Tim Harford's Blog, page 44

An economist’s tips on making email work for you

What fresh torture is this? “Just resending this email to get it to the top of your inbox!” Let me stop you right there. There is no top of my inbox. My inbox is empty. At least it was before you decided to do the digital equivalent of emptying the contents of my waste paper basket all over the floor of my study. Back slowly away, if you value your typing fingers.

Not a month goes by without some monstrous email habit catching on. Isn’t it about time we figured this all out? Email celebrates its 50th birthday this year and has been ubiquitous in the office for a couple of decades. Yet it is hard to think of a workplace practice that causes more aggravation. (Well — there’s the open-plan office. But let’s not go there, metaphorically or otherwise.)

When I asked people on Twitter to share their pet hates about email, I was struck by the fact that they were still arguing about etiquette. Some hated the stiff formality of “Dear Tim” and “kind regards” while others insisted on it. A few complained about people who typed the message into the subject line; many people wanted to see much more of this, for swifter reading.

One must always be considerate, but it is a category error to think of email as governed by the rules of etiquette. Email is a tool for getting things done, and so the essential questions are not about salutations but about productivity. Emails are problematic not when they use the wrong sign-off but when they waste time and attention.

The more thoughtful treatments of this problem — for example, Cal Newport’s new book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Overload — rightly diagnose a systemic malaise. Part of the problem stems from email’s sheer versatility. We can use email for almost anything, so we do. A wise organisation will seek out tools and processes better adapted to collaborating on specific tasks. If you try to co-ordinate a complex project with your colleagues in a general all-purpose inbox, stress and overload are inevitable. You enter what Newport calls “the hyperactive hive mind”.

Yet while this is a systemic problem, there’s a lot each individual can do to tame it.

First: use the tools that many email programs offer. If you want to send an email to a large group while ensuring that only you receive the replies, don’t type “PLEASE DO NOT REPLY ALL”. Make it impossible to do so by putting the group in BCC. If someone else fails to follow this rule and your inbox fills up with witty but irrelevant banter from colleagues, try “mute”. Use “schedule send” to ensure your email arrives during office hours, no matter when you send it. This is a kindness, but also trains your colleagues not to expect instant responses.

Second: be the change you want to see in the world. Try announcing that you are “moving Julia to BCC” as a way of politely excusing her from further duties in a group email. Dabble with changing the subject line: “Arrangements for AGM 8 July” ceases to be a good subject if the AGM has been moved to July 7. If your entire email is that the 4pm meeting has been postponed by 15 minutes, then I recommend a subject line “The 4pm meeting has been postponed by 15 minutes //” rather than “URGENT PLEASE READ”.

Why act like this? Because it makes you a more pleasant person to work with. Because people will notice, and they may learn. Just as people acquire appalling habits from each other, such as sending repeated invitations to the same Zoom URL (or is it the same?), they also follow good examples.

My third piece of advice is the most fundamental: clarify and decide. A hundred emails a day is a lot if you leave half of them sitting in your inbox. Keep that up and in a month you’ll have 1,500. Give it a year and you’ll be begging to be allowed to declare email bankruptcy, post the keys through the letterbox and walk away. The solution is to be sharper about your decisions. If no action is needed then delete or archive. Most archived email is easy to find again.

If action is needed, and it is brief and obvious, do it immediately. Otherwise, archive the email and note the project in a task manager such as Trello, Remember the Milk or even a simple text file. If the email is about a meeting, put all the details in your calendar. But unless you want to give the entire world access to your to-do list, do not make the mistake of using your inbox as that list.

This isn’t always easy, but the alternative is worse. I recently had the opportunity to discuss my work habits with productivity trainer Todd Brown of Next Action Associates. A hard core of about a dozen emails sitting in my Action folder, stubbornly unmoving, was giving me headaches. Todd correctly diagnosed the problem: in each case I hadn’t quite decided what the action was supposed to be.

The solution to email overload is to make clear decisions, quickly. That does not and should not mean instant replies, but it should mean that the email no longer festers in the inbox. A sharp organisation will find better ways to handle its core activities than reverting to email. But so too will a sharp individual.

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

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is out on 6 May and available for (enormously helpful) pre-orders. US title: “The Data Detective”.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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.

[image error]

Scouts, Framers, Long Life and Personal Change

A brief history of Extra Life: I’m interviewing Steven Johnson about his new book “Extra Life” – all about how life expectancy has grown so dramatically over the last century or so. As you’d expect from Steven the book is fascinating – do drop in (5pm ET Monday 17 May at Politics & Prose, online).

How to be a different person – for some reason I’ve been reading books about changing the way you think (Julia Galef’s very original and thought-provoking The Scout Mindset), changing your habits and temptations (How to Change by Katy Milkman, which is practical and evidence-based although did not contain anything that surprised me) and even changing your personality (Christian Jarrett’s Be Who You Want, whose very premise was surprising, and made me reflect that I do not really want to change my personality). It is great to see what might once have been called “self help” occupied by writers who are precise and care about evidence.

Me on the radio: I was interviewed by Constant Wonder.

Artificial intelligence and mental models: I did an event with the excellent Kenneth Cukier recently; he and his co-authors have a new and fascinating book out called Framers – about the relationship between humans, artificial intelligence, and mental models.

If you missed the FT Weekend, do try to find a copy (or go online). I interviewed Danny Kahneman and wrote a cover story about magic, misinformation and misdirection.

If you bought a copy of How To Make The World Add Up in paperback publication week – thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Cautionary Tales – The Fan Who Infected a Movie Star

(Self promotion: the paperback of How To Make the World Add Up is now out worldwide (except North America). Please consider an early order, which is disproportionately helpful in winning interest and support for the book. Thank you!)

A moment of selfishness by a sick fan wrecked the lives of a Hollywood star and her family.

German measles is a minor illness for most people – but for unborn children it can be devastating. In 1943 – when the link was only just becoming clear – a young US marine decided to break rubella quarantine to meet the movie star Gene Tierney. The marine was sick… and Gene was pregnant.

The appalling consequences of that meeting tell us much about how our thoughtlessness can harm those around us – but the kind of tragedy that befell Tierney and her daughter can be averted if we appeal to the better parts of human nature.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

Gene Tierney tells her story in her own words in Self Portrait. 
Norman McAllister Gregg’s paper in the Transactions of the Ophthamological Society of Australia is entitled Congenital cataract following German measles in the mother.
Brady Sluder’s story was covered in media including the Huffington Post. The Danish mask-wearing study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. 
The survey on white-collar presenteeism was commissioned by Accountemps. The costs of presenteeism versus absenteeism are explored in EHS Today. The BBC reported on the UK local government’s “pushy parent” school attendance campaign.
Adam Grant and David Hofmann’s study is called It’s Not All About Me : Motivating Hand Hygiene Among Health Care Professionals by Focusing on Patients. The research on blood donors in Bosnia is published as How Effective are Reminders and Frames in Incentivizing Blood Donations? Altruism as a vaccine persuasion strategy is covered in Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Vaccination Policy Effectiveness.
The history of rubella vaccination in the UK is covered in a publication by Public Health England.

What does Covid teach us about climate change?

Like the uninspired sermon-writer who finds a way to link everything to Jesus, some commentators find a way to link everything to climate change. In December, an editorial in The Lancet medical journal on Covid-19 and climate change announced that “the causes of both crises share commonalities, and their effects are converging . . . both born of human activity that has led to environmental degradation”.

I suppose so. But as with the vicar whose odd socks remind him of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, just because the analogy can be made does not make it insightful. It is clearly true that climate change and Covid-19 are both big problems that have met with a stumbling response, but the differences between the two may be as instructive as the similarities.

One difference, all too obvious to journalists, is that while Sars-Cov-2 turned the world upside down in weeks, the pace of climate change just doesn’t suit the news cycle. Volcanoes, which can temporarily alter the climate, take time to do so. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 — one of the largest eruptions in 100,000 years — lowered global temperatures and caused crop failures and food shortages on the other side of the world. Even with such a spectacular trigger, this took a year.

Climate change because of greenhouse gas emissions is well under way, but at a speed measured in decades. As a result, it is almost impossible to cover climate change as a pure news story. Instead, we journalists write about parallel matters, such as the convening of global conferences or the publishing of portentous reports. The true story is enormous but never quite news.

Activists now use the phrase “climate emergency” in an effort to prompt a sense of urgency. I sympathise: we have delayed obvious policy responses such as carbon pricing for a quarter of a century, and every further delay makes the problem graver. But such delays will always be tempting.

For those of us concerned about a lack of action on the environment, this discouraging reality is a function of the very word “news”. It is not easy to cover something that happens in extreme slow motion, whether it is an existential threat such as climate change or an inspiring success story such as the availability of vaccines for childhood diseases.

Greta Thunberg complained to the Financial Times last week that “the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis”. She is right about that, and it never will be. We will never have a daily afternoon news conference in which the prime minister explains to the nation how the climate has changed over the past 24 hours.

That, then, is the disheartening difference between climate change and Covid-19. Now for the equally disheartening similarity: both are amenable to disinformation, polarisation and wishful thinking. None of us like the consequences of climate change or coronavirus, but a few people go further. Because they would prefer the problem did not exist, they seize on any reason to believe that it does not — blaming the Chinese, Bill Gates or Woke Liberals. There is a ready supply of “conflict entrepreneurs” who profit from disinformation to meet this demand for reassuring lies.

But there is hope. The dramatic response to Covid-19 suggests that we are capable of demonstrating some of the virtues that may be necessary to deal with climate change. We can adapt in extraordinary ways if we must and if we’re willing to make significant sacrifices for the common good. Covid-19 should also teach us that resolving a problem with technology may be easier than resolving it with dogged behaviour change. It is instructive to witness how painless and cheap the vaccines have been compared with endless lockdowns — or mass death.

Of course, there is no vaccine against climate change, but there has been astonishingly rapid progress towards cheap, clean energy sources such as wind and solar, and the low-cost batteries that will make them practical.

Here again, Covid-19 suggests a lesson. The vaccines were produced by a global scramble for results, with researchers sharing information while racing to develop them. Governments put large sums of money on the line to ensure that private companies had the necessary resources and incentives to push forward at a speed that would otherwise have been commercially reckless. (That said, governments could have done more, and still should, as the benefits of more doses, earlier, are huge.)

Governments have given some support for green energy and other environmental technologies — but, again, could do more with taxes, subsidies and standards both to pay for development and to encourage adoption. There is little benefit to having an invention — whether a cheap solar panel or an mRNA vaccine — if it is not widely used.

But perhaps I am turning into that sermon-writer, straining analogies too far. Developing a vaccine is a different, easier challenge than developing a new energy source and a new energy system to use it. The policy levers are different, and so are the technological obstacles. Still: we can act decisively, make sacrifices to take care of each other, rely on one generation to look out for another generation and work technological miracles. All we need now is a way to focus on a problem that is too slow to be called a crisis, and too dangerous to be called anything else.

First published in the Financial Times on 9 April 2021.

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

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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.

How to Change, unnoticed Noise, and paperback launch week!

Publication week! How To Make The World Add Up is out in paperback this week everywhere except North America. I understand that we’re on the cusp of the bestseller list in the UK, which would be a Big Deal in terms of winning attention for the book – so if you have been thinking about buying a copy or two some sometime then RIGHT NOW would be incredibly helpful. Thank you so much in advance. A wide range of online buying options are here – or of course you can stroll to your friendly local bookshop. (Incidentally, the book has been named Book of the Month by the much-bruised WHSmith Travel so if you happen to be in a railway station, or even an airport, take a look.)

Lunch with Danny Kahneman: It’s been a fun week; a few days ago I had the pleasure of a zoom “Lunch with the FT” with Daniel Kahneman. We spoke about his new book Noise, the joys of collaboration, the way we think about vaccine risk, and what made Thinking, Fast and Slow such a success. Also, I called him my guru and he wasn’t having any of it. Check out the lunch write up in the FT this weekend.

How To Change is Katy Milkman’s new book, all about – well, how to change. She brings the latest behavioural science, based largely on her own ambitious work program, about fresh starts, temptation bundling, and how to make change stick. I’ve only flicked through so far but it looks very promising.

Event with Gillian Tett: On June 14th, I’m doing an event with Gillian about her excellent forthcoming book “Anthro-Vision“. Join us!

If you like chat, and you like charts, the video of the latest Chart Chat (with special guest, me) is online. Check it out: very smart commentary from people who know a lot more than I do about data visualisation. We talk inequality, debt, YouTube animations, the New York Subway, and Florence Nightingale.

What conspiracy theorists don’t believe is more important than what they do

Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject thought-controlling microchips into us all. The true president of the United States is Donald Trump; his inauguration will happen on January 20, make that March 4, make that a date to be arranged very soon.

The question “How could anybody believe this stuff?” comes naturally enough. That may not be the most helpful question, however. Conspiracy theorists believe strange ideas, yes. But these outlandish beliefs rest on a solid foundation of disbelief.

To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt. You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.

Is the line between excessive doubt and excessive belief a distinction without a difference? I don’t think so, because it helps inform how to bring a conspiracy theorist back to reality. One must recognize that this is a person who already mistrusts what most authoritative sources say. One should ask calm questions, inviting the conspiracy theorist to explain and reflect on his beliefs, rather than advance evidence or quote the experts. The evidence and the experts, remember, are exactly what the conspiracy theorist has already rejected.

When someone has dismissed the obvious facts, repeating them will not persuade him to see sense. But when people are given time and space to explain themselves, they may start to spot the gaps in their own knowledge or arguments. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil coined the phrase “the illusion of explanatory depth” to refer to the way our self-assurance crumples when we are invited to explain apparently simple ideas.

A focus on excessive credulity distracts from the problem of excessive doubt, which is everywhere in our modern information ecosystem. We are all capable of motivated reasoning, of believing what we want to believe. But we are all also capable of doubting what we want to doubt, and studies have found that motivated reasoning has a special power when it takes the form of doubt.

A couple of decades ago, the psychologists Kari Edwards and Edward Smith conducted an experiment in which they asked their subjects to read simple arguments about politically fraught topics such as the death penalty. They then invited these people to produce further arguments and counterarguments. Unsurprisingly, Edwards and Smith found that preconceptions mattered: People found it easier to argue with the grain of their prior beliefs.

More striking was that this bias was clearer when people were on the attack, trying to refute an argument they disliked, than when they were weighing arguments they were inclined to defend. When trying to rebut an unwelcome position, people found it easy to make long lists of reasons to doubt. Disbelief flowed freely, and the bias in what people rejected was much clearer than the bias in what they accepted.

Propagandists have long understood this quirk of human psychology. In the 1950s, when Big Tobacco faced growing evidence that cigarettes were deadly, the industry turned doubt into a weapon. Realizing that smokers dearly wished to believe that their habit wasn’t killing them, Big Tobacco concluded that the best approach was not to try to prove that cigarettes were safe. Instead, it would merely raise doubts about the emerging evidence that they were dangerous. The famous “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” from 1954 managed to look socially responsible while simultaneously reassuring smokers that “research scientists have publicly questioned” the significance of the new findings.

Publicly questioning things is what research scientists always do, but that didn’t matter. The artful message from the tobacco industry to smokers was “This is complicated, and we’ll pay attention to it so that you don’t have to.” When we are confronted with unwelcome evidence, we don’t need much of an excuse to reject it.

Trump seemed to channel this body of thought when he seized upon a moral panic about a few transparently silly stories—“fake news”—and created a catchphrase to smear serious journalists. While we in the media wrung our hands at the idea that people might believe the Pope had endorsed Trump, Trump himself realized that the real danger—and for him, the real opportunity—was different. It was not that people would believe such nonsense, but that they could be persuaded to disbelieve authoritative, carefully sourced journalism.

“Deepfakes”—the technology that creates plausible footage of people saying and doing things that they did not—provide a similar lesson. (Deepfakes of Tom Cruise seem to be popular right now.) One researcher reassured Radiolab that “if people know that such technology exists, then they will be more skeptical.” She may be wrong about that, but I am more worried that she is right—that deepfakes create a world of unlimited deniability. Say anything, do anything, and even if the cameras are rolling, you can claim it never happened. We’re not yet at that point, but the trajectory is hardly reassuring.

Journalists need to take the problem of weaponized doubt more seriously. Fact-checking outfits in particular, such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes, must take care not to breed cynicism. The risk is of creating the sense that lies are ubiquitous—which is why the best fact-checkers spend as much effort explaining what is true as they do exposing what is false.

The ultimate cautionary tale here is Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic, How to Lie With Statistics. Huff’s book is clever, insightful, and impish, and it may be the best-selling book about statistics ever written. It is also, from cover to cover, a warning that statistics are all about misinformation, and that one should no more believe in them than in stage magic. Huff ended up testifying at a Senate hearing that the evidence linking smoking and cancer was as spurious as the evidence linking storks and babies. His unpublished sequel, How to Lie With Smoking Statistics, was paid for by a tobacco-lobby group.

Yes, it is easy to lie with statistics, but it is much easier to lie without them. It is dangerous to warn that the lies are universal. Skepticism is important—but we should recognize how easily it can curdle into cynicism, a reflexive dismissal of any data or testimonies that do not fit neatly into our preconceived ideas.

The events of January 6 showed us that conspiracy thinking can have serious consequences. But this is not just about the conspiracy theorists. The psychological traits that lead one down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole are to some extent present in most of us. We all like to listen to people who agree with us. We are all prone to reject unwelcome evidence. We are all more engaged by dramatic stories than by gritty policy detail. And we all like to feel that we have insights into the world that others lack. Nobody likes to feel that they are being taken for a fool, so doubting early and often can seem like the smart thing to do. And if we want to think clearly about the world, skepticism is a good thing.

But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Indiscriminate belief is worrying, but indiscriminate doubt can be even worse.

Written for and first published by The Atlantic on 16 March 2021.

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is out on 6 May – do please order now!

US title: “The Data Detective”.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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.

Cautionary Tales – Whistleblower on the 28th Floor

(Self promotion: the paperback of How To Make the World Add Up is out next week worldwide (except North America). Please consider pre-ordering: early orders are disproportionately helpful in winning interest and support for the book. Thank you!)

Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing risks your job, your friends and even your life. So why do it?

Financial expert Ray Dirks (played by Jeffrey Wright) exposed one of the biggest corporate crimes of all time – and yet he was the one who ended up in front of the Supreme Court.

Whistleblowers often face intimidation from those they bring to justice, but also face hostility from their co-workers, new employers, the authorities and even the public. Why are we suspicious of “tattletales” and what can we do to make vital whistleblowing easier?

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

The classic accounts of the Equity Funding case are The Great Wall Street Scandal by Leonard Gross and Raymond Dirks, and The Impossible Dream: The Equity Funding Story; The Fraud of the Century. By Ronald L. Soble and Robert E. Dallos.

Kate Kenny’s book is Whistleblowing: Towards a New Theory, which contains a number of first-hand accounts from whistleblowers, as does her and her academic colleagues’ website whistleblowingimpact.org. Other sources include contemporary media reports from CNN, CBS, The Guardian, FT Adviser, the Sydney Morning Herald, and an interview with Martin Woods on KYC360.

Piero Bocchiaro, Philip G. Zimbardo & Paul A. M. Van Lange, 2011, To defy or not to defy: An experimental study of the dynamics of disobedience and whistle-blowing. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2011...

DYCK, A., MORSE, A. and ZINGALES, L. (2010), Who Blows the Whistle on Corporate Fraud?. The Journal of Finance, 65: 2213-2253. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01614.x

Covid has been a catastrophe. Might it also be an opportunity?

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism is inspiring — although as anyone suffering from long Covid can tell you, it is not always true. Sometimes what does not kill you just makes you weaker.

Does Nietzsche’s maxim apply to the economy? Will the catastrophic impact of the pandemic produce a great flourishing in response? Or is a disaster simply a disaster?

I’m afraid that the starting point must be to assume that the post-Covid economy will be weaker than the pre-Covid one. Recessions tend to do harm that lasts long after the recession itself has faded. Consider the job market.

Several economists have found that people who enter the job market in a recession suffer lasting damage to their incomes: they miss the first rung of the career ladder and spend years scrambling to catch up. This is true both for Stanford MBA graduates and people far less privileged, including high-school dropouts and those from often disadvantaged ethnic minorities. However, Hannes Schwandt and Till Marco von Wachter have found that the damage is worse for those who already begin at a disadvantage.

Such “scarring” can take place elsewhere in the economy too. Corporate or personal bankruptcies offer few silver linings; when someone borrows money and then finds they cannot repay it, everyone loses.

Recessions also tend to provoke austerity from governments. Wanting to pay back the debts incurred during the recession, they will look to tax rises and spending cuts. None of this bodes well for a booming 2022.

But without diminishing the terrible health and economic costs of the pandemic, there are also reasons to be cheerful. Sometimes Nietzsche is right.

My favourite example is that of Keith Jarrett’s 1975 improvised solo piano performance in Cologne. After a mix-up at the opera house, he was faced with a tiny, tinny rehearsal piano — and understandably he refused to play. When he relented, out of pity for the young concert promoter, he went on to produce a wildly successful performance and one of the bestselling jazz concert recordings.

The “unplayable piano” effect feels like catching lightning in a bottle but is not unusual. I recently wrote about a brief strike on the London Underground in 2014 which provoked many commuters to find new routes to work. Quite simply, when our old solutions are closed off, we find new ones. Sometimes the new ones would have been better all along.

This is perfectly well understood by computer scientists. Algorithms created to solve problems such as scheduling deliveries or designing computer chips tend to deploy random shocks to what would otherwise be a search for incremental improvements. Without the randomness, the algorithm gets stuck. So do we.

We can all imagine ways in which Covid-19 might prompt the same fresh thinking, most obviously in using the internet — at last! — to replace grinding, costly and time-consuming travel. Dense cities have long been hives of innovation as well as, counter-intuitively, having a lower impact on the environment because of more compact homes and greater use of public transport, walking or cycling. If we can finally figure out a way to collaborate at a distance, at least for some people, some of the time, we might hope to revitalise smaller towns without losing innovation or promoting sprawling commutes.

This is nice in theory. Is there evidence that any sort of “reset” is happening? Constance Hunter, chief economist of consultancy KPMG, has pointed to the appearance of new businesses. Applications to set up a business in the US, steady at around 300,000 a month (seasonally adjusted) before the pandemic, briefly dipped before leaping to more than 550,000 in July and remaining well above pre-pandemic levels ever since. Some of these applications are no doubt born of necessity and come from people who have lost jobs and are looking for a new way to make a living. But many also seem to be genuine signs that new business ideas are flourishing: the pattern for “high propensity” businesses, those likely to employ staff, shows the same dip and then surge.

There is room for hope, then. But opportunities can easily be squandered. One example, as my colleague Martin Sandbu has described, is to improve our policies on rough sleeping. A year ago, very quickly, accommodation was found for most of the rough sleepers in England. This suggests the problem is not quite as intractable as we tend to think. But will that achievement be sustained? I wonder.

Another urgent need is for more small-group tuition for children who would benefit from it. Some of that is happening, and the lost schooling of the past year means that we need much more. It is possible we will conclude that this sort of tailored boost to many children’s education is so effective that we should never stop.

But it is also easy to imagine that we do too little and give up too soon. I am reminded of research by the economist Johannes Spinnewijn into the behaviour of job seekers. He observed two tendencies: many people were outcome optimists and control pessimists — or, in plain language, they were hopeful that things would work out but felt helpless to influence events. What we need now are outcome pessimists who are control optimists — people who believe that the post-Covid world can be better, but only if we decide to make it so.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 April 2021.

The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is out on 6 May and available for (enormously helpful) pre-orders. US title: “The Data Detective”.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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.

Dungeons, Dragons, and Scouts

The Scout Mindset. I eagerly awaited The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef, a superb interviewer and a throughgoing disciple of the path of rationality. Galef is interested in being right, finding the truth, and all the ways in which we mislead ourselves. I was expecting, then, a discussion of concepts such as motivated reasoning, polarisation and various other ideas so prominent in How To Make The World Add Up. But Galef actually plays things differently, and the book is refreshing for that. She devotes at least as much attention to arguing the case for rationality as she does for explaining the obstacles to it. After all, if wishful thinking, blind optimism or backing your own tribe are so tempting (and apparently rewarding), someone must make the case for the lonely “scout”, more interested in exploring the territory than in defending a position. Galef does it well. Highlights include a vivid description of the Dreyfus affair (I had long been meaning to read more about it) and the delightful observation, courtesy of sociologist Nils Brunsson, that meetings were generally not called for the purposes of exploring options, but so that everybody could say encouraging things about the option that had already been chosen. Recommended.

Harford elsewhere – I was interviewed by Dirk the Dice for the Grognard Files podcast, and by Shawn and Teos of the Mastering D&D podcast. In both cases the impetus was a recent Cautionary Tales episode about a boy who disappeared, and the very strange consequences. If you want to hear a different, dice-rolling side of me, check it out.

Upcoming talk with Kenn Cukier. On the evening of 9th May, I’m interviewing Kenn Cukier about his excellent new book Framers. Come along!

Self publicity and pre-orders. Forgive me for mentioning again that the paperback of How To Make The World Add Up is out on 6 May everywhere except North America. If you’ve been waiting for the paperback, or enjoyed the hardback and are thinking of buying a gift for someone else, please consider a pre-order (Amazon, Bookshop, others). It helps a lot!

Cautionary Tales – Masterly Inactivity versus Micromanaging

Why parents, politicians and doctors would be wiser to sometimes do nothing.

Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan affairs and dominating the country would be easy – they were wrong. Lady Sale was among the lucky few to escape with her life.

Wiser heads later recommended “masterly inactivity” as a better course of action. In politics, parenting and even medicine – avoiding the temptation to act is a sadly neglected art form.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It is produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wyse. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Mia Lobel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Koenig.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further reading and listening

Essential sources for this episode are William Dalrymple’s Return of a King and Florentia Sale’s Lady Sale’s Afghanistan. Charlotte Mason’s book is School Education.

The Zithromax conversation is here – and here is the Choosing Wisely website.

Schiffrin, H.H., Liss, M., Miles-McLean, H. et al. Helping or Hovering? The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on College Students’ Well-Being. J Child Fam Stud 23, 548–557 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-013-97...

Lyu H, Xu T, Brotman D, et al. Overtreatment in the United States. PLoS One. 2017;12(9):e0181970. Published 2017 Sep 6. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0181970

Bar Eli, Michael and Azar, Ofer H. and Ritov, Ilana and Keidar-Levin, Yael and Schein, Galit, Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks. Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 5, 2007, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1091662

Christopher Julian Wallace “‘Masterly inactivity’: Lord Lawrence, Britain and Afghanistan, 1864-1879” PhD History Thesis 2014