Tim Harford's Blog, page 39

Cogs and Monsters and Dungeons and Dragons, oh my!

Lots of intriguing books on deck this week!

Jon Peterson’s “Game Wizards” is an in-depth history – and I really do mean in-depth – of the creation of Dungeons and Dragons and in particular the ugly struggle for control of TSR. It’s vivid and incredibly well-researched, although this particular niche is… well, it’s very niche.

Robin Wigglesworth’s excellent “Trillions” is at the other end of the scale: Robin describes the invention of the index fund, a hugely consequential development in financial markets that has made almost no impact whatsoever on popular culture. One estimate reckons that the Vanguard index funds alone have saved investors about a trillion dollars in fees. Not sure I can quite endorse that number but it’s in the right ball-park. Great storytelling; recommended.

In “Cogs and Monsters” Diane Coyle argues that we’re getting our critique of economics all wrong. The critics create a straw man of economics, attacking flaws it doesn’t have – while at the same time ignoring very real and consequential weaknesses in the discipline. Diane is extremely wise, and the best friend economics could have – one willing to offer some serious tough love.

It was very kind of Oliver Burkeman to praise my book “Messy” – it’s a book of which I am extremely fond. Oliver’s latest book “Four Thousand Weeks” needs no praise from me as it is doing brilliantly, and deservedly so. But y’all might enjoy his occasional email newslatter, The Imperfectionist.

That’s all from me for this week, except to commend to you this irrefutable argument that every movie is improved by closing with Walk of Life” by Dire Straits…

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.

How to tackle vaccine hesitancy

In rich countries there are plenty of vaccines, but we seem to be running out of people who want them. This is frustrating. The vaccines are a medical miracle — safe, more effective than we dared to hope and produced with unprecedented speed. They are the way out of this global crisis. No wonder vaccinated people often look at holdouts with contempt, pity or fury.

I chuckled at the recent McSweeney’s article “Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks”. Then I wondered who was really the butt of the joke. Was it the anti-vaxxers? Or was it the anti-anti-vaxxers? Either way, it was unlikely to catalyse many decisions to get vaccinated.

I realise that a humorous rant is not a public health policy, but there was something about the McSweeney’s piece that perfectly symbolised a dangerous temptation. Do we want to do the patient work of increasing vaccine uptake? Or would we prefer to enjoy that smug feeling of superiority to those incorrigible, unvaccinated idiots?

Not every unvaccinated person believes Covid-19 vaccines are a genocidal conspiracy. According to polling in the US from the Kaiser Family Foundation, fewer than half of unvaccinated people say they will “definitely not” get the vaccine. Others say they’re keen to get it as soon as possible or they will get it if they’re required to or that they want to wait and see. The “wait-and-see” group, once large, is steadily moving over to the ranks of the vaccinated. This is progress.

If we want vaccination rates to improve further, we should help people who are already halfway to getting it. The starting point is clear, honest communication about benefits and risks, but we should also reframe the alleged problem. All too often I see headlines along the lines of “40 per cent of adults under 30 are unvaccinated” rather than the arithmetically identical “60 per cent of adults under 30 have already received a jab”. It is counterproductive to highlight antisocial behaviour when instead you could be pointing out that most people are doing the right thing.

“Most people are getting vaccinated, so don’t miss out,” is a more persuasive message than, “Why are there so many idiots like you?” If the Kaiser Family Foundation’s poll is to be believed, 85 per cent of Americans over the age of 65 are vaccinated. And despite endless stories about Trumpist vaccine refusal, so are more than half of Republican voters.

The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci rightly warns against “the lure of the caricature”, those viral stories about anti-vaxxers who catch a severe case of Covid but refuse to recant even on their deathbeds. Yet while such ghastly tales loom large on social media, we could more usefully focus on mundane obstacles. Some people are scared of needles or worry about missing work because of side effects or can’t easily arrange childcare to get to a clinic. Solving these problems needn’t be hard — there are a thousand tiny things we could try to make things easier.

A large team of behavioural scientists including Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth recently tested a range of tactics to persuade people in the US to get the flu vaccine. The most effective approaches involved sending a couple of reminder text messages and saying that the flu shot had been “reserved for you”. It’s all so mundane, but the uptick — a few percentage points — is large enough to be well worth a try.

After doing all this easy stuff, we have to ask ourselves a tough question: what are we actually trying to achieve? It would not be difficult to push vaccination rates up by brute force. The UK government could introduce a “rebuild the NHS” tax of £100 a month. Anyone who was fully vaccinated — or could persuade two different doctors to sign a certificate of exemption — need not pay the tax. There would be a fuss and some anti-vaccination campaigners would hope to become martyrs but most people would shrug and get vaccinated. I suspect the vast majority of already-jabbed people would regard this as a perfectly reasonable tax on selfishness and idiocy.

But if that idea makes you squirm as much as me, perhaps that is because we sense that the real problem is rather different, and much bigger. It’s that a small but significant minority lack confidence not just in vaccines, but in the state, corporations, experts and modernity in general. Heavy-handedness might force their grumbling compliance, but at what cost?

The Vaccine Confidence Project, a group of researchers based in London, has spent more than a decade studying attitudes to vaccines, misinformation about vaccines and confidence in vaccines. Recently they launched The Confidence Project examining issues of trust, doubt and misinformation beyond vaccines. It is unclear whether this should be regarded as a noble enterprise or some serious mission creep. They may be biting off more than they can chew, but I applaud the effort.

Lack of confidence in vaccines is a problem in its own right, but also a sign of a more worrying fraying of the social fabric. Repairing that fabric is a harder job than simply pushing up vaccination rates. That is because while vaccines have proved to be highly effective, one cannot say the same about our governments.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 September 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)

Comics, games, and a genius

I was delighted to see The Economist give a glowing review to Ananyo Bhattacharya’s brilliant new book The Man From The Future, noting that it fills “a yawning gap in the history of science”. You heard about that book here first.

A different book in almost every way is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, which I’ve caught up with about a quarter of a century late. Although like other graphic novels of that vintage it can occasionally be shlocky and in questionable taste, overall it’s an excellent read. (Imagine a fantastical and X-rated version of The Matrix – and indeed the Matrix was surely inspired by The Invisibles.) HT to Ralph Lovegrove’s wonderful fiction-and-gaming podcast, Fictoplasm.

Christmas is coming – at least, if you know what’s good for you you’re ordering early… – and I really enjoyed the boardgame Mission: Red Planet. Quick, characterful, easy to learn, and just the right amount of back-stabby.

An interesting short essay in the New Yorker by Cal Newport asks whether commuting to the office is a broken way of working?

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 spot scientists who peddle bad data

I never planned to fake my data. My project involved interviewing the customers visiting a games shop in central London, then analysing the distance they had travelled. Arriving at the location with a clipboard, I realised that I didn’t have the nerve. I slunk home and began to dream up some realistic-seeming numbers. I am ashamed but, in mitigation, I was about 14 years old. I am confident that the scientific record has not been corrupted by my sins.

I wish I could say that only schoolchildren fake their data, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Stuart Ritchie’s book Science Fictions argues that “fraud in science is not the vanishingly rare scenario that we desperately hope it to be”.

Some frauds seem comical. In the 1970s, a researcher named William Summerlin claimed to have found a way to prevent skin grafts from being rejected by the recipient. He demonstrated his results by showing a white mouse with a dark patch of fur, apparently a graft from a black mouse. It transpired that the dark patch had been coloured with a felt-tip pen. Yet academic fraud is no joke.

In 2009, Daniele Fanelli estimated that “about 2 per cent of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once”. I believe that the majority of researchers would not dream of faking data, but it seems that the dishonest exceptions are not as unusual as we would hope.

This matters. Fraudulent research wastes the time of scientists who try to build on it and the money of funding agencies who support it. It undermines the reputation of good science. Above all, if the insights produced by good science make the world better, then false beliefs produced by fraudulent science make the world worse.

Consider the desperate search for treatments for Covid-19. Medical researchers have scrambled to test out treatments from vitamin D to the deworming drug ivermectin, but the results of these scrambles have often been small or flawed studies. However, an influential working paper, published late last year, described a large trial with very positive results for ivermectin. It gave a lot of people hope and inspired the use of ivermectin around the world, although the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration advise against ivermectin’s use to treat Covid-19.

The research paper was withdrawn on July 14, after several researchers discovered anomalies in the underlying data. Some patients appeared to have died before the study even began, while other patient records seemed to be duplicates. There may be an innocent explanation for this but it certainly raises questions.

On August 17 there was an unsettling development in a quite different field, behavioural science. Data detectives Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and anonymous co-authors published a forensic analysis of a well-known experiment about dishonesty.

The experiment, published in 2012, was based on data from a motor insurer in which customers had supplied information about mileage along with a declaration that the information was true. Some signed the declaration at the top of the document, while others signed at the bottom — and those who signed at the top were more likely to tell the truth. It’s an intuitive and influential discovery. The only trouble, conclude Simonsohn and his colleagues, is that it is apparently based on faked data.

“There is very strong evidence that the data were fabricated,” they conclude. Several of the authors of the original article have published statements agreeing. What remains to be seen is who or what was behind the suspected fabrication.

Dan Ariely, the most famous of the authors of the original study, was the one who brought the data to the collaboration. He told me in an email that “at no point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate, or manipulated data in our research”, expressing regret that he did not sufficiently check the data which was supplied to him by the insurance company.

Both episodes are disheartening: science is hard enough when everyone involved is engaged in good faith. Fortunately, science already has the tools it needs to deal with any fraud — much the same tools that it needs to deal with more innocent errors. Scientists need to get back the traditional values of the field, which include the open sharing of scientific ideas and data, and rigorous scrutiny of those ideas.

They should bolster those traditional values with modern tools. For example, journals should demand that scientists publish their raw data unless there is an extraordinary reason not to. This practice dissuades fraud by making it easier to detect, but more importantly allows work to be checked, reproduced and extended. Algorithms can now scan research for anomalies such as statistically implausible data. Automatic systems can warn researchers if they are citing a retracted paper. None of this would have been possible in the era of paper journals, but it should be commonplace now.

Our current scientific institutions reward originality, curiosity and inventiveness, which are classic scientific virtues. But those virtues also need to be balanced with the virtues of rigour, scepticism and collaborative scrutiny. Science has long valued the idea that scientific results can be repeated and checked. Scientists need to do more to live up to that ideal.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 September 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)

ZOMG it is a very exciting week for new nerd books

Some nerd-tastic books coming out this week from friends and colleagues:
Ananyo Bhattacharya’s stunning and deep intellectual biography of John von Neumann, “The Man From The Future”. Looks beautiful, full of telling detail and packed with ideas about group theory, game theory, computer science and more.
Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry offer us their “Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything” – joyful stuff. I sense this will be the pop-science book of choice this Christmas.
David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters weigh in with “Covid by Numbers”, which is a laudable effort to provide structure, balance, context and insight to what is still a fast-moving subject. They’ve done a remarkable job:

We nerds are spoiled for choice! Meanwhile I have been reading a rather older book, “Business Adventures” by John Brooks. It’s a really interesting read – like picking up the New Yorker from the 1960s, with a focus (of course) on management and business. Occasionally it is strange to read an up-close view of what happened in (say) 1959, written shortly after the events in question – but mostly it’s delightful, especially since Brooks writes very well and with a gentle humour.

Also on my radar this week was Reid Hoffman’s review of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book “Renewal“. AMS is a very interesting thinker and the lens of seeing things through who has the good fortune to be able to take risks is thought-provoking.

One more thing: I was recently interviewed at length by the Rewired Soul podcast – check it out!

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.

The power of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes

I recently had the doubtful pleasure of self-administering a mail-order Covid test. It was a process that required simultaneously mastering the test itself, packing up the sample, and registering the procedure online. This administrative, logistical and medical triathlon would have been challenging at any time, much like applying for a driving licence while assembling an Ikea chair, parts of which I had to insert into various orifices.

Still, the bewildering instructions did not help. They were supplied in two not-quite-identical versions for an anxiety-inducing game of spot the difference. Mysterious components went unexplained. On a third instruction sheet was a stern admonition to write down the parcel-tracking number, which could have referred to any of a dozen serial numbers, since the whole kit was festooned with more barcodes than a branch of Tesco.

Why couldn’t these people design a less mind-boggling set of instructions? The answer, my friends, is “the curse of knowledge”. The phrase, coined by three behavioural economists, describes the difficulty a well-informed person has in fully appreciating the depth of someone else’s ignorance. A veteran of parcel delivery knows exactly what a parcel-tracking number looks like. It is so obvious that she will use the term without a second thought, much as you or I would use the word “it”.

Of course, the word “it” can itself be devilishly ambiguous. There’s a PG Wodehouse story in which Bertie Wooster warns a bedroom intruder that his valet will soon be bringing him morning tea: “He will approach the bed. He will place it on the table.”

The intruder is perplexed as to why the valet would place the bed on the table. In Wodehouse’s tale this is comical, because in context “it” is not remotely ambiguous. But when an expert is trying to explain something to a novice, there is no context. “It” could mean anything, as could “parcel-tracking number”.

We humans are egocentric creatures. We can’t help but see things from our own perspective. In his book The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker offers a pithy example of this egocentrism at work. He receives dozens of coursework assignments with file names such as Pinker.doc. For his students, it makes sense to give such a file name to an essay for Professor Pinker, but it betrays a striking failure to put themselves in his shoes.

The most famous study of this problem is by a graduate student in psychology, Elizabeth Newton. She put experimental subjects into pairs and asked one person to tap out a well-known song on the table. Using only their knuckles, they would perform “Baa Baa Black Sheep” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”. The other person had to guess the song.

The listeners found this extremely hard, succeeding fewer than three times out of 100. But the tappers thought the task would be much easier and that listeners would guess the song about half the time. This is because Newton’s tappers could hear the tune in their heads as they tapped out the rhythm. They simply could not imagine what it felt like to hear only the tapping.

In 2005, the psychologist Justin Kruger and his colleagues studied this egocentrism problem in the context of written communication. Participants were asked to write two sentences, one of which was straightforward while the other was dripping with sarcasm. Then they were asked to estimate how difficult other people would find it to spot the sarcasm. They believed the recipients would get it right almost every time. This was far too optimistic: 20 per cent of sentences were misinterpreted. In the context of a work email, that failure rate is easily enough to ruin your day.

The curse of knowledge isn’t new. The catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854 was essentially the result of ambiguous orders being misinterpreted. In a world where so much information is now conveyed in writing — email, text, social media — it is worth paying attention to how to prevent such confusion.

Anyone who has assembled a Lego set can attest that, with enough care, it is possible to provide clear instructions even for complex tasks. The most straightforward solution is to check how the message is being interpreted and then to check again. Alas, it is the nature of the curse of knowledge that we often fail to appreciate how necessary such checking is.

This is one subject that we journalists do understand, which is why this column has been read by numerous editors before reaching you. If the final result is confusing, I apologise. But you should have seen the first draft.

Package designers need a second and third opinion too. I suspect that if the testing company had spent more time watching people like me trying to follow their instructions, they would soon find improvements.

My wife agrees. “They just need to hire an idiot and watch him try to figure out the test,” she observed. Then she looked thoughtfully at me. Unlike Bertie Wooster’s “it”, there was no misunderstanding which idiot she had in mind.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 3 September 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.

In conversation with Richard Thaler and other news

I’m interviewing Richard Thaler at How To Academy (online) at 6.30pm UK time today. Tune in! We will, of course, be discussing “Nudge: The Final Edition“.

Tom Chatfield’s book “How To Think” is a masterclass in clear critical thinking.

I’ve been tickled by Rich Knight’s instructive yet suitably silly book “If I Ran the Country“. Yes, it’s aimed at ten year olds but I’m there for it.

In other news, I’ve just recorded two Halloween episodes of Cautionary Tales, and have agreed to produce two seasons for 2022. Can’t wait.

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.

Does economics have a problem with women?

When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, in 2009, she quipped: “I won’t be the last.” Although she has since been proved right, it was nonetheless astonishingly late in the day for such a landmark. Adding to the awkwardness, Ostrom, who died in 2012, won despite being outside the mainstream of economics.

So does economics have a problem with women? And do women have a problem with economics?

Earlier in the summer, the Royal Economic Society published a report surveying the gender imbalance in economics in the UK. (I used to serve on the RES Council, the group which oversees the Society’s activities.) The picture is not encouraging. Academic economics remains a largely male activity, and the more senior the job grade, the more male-dominated it is. Women make up 32 per cent of economics undergraduate students (up from 27 per cent in 1996) and 26 per cent of academic economists (up from 18 per cent in 1996).

Over a quarter of a century, this pace of progress is not inspiring. It’s also bad news for economics. The economist Diane Coyle, professor of public policy at Cambridge, puts it succinctly: “It’s not possible to do good social science if you are so unrepresentative of society.”

The problem seems much more acute for academic economics than for economics in general. Half of all UK graduate students in economics are women. These women then seem to head into the private sector (banking, consultancy and information technology all beckon) — or they go into think-tanks, the Bank of England or the Government Economic Service, all of which employ a greater proportion of female economists than do the universities. Internationally, women currently run or recently ran the US Treasury, the US Federal Reserve Board and the IMF. The chief economists of both the IMF and the World Bank are women. So it does seem extraordinary that academic economics is so inaccessible or unattractive to women.

Part of the problem is the precariousness of junior academic jobs in all fields and the demands to publish at a frenetic rate just at the moment at which many women are thinking of taking maternity leave. It should not be impossible to rethink academic jobs to make them appealing and available to people with other demands on their time. So far, though, it does not seem to have happened.

But a lack of a family-friendly career path is not the only problem. Four years ago Alice Wu, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, published a systematic study of the language used about female academics on the EconJobRumors web forum. (I’ll spare readers the details, which are often graphically sexual, highly offensive or both. But young female economists exploring the academic job market are not spared any details.)

Wu’s research triggered something of a reckoning at the American Economic Association, which has since paid far more attention to measuring discrimination against women within the profession. It remains to be seen whether anything productive comes of that but such problems are better acknowledged than ignored.

The economics journalist Stacey Vanek Smith, author of Machiavelli for Women, argues that transparency helps to bring change. In the UK it is now mandatory for any organisation with at least 250 employees to report on any gap in average pay between men and women. Vanek Smith thinks that this rule is now squeezing the gender pay gap: it is embarrassing to have to explain away yawning wage inequality, and bosses do not like to be embarrassed. It is also now becoming embarrassing to have so few female economists in senior academic positions — especially when women are so visible in senior policy jobs.

So there is hope. And one simple step forward is to do a better job of selling economics to university applicants and a better job teaching economics to those who do attend.

“If you ask [young people] who’s an economist, they’ll say it’s a boring man in a suit,” says Sarah Smith, professor of economics at Bristol University. “If you ask them what economics is about, they’ll say it’s money, banking and finance.”

Both Smith and Diane Coyle believe that this identification of economics with money and finance is something that appeals more to 17-year-old boys than 17-year-old girls. I cannot prove that the misperception contributes to the gender imbalance but it certainly sells economics short.

An influential open-access course, Core, takes a different approach. It starts with big economic questions of inequality, poverty and sustainable development — issues that students across the world regard as top priorities. Core then uses perfectly standard tools of economics to explore those issues. This does more justice to what economics can be. If it also broadens the appeal of the subject, that is a bonus.

Elinor Ostrom’s career should set an example. She was shut out of conventional economics because, as a girl in the 1940s, she was steered away from maths. She became a political scientist and produced a more inclusive understanding of the questions economics could address, the tools that could be used and the people who should be there when decisions were being made. She was a person who made economics deeper by making it broader. She won’t be the last.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 August 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

“Harford is a fine, perceptive writer, and an effortless explainer of tricky concepts. His book teems with good things, and will expand the mind of anyone lucky enough to read it.”- 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.

Pinker, Von Neumann, and how to be decent

Various exciting books are now out, or imminent. Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce” is just around the corner, and as you might expect it is erudite, entertaining, and packed full of ideas (some new to me and some not). I’m doing an event with Steven Pinker, hosted by 5×15, in a couple of months – but you may not wish to wait for that. The book is well worth a look.

Ananyo Bhattacharya’s “The Man From The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann” is out in early October. I’m very excited about this book: a really weighty intellectual biography, full of telling details and determined to make the connection between von Neumann’s ideas and what came afterwards. (Since he had ideas about everything from game theory to computing, and much else, this is no small task.) Heartily recommended.

“The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean” by David Bodanis has been out in the UK for a while (and in the run-up to paperback publication the hardback price is a steal) but I mention it here because it’s just been published in the US. It’s wide-ranging and full of wonderful storytelling.

If you want something other than book suggestions, try the new FT Weekend Podcast (I’m interviewed on the subject of the joys and sorrows of To Do lists).

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)

Why Covid regulations may be around longer than you think

Travel these days requires an awful lot of paperwork. On a recent trip to Italy, I needed to produce proof of vaccination, proof of three different negative lateral flow tests, proof of the booking of a PCR test, a passenger locator form for the EU and a passenger locator form for the UK. Some of the forms were badly designed. Websites had a habit of crashing. And certain rules called to mind sledgehammers and nuts.

I could not begrudge the bureaucracy. I was trying to jet around the world in the teeth of a pandemic. But as I tried to fill in yet another form, a gloomy thought arose: what if all this paperwork never goes away? Sars-Cov-2 is in no imminent danger of being eradicated, after all, and red tape can be sticky.

For context I picked up Martin Lloyd’s lively history The Passport and was only somewhat reassured. In premodern times the default assumption was that nobody was allowed to travel anywhere — often not even to the next town — without official permission. Over time, and unevenly, freer movement became possible. In England in 1215, Magna Carta included a clause proclaiming that “it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear”, which Lloyd characterises as “an early attempt to abolish a passport system”.

That attempt did not last, but the British long disdained the idea of passports and in the 1800s such documents as they did issue, signed personally by the foreign secretary, supplied no physical description. In 1835, the newly independent country of Belgium requested that “all foreign governments” supply details such as age, height and hair colour on the passports they issued.

In an exchange the current British administration can only dream about, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston described the passport system as “repugnant”, the request for personal particulars “offensive and degrading”, and told the Belgians that if they wanted to destroy their tourist industry that was their own choice. The Belgians backed down. In discussions with Brussels in those days, the British government really did hold all the cards.

In any case, opinion was moving towards the British approach. Emperor Napoleon III of France noted admiringly: “In England the first of all liberties, that of going where you please, is never disturbed, for there no one is asked for passports.” The US and most European countries had abandoned passports by the end of the 19th century. In many South American nations, freedom to travel without a passport was a constitutional right.

So how did the passport come roaring back? The answer was the first world war. Not only were there spies to be intercepted, but identity cards and similar documents enabled governments to keep tabs on their citizens — and find more recruits for their armies. Lloyd writes: “At the end of the war in 1918, the movement to abolish passports re-energised itself but it was now fighting against governments who had discovered how closely a population could be controlled and how easily this could be justified.”

Passports aren’t the only wartime measure to become permanent. In the UK, income tax was introduced in 1799 as a temporary means of funding the war against Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces. It has proved less temporary than advertised. What, then, of all these certificates and locator forms? Will they join the passport and income tax as emergency measures that somehow lasted for ever?

The cynic in me fears that this paperwork will last far longer than necessary, but the evidence suggests that countervailing forces will assemble to oppose the regulations. The World Bank’s Doing Business project tracks the cost and time required to comply with regulations such as registering a business or securing a construction permit. Places with the simplest rules include New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, South Korea, the US, the UK and Sweden, and the leading economies are usually on the hunt for further improvements.

There is a hopeful scenario — to my mind, at least — in which governments manage to both strengthen and streamline their public health information systems, so that ordinary citizens can move around easily in normal times, but in which information about tests, vaccinations and even quarantine can quickly be gathered when needed. Having to show proof of vaccination may feel oppressive to some, but during a health crisis, being able to do so effortlessly might be far preferable to the alternative. Income tax can also feel oppressive, but few object to the principle.

Perhaps the history of the passport can teach us a lesson. Since we don’t live in a world where anyone can stroll across any border, the passport has become a tool for streamlining and democratising travel, and even for defending human rights.

A 1920 conference of the League of Nations began the process of agreeing international standards for passports and ensuring any citizen could have one for a reasonable fee. “Nansen” passports, informally named after their promoter, the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, were issued by the League in the 1920s. They were given to refugees after the chaos of the first world war and the Russian Revolution. Nansen passports enabled, rather than restricted, the freedoms of those refugees. They weren’t red tape, but a ticket to freedom.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 20 August 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

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