Tim Harford's Blog, page 5
June 19, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Shark That Ate Hollywood
Steven Spielberg thought his career was finished. He was behind schedule, his actors were fighting, the crew were mutinous and worst of all, his shark was broken. It looked like Jaws was destined for failure, but the movie that came out defined the Hollywood blockbuster. In this special episode celebrating 50 years of Jaws, we take lessons from the greatest monster movie that almost wasn’t made.
Further reading
The key sources for this episode were The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb and Joseph McBride’s Steven Spielberg: A Biography.
On Jaws:
The Daily Jaws blog
Summer of the Shark Time. June 23, 1975
Jaws: What If The Mechanical Shark Never Broke Down?
In the Teeth of Jaws – BBC TV, 1997.
The Untold Truth of Jaws. Looper. By Andy Scott. Sept 13, 2016
On Creativity:
Teresa M. Amabile, Constance Noonan Hadley and Steven J. Kramer Creativity Under the Gun Harvard Business Review
Am I boring you? Good
A good columnist is never unintentionally tedious, but this week’s effort is about obsolete telephone directories, binary counter overflow, and the alternating current waveform. The boredom is the point.
Start with alternating current. As most of us once learnt and have since half-forgotten, mains electricity is supplied by an oscillating current whose direction changes rapidly. In the UK, for example, the current flips back and forth 50 times a second.
This system is highly efficient but suffers from a serious downside: if the frequency slips outside a tightly defined target range, both the system and many of the appliances plugged into it can be damaged. That almost sounds interesting, but of course it is boring after all, because electricity is generated by power stations that all but guarantee a stable, reliable waveform: heavy, rapidly spinning hunks of metal powered by steam heated by burning hydrocarbons or a nuclear reaction. Or so it used to be, but thermal generation is rapidly going out of style in favour of wind turbines that do not spin at a predictable rate, and solar panels, which produce direct current instead.
“Thermal electricity generation provided system stability so effectively and so transparently that we forgot it did that,” says Paul Domjan, one of the founders of Enoda, an electricity grid technology company. We are going to have to remember again, and quickly, because we are rapidly moving to grids that are far more prone to wobble off the target frequency, as recently happened in Spain, with dramatic consequences.
We are all familiar with renewable energy’s problem that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, but only the real nerds worry about the stability of the AC waveform. This is a problem that can be solved, but not if it is overlooked.
Just in case alternating current starts to seem too interesting, let’s move on to obsolete telephone directories, or more precisely to the diocesan directories published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. An up-to-date directory is useful, if hardly riveting. A decade-old directory describing the former addresses and positions of priests seems good only for the recycling bin.
Yet in 2001, investigative reporters at the Boston Globe suspected that the sexual abuse of children by priests was widespread, and realised that the apparently useless old directories provided a vital clue. In the 1990s, after the church had begun to quietly remove offending priests, there was a sharp increase in the number of priests listed as on “sick leave”, “awaiting assignment” or at the “clergy personnel office”.
Carefully combing through the old directories, the Globe’s reporters assembled a list of priests with unexplained movements through the Archdiocese organisation. That list closely matched their growing list of accused priests, strongly suggesting the church’s complicity.
Because outdated directories turn out to be Pulitzer-prize-winning levels of not-boring, we should turn to binary counter overflows, surely a reliably tedious topic. A computer armed with a three-digit binary counter can count from zero to seven: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111 — and then the counter overflows back to zero. An eleven-digit binary counter will get you to nearly 4.3bn before overflowing — 4,294,967,295 to be precise.
This is fairly boring stuff, unless you are working at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center and your radio system simultaneously disconnects from each of the 800 aircraft flying over southern California. This happened on September 14 2004, and whatever adjectives sprang to the minds of the air traffic controllers and the pilots, “boring” was not one of them.
The culprit? A binary counter overflow in the traffic control computer clock: it was counting down milliseconds from 4.3 billion, which takes just under 50 days to do. When it hit zero the system shut down. Standard procedure was to forestall any problem by rebooting every 30 days, but in the summer of 2004 that evidently did not happen.
As Matt Parker explains in his book Humble Pi, this wasn’t a one-off error. Windows 95 computers would crash for the same reason, while the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had a similar issue and would lose all electronics if somebody left the computers running for more than 248 days.
The boring things in life will shut down your electricity grid, identify paedophiles in the priesthood and crash your computer — or maybe even your aeroplane. Might we attempt a grand unified theory of boring things?
Perhaps. Here it is: smooth, successful operations are uninteresting, and uninteresting matters tend to be neglected. Eventually they stop working well, at which point they become interesting again.
This is certainly true of the AC waveform. It seems boring because it has felt like a solved problem. Yet, as with low inflation or herd immunity from measles, if we allow the foundations of a success story to be eaten away, we find that the problem isn’t quite as thoroughly solved as we assumed.
This is true also of archives. Even celebratory accounts of the Boston Globe team’s use of diocesan directories usually neglect to mention that if those directories hadn’t been available in library archives, the investigation would have hit a dead end.
Archives have a particular problem. If an archive fails — fails to save the right things, fails to preserve old documents or fails to maintain digital information in a format modern computers can interpret — then the fact of that failure may take years or even decades to emerge.
Success leads to boredom. Boredom leads to neglect. Neglect leads to failure. Failure is no longer boring. But if we don’t show more interest in the successful systems we have built, they may suddenly become far too interesting for comfort. By the time these boring topics start seeming interesting, it’s too late.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 May 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy 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
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June 12, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Le Mans 55: The Deadliest Race
The annual Le Mans 24 Hour race brings in hundreds of thousands of spectators to watch the giants of motor racing put their endurance to the ultimate test. Every year, technology improves and the cars get a little faster. In 1955, that push for ultimate speed results in a catastrophe that changes the sport forever.
Further reading
The primary sources for this episode were 24 Hours: 100 Years of Le Mans by Richard Williams, Juan Manuel Fangio’s My Racing Life and Mark Kahn’s classic text Death Race: Le Mans 1955 – which included an exclusive and candid interview with Lance Macklin and the eyewitness testimony of Francois Jardell.
What does it take to stand up to tyranny?
When the thugs arrive — the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan — who stands up to them? That’s a question raised by Rutger Bregman in his new book, Moral Ambition. Bregman, who is Dutch, was fascinated by the example of Nieuwlande, a tiny Dutch town whose residents concealed almost 100 Jews from the Nazi occupiers. “The concentration of people in hiding was higher than nearly everywhere else in Europe.”
So what made the citizens of Nieuwlande courageous? Psychologists have examined the determinants of such heroism. One influential study was conducted by Pearl and Samuel Oliner, authors of The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe and founders of the Altruistic Personality Institute. The Oliners interviewed hundreds of people who had protected Jews in Europe during the second world war. One can understand Sam Oliner’s interest in the topic: he was Jewish, born in Poland in 1930, lost his entire family and, at the age of 12, was hidden from his would-be murderers by a sympathetic Catholic peasant.
A similar project was conducted by psychologist Eva Fogelman, author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. And yet, says Bregman, these studies of heroic acts don’t find many indicators of a heroic personality type.
“A resistance hero could be shy or self-assured, silly or serious, young or old, pious or scandalous, rich or poor, leftwing or right,” writes Bregman. There were some predictive factors, such as independence of spirit. But the heroes seemed much the same as anyone else. The only obvious distinction was the vital one: they took extraordinary risks to save others, while others did nothing.
A later analysis by sociologists Federico Varese and Meir Yaish focused on a different set of explanations. What if, rather than a matter of personality, courageous altruism was a matter of circumstance? And there was one circumstance in particular that stood out in the data: people who were asked to help almost never refused. The secret to being a hero? It was to have someone standing in front of you, demanding heroism.
In Nieuwlande, that person was often Arnold Douwes or his friend Max Léons, a two-man resistance army. On one occasion, Arnold and Max dropped in for coffee with a farmer and his wife, and soon raised the question: would they hide a pair of Jews from the Nazis?
As the farmer started to protest, Max breezily announced, “They’re man and wife — very sweet people . . . just a moment, I’ll go get them.” A moment later, they appeared. Max and Arnold stood up, “So, that’s settled. Good night!”
How rude. How presumptuous. But the Jewish couple survived.
Of course it is not a surprise to observe that people are influenced by the requests of other people. Social behaviour is often contagious. In March 2013, millions of Facebook users changed their profile picture to an equals sign as a signal of support for equality in marriage rights between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Various factors predicted whether people would do this, but a key variable was simply that people were more likely to switch after several of their friends switched.
Switching your profile picture is a low-risk, low-consequence show of support for a cause. It’s not in the same category as defying the SS by hiding someone in your house. Back in the 1980s, the sociologist Doug McAdam drew a distinction between high-risk and low-risk activism, and argued that his fellow sociologists had been all too willing to ignore that distinction.
McAdam studied the Freedom Summer project of 1964, in which unpaid volunteers, mostly white, travelled to the American Deep South to help register Black voters and support other civil rights causes. Several of them were murdered and many of them experienced intimidation or serious violence. Like those who sheltered Jews from the Nazis, these were people voluntarily running mortal risks. Hundreds persisted, but hundreds of others, understandably, dropped out. What distinguished these two groups was not commitment to the cause — they were all committed — but close personal connections to other volunteers. It’s harder to quit, and easier to be brave, if you’re with friends.
In 1986, McAdam couldn’t draw a distinction between friends and “friends”, the people who follow each other on Facebook, Instagram or Strava. But the difference is real. In a 2010 New Yorker essay that predates our current anxiety about smartphones and social media, Malcolm Gladwell argued that the weak-tie networks of social media might be great for raising awareness and signalling support, but not so great for motivating truly brave and committed action.
“The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members,” wrote Gladwell, “who have donated an average of nine cents apiece.”
A few weeks ago, I argued that it wasn’t healthy to spend too much time thinking about Donald Trump, or, to borrow a phrase from Oliver Burkeman, to “live inside the news”. There is a risk that this seems like a recommendation to be selfish: to emulate Erik Hagerman, who lived on an Ohio pig farm and deliberately avoided the news, even donning headphones when visiting a café to avoid encountering anyone talking about politics. After Hagerman was profiled in The New York Times, he was called “the most selfish person in America”.
But Burkeman has more sympathy for Hagerman, who was reported to be spending much of his time and his savings restoring an area of wetlands for public enjoyment. He might not be risking his life, but he was solving an actual problem. It’s just possible that might be more significant than changing a Facebook profile picture.
Hagerman scandalised online opinion by cutting himself off from the news. But what truly seems to motivate the bravest, most altruistic behaviour is not a connection to the news. It’s a connection to other people.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 May 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy 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. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
June 9, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Liar, bigamist, brute: How Isaac Singer liberated women
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday.
The sewing machine was once thought to be an impossible invention. It was such a complicated contraption that it would take more than one inventor, with more than one good idea, to make it work. Each of these inventors, including the notorious Isaac Singer, wanted the credit (and the fortune that came with it) for themselves. And so began the sewing machine war: a mire of backstabbing, stealing and misogyny.
Further reading
A recent biography of Isaac Singer is Alex Askaroff’s “Isaac Singer: The First Capitalist“, but if you can find a copy the definitive book about Singer remains Ruth Brandon’s 1977 biography “Singer and the Sewing Machine“. A contemporary account focused on Elias Howe is James Parton’s 1867 article in Atlantic Monthly, History of the Sewing Machine. The sewing machine wars are covered in detail in Adam Mossoff’s paper The Rise and Fall of the First American Patent Thicket, published in the Arizona Law Review.
June 5, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Nazis, the Bomb, and the Woman that Science Forgot
Lise Meitner has fought for her entire life to be seen as a scientist, slowly building a career as a nuclear physicist in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler rises to power, the small gains she’s made are snatched away. As a Jewish woman, Lise has a critical decision to make: is her passion for science worth her life?
Further reading
Thiis episode was based on The Woman Who Split the Atom by Marissa Moss.
Other sources include
Ruth Lewin Sime – Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
David Bodanis – E=MC2 The biography of an equation
Patricia Rife – Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
Richard Rhodes – The Making of the Atomic Bomb
John Cornwell – Hitler’s Scientists
Ruth Lewin Sime “An Inconvenient History: The Nuclear-Fission Display in the Deutsches Museum”. Physics in Perspective. 12 (2): 190–218 (15 June 2010)
Katrina Miller “Why the ‘Mother of the Atomic Bomb’ Never Won a Nobel Prize” The New York Times 2 October 2023
The zero-sum mindset is no mystery
Twenty years ago, economics was cool. Thanks in part to the publication of Freakonomics, economists were regarded as dispensers of brilliant and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. Whether you were trying to catch terrorists or figure out which wine to serve with dinner, all you needed to do was ask an economist.
It is striking how popular the contrary position has now become: whatever policy position you might be contemplating, if economists are against it, it can’t be that bad. Brexit? The economists hate it; sign me up. Tariffs? Economists have been against them for centuries; bring on the Tariff Man. (As always, there is an exception to prove the rule. After the recent election in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney joked that unlike most politicians who campaigned in poetry and governed in prose, he campaigned in prose and would govern in econometrics.)
Against this backdrop, it was intriguing to see Stefanie Stantcheva recently receive the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, the same award that Steve Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, won back in 2003. But while Levitt won the award for the clever data-detective work that was later made famous by Freakonomics, Stantcheva won in part for asking the public what they think about areas such as inflation, energy and trade. These are issues on which economists regard themselves as experts.
Take inflation, which had seemed to be a solved problem in rich countries until the past few years. Why did it return? Economists broadly agree on the reasons, although not on their relative importance: governments borrowed and spent freely during the pandemic; supply chains were strained; energy prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022; central banks hesitated to respond.
But what do the American citizens surveyed by Stantcheva and her colleagues think? Maybe the public and the economists aren’t so far apart after all: they blame action by the Federal Reserve, increases in production costs, and most of all, government spending. If that looks very much like the economic consensus to you, you may be right.
It is only on closer scrutiny that public attitudes to the causes of inflation start to look odd. For example, many people think that increases in interest rates cause inflation, whereas economists think the opposite. Perhaps people have confused cause and effect: fire engines are often spotted close to fires, paracetamol goes hand in hand with a headache and whenever interest rates are high, there’s an inflation problem. Or perhaps it is simply that people think of inflation as a reduction in their purchasing power and few things reduce purchasing power more reliably than an increase in your debt payments.
Another Stantcheva project investigated “zero-sum thinking”, a topic that seems more abstract, even philosophical, but which perfectly captures the new zeitgeist. There are many ways to describe Donald Trump’s approach to government, or the philosophy of the new Reform party in the UK, but “zero sum” is a useful one.
The zero-sum thinker frames the world in terms of winning and losing, us and them. If one person is to get richer, someone else must get poorer. If China is doing well, then the US must logically be doing badly. Jobs go either to the native born, or to foreigners. In contrast, the centrist dads among us see win-win solutions.
Stantcheva and her colleagues at Harvard’s Social Economics Lab have been asking: what sort of person tends to see the world as zero sum? There are some surprising findings. For example, there are few clearer refutations of a zero-sum mindset than a thriving city, in which people flock to be with others, and the social, cultural, educational and financial opportunities that result. Yet Stantcheva’s research found that urban areas are more prone to zero-sum thinking than rural ones, perhaps reflecting our failure to build new homes.
One puzzle in modern politics has been the rise of populists who grab ideas from both the political left and right. Stantcheva’s work (with Nathan Nunn, Sahil Chinoy and Sandra Sequeira) helps to clarify why this might happen. For example, a zero-sum thinker tends to be in favour of more redistribution and in favour of affirmative action — traditionally leftwing policies — but also in favour of strict immigration rules. Rightwing populists also think affirmative action is important, they just think it’s important and wrong.
The old-fashioned win-win thinker tends to like immigration (more opportunities for everybody) and think that affirmative action and redistribution are a sideshow, because a rising tide lifts all boats.
My own biases are firmly against zero-sum thinking. I’m always on the lookout for smart ideas that can make life better for everyone. But Stantcheva’s work strongly suggests that zero-sum thinking isn’t some sort of senseless blind spot. When people see the world in dog-eat-dog terms, they usually have a reason.
Young people in the US tend to see the world as zero sum, reflecting the fact that they have grown up in a slower-growth economy than those born in the 1940s and 1950s. A similar pattern emerges across countries: the higher the level of economic growth a person grew up with, the less likely they are to see the world in zero-sum terms. People whose ancestors were enslaved, forced on to reservations or sent to concentration camps are more likely to see the world in zero-sum terms. And, intriguingly, while people with little education are often zero-sum thinkers, people with PhDs may be more zero-sum than anyone, which speaks volumes about the scramble for scarce scholarships and research positions in elite education.
The world is full of opportunities for mutual benefit, so zero-sum thinking is a tragedy and a trap. But it is not a mystery. If we want to understand why so many people see the world in zero-sum terms, we only have to look at the fact that our dysfunctional politics and our sluggish economies have needlessly produced far too many zero-sum situations. Fix that problem and maybe economics will one day be cool again.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 May 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy 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. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
May 30, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Give politicians a raise, smuggle smartphones into school, and go full donk!
This week’s episode is a Cautionary Questions special with Nate Silver (On The Edge) and Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff) of Risky Business.
May 29, 2025
Beware Giffen-ish vibes in the money markets
The quest for the elusive Giffen good has taken economists to the depths of the Irish potato famine, to the poorest parts of rural China and to the cages of lab rats at Texas A&M University. Now the Giffen good has been spotted at Disney theme parks. But what do Giffen goods really tell us about the way the world economy works?
Giffen goods were first described in Alfred Marshall’s ubiquitous textbook Principles of Economics. Marshall generously gave credit to Robert Giffen, an eminent Victorian who seemed to be on every economic committee imaginable, but of whom one biographer noted, his “not inconsiderable power and prestige appears to be disproportionate to [his] actual contribution to economic science”.
No matter. Thanks to Marshall, Giffen’s idea is now in every economics textbook: that idea is that, in some circumstances, price hikes can increase demand for a product that nobody really loves.
The canonical example is the potato, which was the cheapest source of calories for subsistence farmers in Ireland in the mid-19th century. During the appalling trauma of the great potato famine, the price of those potatoes rose, and the expense crowded out yet more pricey foods such as meat and milk. The Giffen good was a trap: the more expensive the potatoes became, the less ability you had to buy anything other than potatoes.
In the extreme, the Giffen behaviour itself cannot be sustained: things are truly desperate, people consume nothing but potatoes, and so if the price of potatoes continues to rise, they starve.
For a product that is unattractive and yet dominates the household budget, this is a tale that makes theoretical sense, but it is very much a curiosity.
“Only a very clever man would discover that exceptional case,” opined Marshall’s contemporary Frances Edgeworth, “only a very foolish man would take it as the basis of a rule for general practice.”
Economists no longer believe that potatoes were Giffen goods during the great famine, so the quest for the “exceptional case” has continued. In 1990, the economists Raymond Battalio, John Kagel and Carl Kogut persuaded lab rats to drink more bitter quinine water and less sugary root beer by raising the price of the disliked quinine water. (The “price” in this case was the number of times a rat had to push a button to get a drink of the quinine.)
This was classic Giffen good territory, but it is striking how difficult it has been to observe it in humans rather than lab rats. It was not until 2008 that Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller published persuasive evidence that in the poorest parts of Hunan, China, rice was a Giffen good. Jensen and Miller had conducted a randomised trial in which some households received vouchers that reduced the price of rice. (The subsidy varied but was about 10 to 25 per cent of the normal purchase price.) In response, households consumed less rice, not more — the vouchers had increased their purchasing power enough for them to want to buy tastier ingredients. When the experiment ended and the price of rice rose again, these poor households ended up buying more of that costlier rice.
The story, I am pleased to say, does not end there. Last year the economist Garth Heutel published evidence that theme park rides could be Giffen goods. Park visitors didn’t pay cash for each ride — instead, like the lab rats, they paid in terms of the effort required to enjoy each ride.
Heutel argued that within the constraints of a day at a theme park, there was a strictly limited time budget. A visitor might spend a couple of hours queueing for a popular rollercoaster, but just 15 minutes waiting to jump on a carousel. What, then, if the carousel queue time doubles to 30 minutes? In that case, says Heutel, people might actually decide to ride the carousel more often. Like the canonical potato, the carousel was consuming so much of their time budget that they barely had time to ride anything else. Using data from four Disney theme parks in California and Florida, Heutel finds that some theme park rides are indeed Giffen goods.
Gratifying as it is to note the inventiveness of economists, I would suggest that the real lesson of Giffen goods is that strange things can happen when people are backed into a corner. Two years ago, I noted that some of the cheapest foods, such as sliced white bread and no-frills pasta, had been rising in price most swiftly after the pandemic. The point is not that sliced bread is a Giffen good, but that people feel trapped by such price movements. If the price of fancy products soars, people who buy fancy products can always switch to something simpler. But for those who are already buying the most basic stuff, there is nowhere to trade down to.
The financial chaos of the past few weeks has thrown up another intriguing example. The US dollar and US Treasuries have some Giffen-ish qualities. Think of US Treasuries as being the potato of the financial world: while the potato is a no-frills source of calories, Treasuries are a no-frills source of stability.
Normally, when the US economy is thriving, the dollar is strong, and when the US economy is languishing, the dollar is weak — but when the US economy is in real trouble, the dollar often rises again. The reason? If the US is in trouble, everyone is in trouble — and if everyone is in trouble, it’s best to be in the safest place, which is the US dollar. This “dollar smile” pattern is not exactly a Giffen good, but it is reminiscent of the Giffen good’s counterintuitive movements.
One of the disconcerting market movements in the wake of President Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2 was that the dollar and US Treasuries did not rise — they fell. I’m not sure how much Giffen and Marshall can tell us about this — except that the vibes seem unsettling. When the blight truly takes hold, bad things happen. Or perhaps the rollercoaster is a better analogy. The ride is rickety, the passengers are puking, and no — I’m afraid you can’t get off.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 May 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy 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. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
May 22, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Roosevelt and the Renegade (Panama Disaster 2)
Sixteen years have passed since Ferdinand De Lesseps’ catastrophic failure in Panama, and the dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal company. Now, President Theodore Roosevelt has picked up the task. “No single great material work,” Roosevelt tells Congress, “is of such consequence to the American people.”
The Americans have their work cut out. Enter chief engineer John Stevens. How does he spot a problem no-one else has noticed? And what does he do to solve it?
This episode was originally released on Pushkin+
Further reading
The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough, Hell’s Gorge by Matthew Parker, John Frank Stevens, Civil Engineer by Clifford Foust, and Framers by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Francis de Vericourt.
Academic studies:
Michael Hogan “Theodore Roosevelt and the Heroes of Panama” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, Part I: American Foreign Policy for the 1990s and Part II: T. R., Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1901-1919 (WINTER 1989), pp.79-94
Jones, E. E.; Harris, V. A. (1967). “The attribution of attitudes”. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 3 (1): 1–24. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(67)90034-0. (See also Patrick Healy “The Fundamental Attribution Error“.)
