Tim Harford's Blog, page 47

The hard lessons of home schooling

This week’s meltdown involved a French test. The teacher was displaying questions on screen as a PDF document. As she scrolled down, my son started to panic: he hadn’t finished the early questions yet — and now they had disappeared from view. He raised his hand to tell the teacher but she didn’t notice. When we found him, he was trying to explain the problem to her, through sobs, while ducking out of sight of the camera from embarrassment.

Just another day of remote learning, and my children are lucky: they each have their own desk, their own room and their own computer. Their schools are well resourced. Not many can count all these blessings. Still, the cracks are starting to show.

Months ago, I worried about the grave costs of keeping schools closed. Those costs are so diverse that it is easy to be distracted by the immediate problems. First, the burden of overseeing children falls disproportionately on women. A rigorous study by Aase Villadsen and colleagues, published by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) in July, concluded that mothers of primary school children had spent an average of five hours a day on home schooling. That is close to full time. Fathers had spent just under two hours a day, itself hardly trivial. Is it sustainable to expect working mothers to hold down their jobs in such circumstances?

For parents of secondary school children the problem is less intense, although it remains: fathers spend an average of one hour a day and mothers two hours supporting schoolwork done at home.

Second, mental health. Another CLS study, by Morag Henderson and colleagues, has found high levels of depression, anxiety and loneliness in 19-year-olds — considerably higher than in older generations. Perhaps younger teenagers are spared this; I doubt it.

But what worries me more than anything is the long-term cost of the lost education. A study by Per Engzell and colleagues looked at the experience of Dutch pupils after missing just eight weeks of in-school learning: “Despite a light lockdown and excellent infrastructure for remote learning, our results are dire.” Children had, on average, made no progress at all during the missed school. More fortunate children had learnt a little; disadvantaged ones had actually regressed.

This is not just a rich-country problem. According to Unesco, there have been moments when 1.5 billion children, more than 80 per cent of the school kids on the planet, were missing school. Some smaller percentage have been missing school for a very long time.

There are two ways to look at this, both of them apocalyptic.

The first is that a generation of children has lost the chance to develop important skills — reading for the young ones; more advanced mathematics, science and critical thinking for the older ones; and softer skills such as co-operation and concentration for all.

Even in the narrowest economic terms, this comes with quite a price tag. Eric A Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann calculate, in an OECD report, that the students “affected by the closures might expect some 3 per cent lower income over their entire lifetimes”. Since these children will one day be a quarter or even a third of the workforce, economic growth can be expected to be 1.5 per cent lower each year “for the remainder of the century”. That calculation was done in September, when they added, “These economic losses would grow if schools are unable to restart quickly.”

Ouch. Could it really be quite that bad? It is tempting to dismiss the output of that economic model. Yet the evidence, as well as common sense, strongly suggests that school matters; many children are missing a lot of it.

The second way to look at the problem is perhaps even grimmer: it is a story of inequality. As the Dutch data suggest, not all children will be equally affected. Anna Vignoles, until recently a professor of education at Cambridge university, points out that there have always been children who start school at a disadvantage and we have generally failed to help them catch up as much as one might think. “It seems ridiculous to say that a year of disruption will last the rest of their life,” she told me. “But given that we fail in normal times, I don’t know how we think we are going to catch up this time.”

But there are plans that could help. Simon Burgess and Hans Sivertsen of the University of Bristol propose one: hire an army of tutors, give them some basic training and put them to work doing small group sessions for an hour a day after school — perhaps for a year or so after the crisis has passed. I suspect there will be no shortage of capable people, eager for a chance to contribute to the recovery.

Some children will need — and can get — more help than others, so the plan can address both the loss of skills in aggregate and the unequal impact of the lost schooling. The UK government has already funded some modest steps in this direction but we should have the ambition to help children on an unprecedented scale. Small-group teaching is one of few approaches that have been rigorously proven to improve a pupil’s progress. The main question is the expense. Can we afford to pay for this catch-up tuition? Surely, we can’t afford not to.

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

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. (Elsewhere the same book is titled “How To Make The World Add Up”.)

“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 – Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death

[Posting this early, as the wonderful people at 99% Invisible have very kindly released the episode and I want to get the shownotes up.]

Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine – but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back her public health campaigns.

Her charts convinced the great and the good that deaths due to filth and poor sanitation could be averted – saving countless lives. But did Nightingale open Pandora’s Box, showing that graphs persuade, whether or not they depict reality?

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

I discussed the remarkable legacy of Florence Nightingale and the perils of misinformation in my new book The Data Detective (US/Canada) / How To Make The World Add Up (UK / International).

Key sources on the life of Florence Nightingale include Mark Bostridge Florence Nightingale, Lynn McDonald (ed) The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale Vol 14, and Orlando Figes Crimea.

On the interpretation and history of the rose diagram I recommend Hugh Small’s October 2010 paper presented to the Royal Statistical Society and his essay “Nightingale’s Hockey Stick“, Lee Brasseur’s “Florence Nightingale’s Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams” Technical Communications Quarterly 14(2) 2005, RJ Andrews “Florence Nightingale is a Design Hero” and the collection of essays published in Significance Magazine, April 2020.

The study measuring our rapid reaction to infographics is Lane Harrison  et al Infographic Aesthetics: Designing for the First Impression; Proc. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2015

Cautionary Tales – Martin Luther King Jr; the Jewelry Genius; and the Art of Public Speaking

One speechmaker inspired millions with his words, the other utterly destroyed his own multi-million-dollar business with just a few phrases.

Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr (played by Jeffrey Wright of Westworld, The Hunger Games, and the James Bond films) and jewelry store owner Gerald Ratner offer starkly contrasting stories on when you should stick to the script and when you should take a risk.

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

I discussed the contrast between the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gerald Ratner in my book, Messy.

Key sources on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. include Taylor Branch Parting the Waters, David Garrow Bearing the Cross, Stephen B. Oates Let the Trumpet Sound, the Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Patrick Parr’s profile in The Atlantic and Alex Haley’s interview with Dr King in Playboy.

Gerald Ratner was interviewed by my Financial Times colleague Emma Jacobs in a piece we wrote together titled “Regrets? I’ve had a few.” Gerald Ratner’s full speech is available to view online.

Sherry Turkle’s book is Reclaiming Conversation and Charles Limb gave a TED talk about his work on improvising brains.

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. (Elsewhere the same book is titled “How To Make The World Add Up”.)

“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.

We’re living in a golden age of ignorance

Has there been a moment in modern history where so many people in free societies have believed such damaging lies? It’s easy to point to the US, where nearly 90 per cent of people who voted for Donald Trump believe Joe Biden’s election victory was not legitimate. No surprise, then, that there is considerable support for the recent violent attempt to prevent the democratic transfer of power. But it’s not just the US. In France, a minority of adults are confident that vaccines are safe, which explains why only 40 per cent say they plan to get a Covid-19 shot. This hesitancy also goes some way to explaining why France’s vaccine rollout has started so slowly.

Meanwhile, across the world, substantial minorities believe that the Covid-19 fatality rate has been “deliberately and greatly exaggerated”. The proportion of Covid-19 deniers is 22 per cent in the UK; in many other countries, it is even higher.

How did it come to this? The simplest explanation — to repurpose a phrase from former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers — is: “There are idiots. Look around.” But while there is a certain visceral satisfaction in that explanation, there is much more going on.

Robert Proctor, a historian, coined the term “agnotology” to describe the academic study of ignorance. He became interested in the phenomenon after studying Big Tobacco’s all-too-successful effort to seed doubt about the scientific evidence on the risks of cigarettes.

Proctor once told me “we are living in a golden age of ignorance”. That was in 2016; the golden age had barely started to dawn. Three elements of it are worth highlighting — none of them entirely new.

First, distraction. It’s possible for people to spend hours every day consuming what is described as “news” without ever engaging with anything of substance. Some distractions are obvious: doing the sudoku will not help you understand the implications of the post-Brexit trade deal, and neither will gazing at pictures of celebrities.

At least such diversions are marketed as such. Others are more insidious. Consider “scotch-egging”, the oddly British pastime of arguing over whether a particular activity (driving to beauty spots to go for a walk, cycling in east London when your home address is in Downing Street, treating a scotch egg as a “substantial meal” with your drink in a pub) does or does not violate the letter or the spirit of pandemic rules. Scotch-egg stories are emotionally salient and easy to understand, and superficially they seem to be about important matters of public health. But they suck attention away from the real questions: how can I live life while protecting myself and others? When I cast my vote, does the government’s response deserve praise or blame?

Second, political tribalism. In a polarised environment, every factual claim becomes a weapon in an argument. When people encounter a claim that challenges their cultural identity, don’t be surprised if they disbelieve it. It is obvious that political polarisation might shape our beliefs about questions of politics (do you approve of Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic?) and government (was the US election fair?) and policy (should we provide a universal basic income?). But it also shapes our beliefs about apparently unrelated scientific questions, such as whether humans are causing dangerous climate change, or whether the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is safe. Logically, the answers to these questions should not skew left or right — but they do.

The HPV vaccine is a fascinating example. A team of researchers at Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project concluded that many Americans had sharply different views about HPV compared to the hepatitis B vaccine (HBV). What explains the difference? They tended to learn about HBV from their doctors, while they learned about HPV from cable news. Not everything is polarised — but almost anything can be polarised, and it will be if a prominent political or media figure sees advantage in doing so.

Distractions stop us from paying attention to what matters, and political tribalism makes us reject evidence that casts our tribe in a bad light. Combine the two, add steroids and you get the third element of the age of ignorance: conspiracy thinking.

Conspiracy thinkers devote enormous mental energy to extracting meaning from trivia. Overwhelming evidence can be dismissed as fake news manufactured by the conspiracy. So can ignorance be banished? It isn’t easy. David McRaney, creator of the You Are Not So Smart book and podcast, and Adam Grant, author of Think Again, each offers similar advice: don’t lead with the facts.

Instead, establish rapport, ask questions and listen to the answers. (Needless to say, this is much easier in a real-life conversation than on social media.) You won’t be able to bully someone out of fringe views, but sometimes people will talk themselves around.

This is wise advice, but my own recent work has a more modest goal. Instead of trying to enlighten someone else, I suggest that each of us starts with our own blind spots. We are all distracted. We all have tribes too: social if not political. We are all vulnerable, then, to believing things that aren’t true. And we are equally vulnerable to denying or ignoring important truths. We should all slow down, calm down, ask questions and imagine that we may be wrong. It is simple advice, but much better than nothing. It is also advice that is all too easy to ignore.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 22 January 2021.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is now out in the US and Canada.

“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.

Miracle tech that is anything but: a taxonomy of bionic duckweed

Is bionic duckweed a dire threat to our health and prosperity? It just might be. But lest you fear that it is a fresh torment to test us alongside Covid-19, wildfires and murder hornets, I should reassure you that it is not a Triffid-like killer plant. Bionic duckweed is, instead, a metaphor for a glorious future technology, which might sound good — but isn’t because it keeps us from acting.

The term was coined by a journalist and railway expert named Roger Ford. In evidence to a UK parliamentary committee in 2008, he lamented that electrified railways had been delayed because of the suggestion that “we might have fuel-cell-power trains using hydrogen developed from bionic duckweed in 15 years’ time” and so it would be a waste to have electrified the lines now. No investment today; there will be bionic duckweed tomorrow.

This fascinating and infuriating idea was brought to my attention in a brief essay written by Stian Westlake, co-author of Capitalism without Capital. The concept that our focus on the future might actually make us short-sighted is such a fertile one that I have been tempted to produce a taxonomy of bionic duckweed.

One: evil duckweed. For Westlake, bionic duckweed is a “knowingly malign” prediction designed to distort decisions today. Jack Stilgoe’s book Who’s Driving Innovation? provides an example: efforts by small-government types to stymie investment in light-rail schemes by claiming that completely autonomous cars — sometimes called “Level 5” — are just around the corner. Experts believe they are decades away. “I can show you places around this world I have been to where Level 5 autonomous vehicles are in operation today,” said one Nashville politician in 2017, in a successful effort to persuade voters to reject a mass transit system. Perhaps this was deliberate exaggeration. Perhaps he was making an innocent mistake. Perhaps he had visited these places in a time machine.

Two: duckweed ex machina. Closely related to evil duckweed, duckweed ex machina solves unpleasantly knotty political problems by waving rather vaguely at a technological fix. Boris Johnson loves this stuff. First, it was going to solve the problem of the Irish border. Johnson wrote last year: “If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border.” He did not explain how, exactly, the problem would be solved — and thus far it has not been. Also: I don’t think “frictionless” means what he thinks it means.

Then there are the “game-changer” technologies to fight the coronavirus. Remember when the UK government ordered 3.5 million “game-changer” home antibody tests? That was in March. If the game has been changed, I have not noticed. Or consider the algorithm that was supposed to assign fair grades for exams that had been cancelled, with life-shaping university places at stake. The algoshambles was pure duckweed ex machina: the government faced a painful decision, and technology promised instant relief. See also: “moonshot”.

Three: Schrodinger’s duckweed — the technology that might or might not be round the corner. Consider a vaccine against coronavirus. It seems likely that a proven vaccine will be produced, but it remains unclear how effective it will be and when it will be widely available.

That uncertainty creates problems all by itself. Imagine that we were all, miraculously, given an effective vaccine tomorrow. We could get back to the theatre, back to the office, back to normal. Now, in contrast, imagine that we were told that the virus would be with us forever, lurking in the background like the flu, and we would never find a cure. I suspect that we might well shrug and get back to normal too, in the grim knowledge that some of us would not long survive. It is the uncertainty that keeps us away from crowds, sometimes by law but mostly on a voluntary basis. Who wants to risk catching Covid-19 at Christmas when a vaccine might be with us in January?

The classic work on this problem is by the economists Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck. They showed that in the face of uncertainty, when it is expensive to reverse an action, procrastination becomes very attractive.

The Trump administration seems to thrive on maximising uncertainty. So does the UK’s post-referendum policy on Brexit, which has repeatedly postponed, denied or reversed painful choices. This sort of uncertainty can be enormously damaging, as people wait for clarity before deciding what to do. That is true for self-inflicted wounds but also true when the uncertainty concerns good news such as a vaccine: Schrodinger’s duckweed is duckweed nonetheless, and it clogs the gears of our decisions.

The fourth and final category: inevitable duckweed. Sometimes there is no malevolence, no wishful thinking and no uncertainty. Sometimes the new technology is imminent. Even then, inevitable duckweed can delay investment. Solar power is cheap. But it will be even cheaper next year, so we hesitate to install it.

My own computer — ostensibly a high-end Dell laptop — has broken down several times in the first two years of use. I am tempted to buy something new and start again. And yet I keep patching it up and plodding on. Why? Duckweed. The longer I can keep it going, the better and cheaper the replacement will be. Not all bionic duckweed is evil. But even the good stuff slows us down.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 October 2020.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“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.

From vaccines to homework, why we humans can’t stop overpromising

Is there a more reliable source of disappointment anywhere in the world than my own daily to-do list? Each night I write down everything I plan to do in the morning, and I transfer all the uncompleted tasks from the previous day. I’ve done this for more than a quarter of a century. In 10,000 days, have I ever looked at yesterday’s list and nodded with satisfaction that every item had been ticked off? Not once.

I can take consolation in knowing that I am not alone. Whether the task is as trivial as processing the past hour’s emails or as colossal as building a high-speed rail link or staging the Olympic games, we underestimate the time and effort involved on almost every occasion. One might think that we are in the middle of a wonderful exception: the record-shattering development of vaccines in months rather than years. Yes — and no.

Vaccines have been created with astonishing speed. I looked at prediction markets from July, “superforecasts” from August and modelling from early October, and all suggested that a vaccine was unlikely before the end of 2020. On the other hand, while vaccines have been developed quickly, the production process is, like most large projects, running well behind expectations.

Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder of Airfinity, a life science analytics company, told me that vaccine manufacturers projected they would produce 800 million doses by the end of 2020. The reality was something between 20 million and 30 million doses. The pharmaceutical companies, then, achieved about 3 per cent of what they had announced — much the same proportion that I tick off my to-do list.

At least they have an excuse: a vaccine is one of the world’s most complicated products to produce. With a new vaccine, snags and delays are inevitable.

The realist might add that most megaprojects have an inbuilt bias towards overpromising. The vaccine manufacturers who projected 800 million doses might well have been fooling themselves, but they were also promising the moon as a way to win advanced orders. More successful vaccine programmes, such as the UK’s and the US’s, did not take those optimistic projections too seriously: they paid closer attention to the supply chains themselves and invested money in manufacturing capacity.

In 1977, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put a label on the fact that everything takes longer than we hope: they called it the planning fallacy. At the heart of the problem is that we intuitively make such forecasts by focusing on the project itself and imagining in our heads (or on a project management chart) how it will unfold. We never quite manage to imagine all of the different ways in which things might go wrong.

In a large, complex project, delays are likely, and it is difficult to prevent them from propagating throughout the schedule. Even in a small project, there are distractions or setbacks that we did not plan for.

A classic study of this phenomenon at a small scale was conducted by psychologist Roger Buehler and colleagues in the early 1990s. They asked a group of undergraduates to predict how long it would take to submit their honours thesis and to consider upside and downside scenarios — “if everything went as well as it possibly could” and “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could”. The students’ optimistic estimate was 28 days and their baseline guess not much longer: 34 days. The worst-case scenario estimate was 49 days. The reality? Fifty-six days.

Nor is this just the naivety of students. Huge infrastructure projects routinely overrun, according to research conducted by Bent Flyvbjerg, professor at Oxford university’s Saïd Business School. In 2014, he wrote: “Performance data for megaprojects speak their own language. Nine out of ten such projects have cost overruns.” Flyvbjerg adds that this has been true for decades in public and private sector projects alike.

But what of my daily to-do list? I cannot claim the projects are especially complex, and there is nobody to whom I am overpromising except myself. I have no excuse. Nor did the students that Buehler studied. One might argue that their thesis seemed to them as unknown and complex as any megaproject. But when Buehler followed up by asking them to predict completion time for smaller academic and non-academic projects such as writing an essay or cleaning their apartment, the typical project took twice as long as forecast. We make the same mistake over and over again.

When trying to come up with a realistic prediction, Kahneman and Tversky advocate looking at the experience of similar projects instead. For an essay or bout of spring cleaning, that should be easy. It is not always possible. For each large, groundbreaking project, there is only so much that can be learnt from history — though we can certainly learn something. But do we?

Kahneman is fond of telling a story where he and a team of experts in decision-making, pondering an ambitious curriculum reform project, wisely looked at the record of similar efforts. That record suggested their own efforts would be fruitless and hugely time-consuming.

“Facing a choice,” he wrote, “we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.” The project took eight years and ended in failure.

If Kahneman can’t follow his own advice, who am I to expect wisdom? I told myself I’d finish this column yesterday afternoon so that I could focus on my children. And yet here I am, still typing. The planning fallacy strikes again.

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

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. (Elsewhere the same book is titled “How To Make The World Add Up”.)

“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.

Covid-19: How close is the light at the end of the tunnel?

Will it ever end? In November, we were celebrating the announcement that the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine seemed to be highly effective against Covid-19, followed with bewildering speed by similar claims for the Sputnik V, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines. Nearly three months later, hospitals are overwhelmed and the global death toll is climbing twice as fast as in the worst days of the first wave. At a time like this, I reach for my calculator.

Without minimising the suffering so many people are enduring, I think there is potential for rapid progress very soon. (I am writing these words at the end of January 2021.) There are two reasons why these vaccines, some highly effective, have not yet done anything obvious to save lives or protect hospitals. The first is evident: not enough people have been vaccinated so far. Israel and the United Arab Emirates are well into a remarkable mass vaccination campaign, but most major economies have given a first dose to 2 or 3 per cent of their population.

The second reason is that the vaccine takes time to work. In the UK, Margaret Keenan received a first dose of vaccine bright and early on December 8, but it needs a couple of weeks to provide much protection. She and her fellow first-day vaccinees were much safer by Christmas. Infection takes on average five days to develop into symptoms, so there would have been little sign of any benefit before New Year’s Eve. It usually takes another 10 days before there is much risk of admission to an intensive care unit, and still more before there is a risk of death. Only now are those first few vaccines, weeks ago, beginning to reduce the death toll. It is like turning around the proverbial oil tanker.

The UK had vaccinated (with first dose) about 1 per cent of its population by Christmas, but funeral directors will not notice the effect of that until Valentine’s Day. It seems wretchedly slow. So let me now share the good news: a small number of well-targeted vaccinations can have a huge effect.

Covid-19 is, overwhelmingly, a disease that spares the under-sixties. According to Yifei Gong and Stuart McDonald of the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group (ARG), 36 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths in the UK were of people who were resident in a care home — a group of 400,000 people. Another 30 per cent of deaths were among people aged 80 or more, a group of three million. (These calculations cover the first wave of the pandemic, running up to November 20.)

The same broad pattern applies in any rich country with an elderly demographic. Vaccinate the top priority groups — just a few per cent of the population — and you might reasonably hope to prevent two-thirds of the deaths. The UK government announced on Monday that nearly 80 per cent of those aged 80 and over had received a first dose of vaccine; hardly a surprise, with more than six million doses already administered. Those people, highly vulnerable until now, will be well protected by Valentine’s Day, with deaths prevented in March. The US and EU are behind, but not standing still.

We should expect painfully little to happen, until it starts to happen fast. The ARG estimates that the vaccination that has already taken place is making deaths in hospital about 5 to 10 per cent lower than they would otherwise be. That is important, but imperceptible in the roar of the second wave. In contrast, by the end of February, vaccination should reduce deaths by two-thirds; by the end of March, they should be reduced by about 85 per cent, relative to a no-vaccine scenario.

This projection assumes very high protection and very high take-up, as well as continued acceleration of the vaccination programme. There is room for things to fall well short. But it is quite reasonable to expect dramatic progress in February.

The people who are being admitted to hospital and to intensive care units are, on average, a lot younger than the people who are dying. For this reason the vaccine will not protect hospitals as quickly as it will prevent deaths. But the story arc is the same: nothing happens for a while, and then a lot happens. By early March, hospital admissions should be down 60 per cent and ICU admissions down a third, compared to where they would be without a vaccine, according to the ARG’s calculations.

Why, then, are we still talking about lockdown? Because the virus can spread very rapidly indeed. We have learnt that lesson the hard way, twice. Let’s not forget. A one-third reduction in ICU admissions could be swamped by a day or two of uncontrolled growth, and certainly by a week of carelessness. We will be out of the worst far more quickly, with fewer deaths, if we meet the vaccine halfway by suppressing the virus with social distancing. That need not mean a draconian lockdown, but it will mean that normality is postponed.

There is another reason for hope: the vaccine may also prevent transmission of the virus. If it does, then every dose brings us closer to herd immunity. Vaccinating 10 per cent of the population won’t do much for herd immunity, but vaccinating half of us will go a long way towards protecting the other half.

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises has a character who ruefully notes that he went bankrupt gradually — and then suddenly. In countries fortunate enough to have plenty of vaccine doses, that is how this pandemic will end, too.

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

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“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.

What are the best books ever published in the history of the universe?

Well, I don’t know. But The Week kindly asked me to send a list of my ‘best books’ and I wasn’t sure how to interpret the question. So here goes!

Getting Things Done by Edwin Bliss. I stumbled upon this book a boy and it opened my mind to the then-radical idea that you could use time badly, or wisely. Bliss’s book is written for a world of filing cabinets and secretaries, so these days I’d recommend instead David Allen’s book with the same title – although Bliss’s version is available on cassette!

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin. I’m always willing to be whisked away to a fantasy world, and Le Guin’s is among the wisest, most original, and most beautifully portrayed. It is hard to think of a grand theme that isn’t explored somewhere in the Earthsea trilogy, but always with subtlety and humanity.

Dragon Warriors by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson. This is not a story – it’s a set of rules for playing a wonderful game of the imagination. I read this book at the age of 12 and was transported. I’m  proud to be a nerdy game-player – and fortunate that these days I even get to play with Dave and Oliver themselves.

Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff. An introduction to game theory – the use of mathematics to understand cooperative and competitive interactions, from tennis to business to the cold war. This was the book that turned me into an economist. It’s full of clever counterintuitions and memorable stories.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. Used wisely, statistics can show us truths about the world that we can’t see in any other way. But the statistics have to be collected and analysed with everyone in mind, not just a default white male. This is a powerful, insightful book.

Humble Pi by Matt Parker. I love maths, and I love stories about things going wrong. Planes crash, lakes disappear down misplaced mine shafts, and marketing campaigns go terribly awry. Matt Parker’s book is hilarious, in a way that belies the depth and importance of his message.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“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.

What I’ve been reading: Bravey by Alexi Pappas

When Alexi Pappas and I realised we were releasing books at around the same time, she suggested that we do a book swap and send each other our books. What a good idea, especially since I probably read too much social science – and I’m a firm believer in a little randomisation in life. I didn’t know what to expect from Bravey.

Well, what I received was an elegant and very moving debut from a seriously gifted writer. I knew Pappas was an athlete – she set a 10k national record at the 2016 Olympics – but I did not know anything about her life story.

I assumed there would be tales of hardship and sacrifice – surely nobody becomes an Olympian without them, especially not a distance runner – but I did not expect, on page on, “My first five years of life coincided with my mom’s last.”

I wasn’t ready for that. My own mother died young, and with considerable suffering – but nothing like Alexi describes. And at that moment, normally, I would put the book down. Life is tough enough. I don’t want to wallow in empathetic misery. And yet…

….she writes so beautifully, and with no trace of self pity. The details of her early life are sensitively observed, the turns of phrase poetic. One suspects that there will be some inspirational moments later in the book but she is certainly not dashing for the motivational poster slogan.

The book is compelling reading. I’ve put it down long enough to write this and I’ll be picking it up again very soon.

Brava, Bravey.

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. (Elsewhere the same book is titled “How To Make The World Add Up”.)

“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.

Dates announced for The Data Detective book tour!

The Center for Global Development does amazing, evidence-based work on one of the most important challenges in the world. I’m so flattered that they are hosting my first event, with Amanda Glassman in the chair. Noon, DC time, on 10 February.

Wednesday 10th Feb I’m also speaking with the incredible Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, ‘How To‘ and ‘What If?’ The event is hosted by Point Reyes Books – noon California time.

On Thursday 18th February I’m being hosted by Ryan Bourne, the voice of reason, at the Cato Institute, at noon DC time.

And on Friday 26th February – the perfect Friday evening – Maria Konnikova, author of the knockout hit of 2020, “The Biggest Bluff“, is joining me at The Harvard Bookstore at 7pm Boston time.

More to follow!

My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. (Elsewhere the same book is titled “How To Make The World Add Up”.)

“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.