you don’t get things done.

Matthew Levine’s Money Stuff is a long, daily newsletter about finance, but it’s full of creative ideas and often very funny. I don’t always have time to read it, but it’s email: free disposal! Worth a look.

Diane Coyle’s The Enlightened Economist offers frequent reviews of the latest books, usually in history, economics or social science. Not a newsletter in the classic sense but the reviews are serious-minded and insightful. Coyle’s latest book is Cogs and Monsters.

Noah Smith’s substack Noahpinion fully explores the medium: there are recommendations of the best manga, pieces of macroeconomic analysis, proposals to fix Twitter, and video interviews with interesting people (for example, an early interview about Omicron with Eric Topol). Worth a look.

And, not quite a newsletter but I loved this piece on the Futility Closet blog about an open letter written before Christmas 1914 from the women of the UK to the women of Germany. Needless to say Futility Closet itself is worth your time.

Those who prefer their recommendations in audio format might enjoy my recent interview on the Better Known podcast, where I recommend six things that should be better known (and one thing I wish was more obscure). Enjoy.

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is now out. US title: “The Data Detective”.

“One of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time… fascinating.”- Steve Levitt (Freakonomics)

“If you aren’t in love with stats before reading this book, you will be by the time you’re done.”- Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women)

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

Two cheers for the Christmas newsletter

In these polarised times, one truth can be relied upon to unite the British commentariat: Christmas letters are ghastly. Writing in Country Life magazine, Kit Hesketh-Harvey advised being “alert enough to shake the card out directly over the recycling bin”. The late Simon Hoggart collected the most execrable family newsletters he could harvest from readers of The Guardian and published them for the world’s amusement. Punctuation pundit Lynne Truss composed “revenge” letters, sending up the vanity and vacuity of it all.

A bad Christmas letter is very bad indeed, but I wonder about all this mockery. The logic of such letters is straightforward enough: to convey some information about your life to someone you rarely see but whom you hope might care, without having to repeat yourself a hundred times. If in fact they do not care at all, there is a problem, but the newsletter is not it.

The simplest alternative, a tasteful Christmas card with a printed greeting and an unintelligible signature, is an odd gesture. It conveys almost no information beyond the fact that some time and expense have been invested.

Admittedly, content-free messages are common enough. Linguists use the term “phatic communication” to describe everything from “How’s it going?” to a poke on Facebook. (Remember Facebook pokes?) It is always alarming to greet someone who misinterprets “How are you?” as a request for information; instead, these are acts that maintain social bonds. But if a connection endures in the form of nothing more than an exchange of almost-blank cards once a year, one has to suspect that everyone’s time is being wasted.

So the idea of sending a little update tucked into the card makes perfect sense. Yet the reality often disappoints. Why?

The genre is a difficult one. A classic holiday letter must — like a Facebook post — mean something sensible to a wide variety of recipients. Too upbeat and it feels boastful or fake. Share unpleasant details and it’s Too Much Information. Keep it light and you risk seeming banal. Brevity can confuse. Prolixity is worse. Even for a skilled writer this is a challenging brief, and neither you nor I are Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde. And yet some of us persist.

In an intriguing study, published in 2000 in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, three sociologists investigated “why it is that these letters seem both to irritate readers and to enjoy enduring popularity”. The researchers, Stephen Banks, Esther Louie and Martha Einerson, assembled 128 letters and analysed their contents using 80 labels and 13 topic groups. The most common topics were: “positive experience/adventure”; “I/we have achieved”; and “interpersonal connectedness”, which ranged from invitations to visit to describing membership of a church or a club. General expressions of good news such as a birth or marriage were barely more common than expressions of bad news such as divorce, death or ill health — but when people did write about bad news, they generally attempted to put a brave face on it.

What are people doing here? They are telling a story about themselves, of challenges overcome and of a good and upright life well lived. The story will often be about personal relationships, be phrased in a way that assumes a personal relationship (“We had to cut down the big tree in front of the house” rather than “a big tree in front of our house”) and will gesture towards a personal relationship (“I am thinking of you and your loved ones”). And yet there is nothing personal about it: everyone gets the same text.

Social media can be vainer and more vacuous than any newsletter, and it is distracting into the bargain. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies, points out the sharp distinction between Google searches and Facebook posts. A sentence in a Facebook post beginning “My husband is . .. ” will tend to continue with “the greatest” or “my best friend”. A Google search beginning “Is my husband . . . ” usually continues “gay” or “a jerk”. What we say proudly on Facebook is very different from what we whisper to Google.

And yet social media allows some semblance of dialogue. When your friend declares that their husband is the greatest, you may privately roll your eyes but you are at least invited to chip in with your cheery response. The stories we tell in Christmas newsletters offer no such option.

Personally, I enjoy the few newsletters I receive. Up to a point, I might even enjoy receiving more. But my own practice is a little different; I do send typed letters with Christmas cards, and of course those letters deploy plenty of cut-and-paste. (Etiquette manuals demand a handwritten note; surely only the idle rich have time for such archaisms.) But each letter is addressed to a particular person and at least some of it is written for them and them alone. No doubt I overrate my ability to navigate the shoals of inanity and pride. But I hope that some of these letters are read with the spirit of seasonal goodwill with which they are sent.

And for those who are determined to weave a narrative that their friends enjoy, there is always the example of Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote a short story, failed to find any outlet for it and so, in 1943, printed 200 copies and sent them to friends as a Christmas gift. That story became the film It’s a Wonderful Life. In the realm of seasonal storytelling, the bar has been set high.

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Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 November 2020.

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

My new book is How To Make The World Add Up. “Fabulously readable, lucid, witty and authoritative.” – Stephen Fry

“Powerful, persuasive, and in these truth-defying times, indispensable” – Caroline Criado Perez

The best podcasts of 2021

I’ll admit, this is a somewhat arbitrary mix of podcasts that are noteworthy because they are particularly wonderful, noteworthy because I feel they are underappreciated, and noteworthy because they are new. Still – they are all free, and truly we live in an age of wonders.

Sideways – Matthew Syed’s superb new(ish) podcast from the BBC. I can’t quite believe how many great stories Syed collects and how well he tells them. Will appeal to fans of – for example – Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. Syed’s recent book is the equally brilliant Rebel Ideas.

The Last Archive – Jill Lepore’s idiosyncratic, witty and beautifully produced podcast (from Pushkin, who also produce Cautionary Tales). The most recent season is “The Evening Rocket”, a co-production of Pushkin and the BBC all about Elon Musk and the influence of classic science fiction on the Silicon Valley of today. Lepore’s bravura history of the United States is These Truths.

99% Invisible – Consistently delightful, insightful and humane from Roman Mars and the team. There is also a lovely book, The 99% Invisible City.

The New Bazaar – hosted by my former colleague Cardiff Garcia, this show has a simple formula: get very good guests, ask them very good questions, and take your time. For example, try Garcia’s interview with Diane Coyle about her new book Cogs and Monsters.

Rationally Speaking – Julia Galef’s deep, thoughtful interview podcast. My only complaint is that episodes drop all too rarely. Galef is the author of the highly-recommended The Scout Mindset.

Ones and Tooze – a new podcast which basically revolves around Adam Tooze dropping knowledge about the week’s big economic stories. It’s a simple showcase for the breadth and depth of his economic insight. Tooze’s latest book is Shutdown: How Covid Shook The World’s Economy. Liking that past tense!

Conversations with Tyler – Tyler Cowen’s wide-ranging and deep interviews with a delightfully eclectic mix of interviewees. It is astonishing how much Cowen gets out of people. (There have been one or two disappointing interviews this year, by people who simply refuse to engage with the questions – but on reflection they have merely underlined just how well the format usually works.) Cowen’s forthcoming book is the self-recommending “Talent“.

Deep Questions – Cal Newport answers productivity questions from listeners. You could drown in this podcast, as Newport is prolific, but there are lots of good ideas to dip your toes into. Newport has written several excellent books; his best is Digital Minimalism.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that my own podcasts are also highly recommended. There’s More or Less, a show all about the numbers in the news. (The relevant book is How To Make The World Add Up / The Data Detective.)

And there is also Cautionary Tales – after our halloween episodes, I’m now working on a double season for 2022. Watch this space!

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

Why carbon taxes really work

A friend recently wrote to me agonising over an ethical question. He was pondering a long-haul trip to see his family but was all too aware that the flight would have a huge carbon footprint. Could the journey possibly be justified? I suggested that my friend find out what the carbon footprint was (a tonne of CO2, it turns out) and then imagine a hypothetical carbon tax. Would he still be willing to travel if he had to pay the tax? If not, the trip wasn’t worth it.

My advice raises the question of what this carbon tax should be. At a carbon tax of £5 per tonne of CO2 — plenty of carbon global emissions are taxed at less than that — the extra tax on that one-tonne return flight would be trivial. At a more serious £50, it would be noticeable but perhaps not decisive. (The emissions trading systems in the EU and the UK until recently implied a carbon price of around £50 per tonne of CO2; the UK price has since leapt. US Democrats are pondering their own carbon tax.) If the carbon tax were a deep-green £500 per tonne of CO2, my friend would have to be missing his family more than most of us ever do.

I realise it is quixotic to advise checking one’s personal consumption decisions against a completely hypothetical tax, but it gets to the core of what a carbon tax is for. It isn’t just an incentive to change behaviour; it’s a source of information about which behaviour we most urgently need to change.

That information is currently obscure. The world’s supply chains are formidably complex, delivering products with a carbon footprint one could only guess at. The big picture is obvious enough: flights are bad, cycling beats driving, double glazing is a good idea. But should you buy the British tomatoes, possibly grown in a heated greenhouse, or the Spanish variety, with more food miles on the clock? Even for the attentive, these questions are difficult.

About a decade ago, Mike Berners-Lee published How Bad Are Bananas?, a book that explained the carbon footprint of various everyday products. (Bananas are fine.) The title hints at the hopelessness of waiting for consumers to voluntarily vanquish climate change. How bad is red wine? How bad is an iPhone? Collectively we make many billions of decisions every day about what to buy, how to travel and where to set the thermostat. We cannot be expected to do so with Berners-Lee at hand.

The brilliance of a carbon tax is that we would not have to. The price of everything we buy is tied to the cost of resources required to make and deliver it. If something requires acres of land, tonnes of raw materials, megawatt-hours of energy and days of skilled labour, you can bet that it won’t come cheap. The link between price and cost is fuzzy but real. Yet carbon emissions have not been reflected in that cost.

A carbon tax changes that by making the climate impact as real a cost as any other. It sends a signal along all those supply chains, nudging every decision towards the lower-carbon alternative. A shopper may decide that a carbon-taxed T-shirt is too costly, but meanwhile the textile factory is looking to save on electricity, while the electricity supplier is switching to solar. Every part of the value chain becomes greener.

Large changes might well be achievable with a surprisingly subtle carbon tax. The International Monetary Fund has suggested that a tax of $75/ton of CO2 might be required, but even with a £100/tonne tax — nearly twice as much — the day-to-day pain would be less than most people expect.

In the UK, carbon dioxide emissions are less than six tonnes per person per year, plus two or three tonnes more to reflect the carbon footprint of imported goods. A £100/tonne tax that covered those emissions would raise the cost of living by just over £2 a day, and cover more than 5 per cent of UK tax revenue. That’s not nothing: the government would be wise to send everyone a monthly lump sum in compensation. The burden would fall unevenly: those who spent a lot, flew a lot, drove a lot or heated big, draughty houses would pay more. It is unlikely that you would notice much impact on the price of bananas.

Coffee provides an instructive example of how much of the change would be imperceptible. According to Mark Maslin and Carmen Nab of University College London, a kilogram of coffee beans delivered to the UK has a typical footprint of about 15 kilograms of CO2. If farmed and shipped more sustainably, the footprint is 3.5 kilograms. With a £100/tonne carbon tax, that’s either £1.50 or 35 pence. You can make dozens of coffees with a kilogram of beans, so coffee drinkers might not notice, but you can bet that behind the scenes farmers and shippers will be looking to push their costs away from £1.50 and towards 35 pence.

My colleagues Gillian Tett and Simon Kuper have been writing about the risks of “greenflation” and the pain that a serious carbon tax would cause. They’re right to be wary of the political damage that a botched tax might do. But one can also worry too much.

It seems like a huge leap to decarbonise the world economy, but it is better understood as a trillion tiny steps. From frugal shopping to efficient logistics to renewable sources of electricity, carbon taxes gently steer us towards the greener solution every time, whether we are racked with guilt or blithely unconcerned. They should be at the centre of our fight against climate change.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 29 October 2021.

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

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

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

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

My books of the year 2021

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future – A biography not only of the genius’s genius, John von Neumann, but also of von Neumann’s ideas and influence, which are nearly impossible to exaggerate. Serious and brilliantly-written.

David Bodanis, The Art of Fairness – A delightful and moving exploration of nice guys, nasty guys, and what it takes to succeed without being a jerk.

Michael Brooks, The Art of More – The history of how ideas in mathematics (such as algebra, geometry, statistics and accountancy) helped to shape the modern world. Given my own predelictions I was delighted with this book.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks – Did you want a strangely moving mix of Getting Things Done, Being and Time, and the Tao of Pooh? It’s here. Burkeman’s book is one of the hits of the summer and deservedly so.

Jordan Ellenberg, Shape – A really fun, witty exploration of ideas in geometry and their surprisingly wide-ranging application.

Steven Johnson, Extra Life – Johnson explores the astonishing expansion in life expectancy over the last two hundred years, and asks how we measure it and who – and what – deserves the credit. Wide ranging and a pleasure to read.

Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset – A charming and original contribution to the genre on being open-minded and curious. Great stories and ideas, alongside a serious argument for the virtues of exploring rather than defending ideas.

Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia – Gladwell’s podcast company Pushkin publishes my Cautionary Tales podcast, but is also experimenting with ‘enhanced audiobooks’. This is their first attempt and it’s a cracker.

Adam Grant, Think Again – Grant is always witty and humane, but assembles a terrific range of ideas and research to analyse and overcome the obstacles to rethinking our own views and (even harder) persuading others to rethink theirs.

Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein & Olivier Sibony, Noise – when I interviewed him, Kahneman all but admitted that this is not a life’s-work-masterpiece like Thinking Fast and Slow. It is, however, brimming with interesting thoughts.

Cal Newport, A World Without Email – this is marketed as a self-help book by a self-help guy, but it’s much more than that. Newport delves into the manufacturing productivity revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century and makes a serious case that we need (and can get) the same kind of revolution in knowledge work.

Steven Pinker, Rationality – the joy of this book (other than Pinker’s playful wit) is the sheer range. It’s a crash course in game theory, logic, statistics, political science, moral philosophy, etc. etc. Perfect pre-reading for your PPE degree, but guaranteed to teach you something.

Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything – just delightful, wide-ranging stuff from the surely best science-communication double-act in the world. The perfect gift for the nerd in your life.

Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.

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

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is now out. US title: “The Data Detective”.

“If you aren’t in love with stats before reading this book, you will be by the time you’re done.”- Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women)

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