Tim Harford's Blog, page 50

Self-help books that actually help

Self-help is a much-mocked section of the bookstore, and in truth there is much to mock. However I have a soft spot for certain self-help books that I have found useful over the years. These ones get my vote.

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

Getting Things Done by David Allen. The book has a cult following for a reason; David Allen understood early why the demands of modern life can be so stressful and bewildering. The full system is too much for most people – it’s certainly too much for me – but the basic principles of capturing tasks in a trusted system, clarifying next actions, and regularly reviewing, will take you a long way.

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

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

TED Talks by Chris Anderson. I used to speak competitively on the international circuit; now I give talks for a living. I’ve thought a lot about public speaking and read a lot of books on the subject. (Once upon a time I even pondered writing one.) Forget the others: this is the one.

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

Help! by Oliver Burkeman. This is a collection of Burkeman’s Guardian columns, which is not always a successful formula, but I love it. He perfectly walks the line between expressing ironic scepticism at wacky self-help ideas, and falling in love with ideas that might actually work. A deceptive amount of wisdom behind the giggle and the raised eyebrow.

Links above are to Amazon, but I’ve also gathered my recommendations together at Bookshop US and Bookshop UK.

Why are we so obsessed with saving Christmas?

We said our goodbyes to my mother on Christmas Eve 1996. She had died earlier in December after a long and painful illness, but when the end came it was sudden. It can’t have been straightforward to arrange a funeral service on Christmas Eve, the churches being put to other uses, but somehow my father managed it; the children’s stockings were filled as well.

I think I speak with some knowledge of what does or does not ruin Christmas.

It has been baffling, then, to watch the speculation in the British press about whether Boris Johnson will “save Christmas”, as though he were some over-promoted elf in a seasonal movie. (It is, admittedly, a role he is better qualified to play than that of prime minister.) Apparently, the thinking is that if the country is still in lockdown in late December, Christmas is ruined. If lockdown is lifted, as expected, in early December, Christmas is saved.

Given how desperate Boris Johnson is to be liked, my money is on the latter scenario. What makes this so absurd is that in the big scheme of things, Christmas doesn’t matter. Don’t get me wrong: I love Christmas as much as the next man, even if the next man is a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge. But when it comes to catching up with my family, I’d rather not risk giving everyone the unintended gift of Covid-19, whether or not it is legal to do so.

As for the economy, the Christmas boom is smaller than you might think. Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, estimates that for every £100 we spend across a typical year in the UK, just over 50 pence is part of the December Christmas boom.

Of course, some retailers and restaurants will be badly hit if Christmas spending is prevented by lockdown rules. But we should be honest about the situation: large sections of the economy have already been devastated, and that would be true with or without legal restrictions. Few people want to attend pantomimes in a pandemic.

Covid-19 is a public health disaster; lockdowns are an extremely crude and costly response. Both those facts are true regardless of the time of year. There is an honest case both for and against lockdowns, and whether a lockdown hits Christmas, Halloween or Valentine’s Day is barely relevant.

Consider what makes Christmas fun: the gifts, the feasting, the carols, the family reunions and the tiny tots with their eyes all aglow. The carols are going to have to be outdoors this year, lockdown or no lockdown — Covid-19, it turns out, is unsentimental about such things. Some of the gifts and the feasting will happen anyway, within family bubbles. Other festivities can be postponed until safe. As for the tots, I predict that Father Christmas will be filling stockings come what may.

No, the reason Christmas looms large politically is not that it presents a unique opportunity to enjoy ourselves, but that it presents a unique opportunity for us all to enjoy ourselves at the same time. “All” is an exaggeration; I am aware that some people do not enjoy Christmas, others celebrate Diwali or Hanukkah or Eid, and still others mark Christmas on January 7. Nevertheless, it is a collective celebration.

Christmas, indeed, produces one of the few outbursts of mass happiness big enough to be viewed through sentiment analysis on Twitter. At hedonometer.org, a team of academics plot positive and negative emotions around the world, as measured by the words used in tweets. Christmas Day regularly stands out. That is partly because the researchers code the word “Christmas” as happy. We should not leap to the erroneous conclusion that Christmas is a time of unparalleled joy. Instead, the point is that at Christmas, the joy is collective, or at least simultaneous.

If you are over the age of nine, it is unlikely that Christmas Day is going to be the best day of your year. But it has a good shout of being in the top 10. That is why the newspapers are paying attention; that is why the government is desperate not to “ruin” Christmas.

But it is also something for each one of us to keep in proportion. It is perfectly possible to savour many of the joys of Christmas — the feasting, the family and the fun — at any time of the year. But this time we might not be doing so simultaneously — and can you imagine the resulting headlines if we could not? Each of us should be thinking about what we really value about Christmas and how to sustain those values regardless of circumstances. And, in any case, there will be other Christmases.

Of course, for some people that is not true. Some people will not see another Christmas and may be desperate to see and hug their families one last time. Others are isolated in nursing homes, unable to see friends. Dementia sufferers, perfectly capable of enjoying a friendly face-to-face visit, often struggle to interact through Skype or a closed window, or with someone in a mask. But let’s keep Christmas out of that debate. The isolation of people in nursing homes is intolerable. It is also intolerable to expose everyone in a home to a high risk of a Covid-19 outbreak. This is yet another of the painful choices we are making as a society. It is not clear to me that we are getting it right. But I am confident of one fact: for this dilemma, Christmas is a sideshow.

My mother’s death hit us all hard. She was young, and so were we. Maybe it would have been easier to bear if she had died instead in November or, suffering terribly, endured until January. But I do not think so.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 October 2020.

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We will not understand Covid until we give up debating it

Confused by the contradictory claims about the dangers posed by coronavirus? Cut through the fog with this one weird trick: stop trying to win an argument.

I realise that such advice does not sit easily with the way culture has been going in Britain in general of late, and the way things have been at Westminster for as long as anyone can remember. The Prime Minister, like too many top British politicians through history, is the former president of the world’s most famous student debating society. The leader of the opposition, meanwhile, was a prominent barrister. Both men are well-used to beginning with a conclusion, and hunting for the facts to fit.

The mindset of the debater is not that of the calm seeker-of-truth. Opposing arguments are to be caricatured, statistics to be twisted, examples to be cherry-picked. The audience is to be entertained or even enraged as much as persuaded. Politics rewards anger and in-group loyalty.

When one is used to examining every scrap of evidence as possible ammunition, it becomes hard to use them to navigate towards a truly solid conclusion, or sometimes towards any conclusions at all: just think of Boris Johnson’s notorious pair of opinion columns, one arguing for Brexit and the other, unpublished, arguing the opposite. Such rhetorical gymnastics are familiar to anyone who has spent time in a debate club. They create the illusion of giving the pros and cons a thorough testing. But now that Brexit is happening, the illusion has faded; we realise the referendum barely scratched the surface of the real issues.

In the early spring, coronavirus shouldered Brexit to one side. It presented us with a common enemy, impervious to spin and misinformation. Amid the anxiety and the sorrow, I found something refreshing about reporting on an issue where people actually wanted to understand, rather than use to defeat their political opponents.

But it did not take long for the polarisation to creep back in. Somehow we have now managed to start a culture war about a pandemic. There is a vociferous chorus of lockdown “sceptics” and Covid alarmists.

The alarmists have natural allies in the media’s love of tragic yet unrepresentative tales of young people slain by the mysterious illness, or worrying reports of “long Covid” symptoms presented without any sense of whether such symptoms are common.

The so-called sceptics, who lack any of the doubt about jumping to conclusions that defines the proper use of that word, are—if anything—even louder. They have moved steadily from one talking point to another: that the virus might be vastly more common—and thus less deadly—than it seemed; that a kind of herd immunity might be in easy reach; that people were “dying with” rather than “dying of” Covid-19; that the virus was mutating to become less dangerous; and most recently, that the number of cases was dramatically overstated because tests were producing so many false positives.

There is something in most of these claims, from both sides. But my point is not that if there is truth on both sides, the centre ground must be right. It is that this grand “clash of ideas” is not bringing us any closer to understanding the truth.

This is a disturbing conclusion. I grew up thinking that the truth was most likely to emerge from a process of intellectual disputation. It does not seem to be working out that way.

We all have a tendency to think with our hearts rather than our heads, and that tendency is sharpened, not dulled, by a vociferous argument. Wishful thinking, tribal loyalty, and tortured logic are ever-present pitfalls, but the pits yawn wider and deeper once a few alpha chimps are yelling at each other about “covidiots” and “face-nappies.”

A disheartening autumn provides us with an interesting case in point. At the end of August, the virus seemed to be in retreat. The prevalence survey published by the Office for National Statistics on 4th September, covering late August, suggested that infections had fallen to 36 per million people per day in England. Even for the highly vulnerable, the risk of taking a day out was looking small. But then each new week showed a large increase, and by 25th September, the estimate of infections was up to 175 per million people per day—mostly in the under-35s, and mostly in London and the north of England.

Those are the facts. But the facts were not of much interest: cabinet ministers blamed the public, lockdown sceptics blamed false positives, and newspaper columnists mocked the government for reversing its stance from “get back to the office” to “actually, stay at home.”

Everyone got their zingers in, but an ordinary citizen, trying to weigh up the health risks she faces, her responsibility to keep others safe, and the threats to her livelihood, is none the wiser. The personal risk remains low for most people, but the fact that cases have risen so rapidly suggests that we have a real challenge on our hands.

The truth, it turns out, is complicated. But complicated is no way to win a shouting match. If we want to understand the virus—and, for that matter, anything else in a complex world—we must first give up on the illusion that what passes for public “debate” is about anything more than scoring cheap points, which inevitably come at the cost of the whole truth.

Written for and first published in Prospect Magazine on 2 October 2020.

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The power of negative thinking

For a road sign to be a road sign, it needs to be placed in proximity to traffic. Inevitably, it is only a matter of time before someone drives into the pole. If the pole is sturdy, the results may be fatal.

The 99% Invisible City, a delightful new book about the under-appreciated wonders of good design, explains a solution. The poles that support street furniture are often mounted on a “slip base”, which joins an upper pole to a mostly buried lower pole using easily breakable bolts.

A car does not wrap itself around a slip-based pole; instead, the base gives way quickly. Some slip bases are even set at an angle, launching the upper pole into the air over the vehicle. The sign is easily repaired, since the base itself is undamaged. Isn’t that clever?

There are two elements to the cleverness. One is specific: the detailed design of the slip-base system. But the other, far more general, is a way of thinking which anticipates that things sometimes go wrong and then plans accordingly.

That way of thinking was evidently missing in England’s stuttering test-and-trace system, which, in early October, failed spectacularly. Public Health England revealed that 15,841 positive test results had neither been published nor passed on to contact tracers.

The proximate cause of the problem was reported to be the use of an outdated file format in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel is flexible and any idiot can use it but it is not the right tool for this sort of job. It could fail in several disastrous ways; in this case, the spreadsheet simply ran out of rows to store the data. But the deeper cause seems to be that nobody with relevant expertise had been invited to consider the failure modes of the system. What if we get hacked? What if someone pastes the wrong formula into the spreadsheet? What if we run out of numbers?

We should all spend more time thinking about the prospect of failure and what we might do about it. It is a useful mental habit but it is neither easy nor enjoyable. We humans thrive on optimism. Without the capacity to banish worst-case scenarios from our minds, we could hardly live life at all. Who could marry, try for a baby, set up a business or do anything else that matters while obsessing about what might go wrong? It is more pleasant and more natural to hope for the best.

We must be careful, then, when we allow ourselves to stare steadily at the prospect of failure. Stare too long, or with eyes too wide, and we will be so paralysed with anxiety that success, too, becomes impossible.

Care is also needed in the steps we take to prevent disaster. Some precautions cause more trouble than they prevent. Any safety engineer can reel off a list of accidents caused by malfunctioning safety systems: too many backups add complexity and new ways to fail. My favourite example — described in the excellent book Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik — was the fiasco at the Academy Awards of 2017, when La La Land was announced as the winner of the Best Picture Oscar that was intended for Moonlight. The mix-up was made possible by the existence of duplicates of each award envelope — a precaution that triggered the catastrophe.

But just because it is hard to think productively about the risk of failure does not mean we should give up. One gain is that of contingency planning: if you anticipate possible problems, you have the opportunity to prevent them or to prepare the ideal response.

A second advantage is the possibility of rapid learning. When the aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready was working on human-powered aircraft in the 1970s, his plane — the Gossamer Condor — was designed to be easily modified and easily repaired after the inevitable crashes. (At one stage, the tail flap was adjusted by taping a Manila folder to it.) Where others had spent years failing to win the prestigious Kremer prize for human-powered flight, MacCready’s team succeeded in months. One secret to their success was that the feedback loop of fly —> crash —> adapt was quick and cheap.

Not every project is an aeroplane but there are plenty of analogies. When we launch a new project we might think about prototyping, gathering data, designing small experiments and avidly searching for feedback from the people who might see what we do not. If we expect that things will go wrong, we design our projects to make learning and adapting part of the process. When we ignore the possibility of failure, when it comes it is likely to be expensive and hard to learn from.

The third advantage of thinking seriously about failure is that we may turn away from projects that are doomed from the outset. From the invasion of Iraq to the process of Brexit, seriously exploring the daunting prospect of disaster might have provoked the wise decision not to start in the first place.

But I have strayed a long way from the humble slip base. It would be nice if all failure could be anticipated so perfectly and elegantly. Alas, the world is a messier place. All around us are failures — of business models, of pandemic planning, even of our democratic institutions. It is fanciful to imagine designing slip bases for everything. Still: most things fail, sooner or later. Some fail gracefully, some disgracefully. It is worth giving that some thought.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 October 2020.

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What I’ve been reading: economic comedy and the power of decency

Two books this week that were written by friends of mine.

First, a shout out for How To Buy A Planet by D.A. Holdsworth – a comedy about what happens when the world’s leaders decide to sell Earth to some cute aliens in order to wipe the slate clean and press ahead, debt-free. Needless to say, all does not go according to plan. Echoes of Douglas Adams in this book, which is no bad thing. Lots of fun.

Second, David Bodanis’s book The Art of Fairness (Amazon / Bookshop) is published this week. David is a very old friend of mine – the man who originally persuaded me to become a writer – and he’s been talking about writing this book since 2001. I couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s finally seen the light of day. “I’ve always been fascinated by a simple question,” he asks. “Can you succeed without being a terrible person?”

The answer is yes, but it’s complicated and fascinating. David used to lecture on the “social scientist’s toolkit” at Oxford University and has a huge range of scientific and psychological ideas at his fingertips, but the real joy of this book is the storyteling, which ranges from the construction of the Empire State Building, the debutante who became an anthropologist who became a guerilla leader, and the rise of the Nazis. A spellbinding book.

I’ve just 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.

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How auction theory took the Nobel memorial prize in economics

If you and I were to bid against each other in a charity auction for, say, dinner with Princess Marie of Denmark, little would have to be explained about how the details of the auction work. One of us values the prospect more, would pay more, and would win.

But if you and I were bidding against each other for the joint value of the cash in our wallets, the auction becomes far more intriguing. I know only what is in my wallet and you know only what is in yours. Each of us should take a keen interest in what the other is willing to pay, since it is a clear signal of the value of the prize.

The charity auction for an evening with Princess Marie would be described by an economist as a private value auction. I have my own idea of its value, you have yours and the only question is whose value — and thus whose bid — is higher.

The wallet auction is known as a common value auction. The cash in the wallets is worth the same to each of us. To add to the intrigue, each of us has a piece of the puzzle but neither of us know everything about the true value.

This is a hint of the complexities involved in the ostensibly simple process of running an auction, or bidding in one. Auctions date back a long time. Almost 2,500 years ago, the historian Herodotus described men bidding for the most attractive wives in Babylon. Auctions also appear in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as in Samuel Pepys’s diaries. Presumably, the auction is almost as old as the marketplace itself. It was no doubt invented many times over in markets when some buyer offered to pay four denarii per jar for fresh honey, and the man next to him said, “don’t settle for that price — I’ll give you five”.

The economist William Vickrey shared a Nobel memorial prize in 1996 in part for his foundational work on the theory of auctions. But Vickrey’s work, while elegant to the point of beauty, does not give economists the tools to analyse the complex practical auction design problems that real world settings require.

Into the breach stepped Robert Wilson and his former student Paul Milgrom, the Stanford professors who have shared the 2020 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”.

Paul Klemperer, a leading auction theorist at Oxford University, says that even the Nobel citation is hardly praise enough. “These were not just ‘improvements’. Robert Wilson is the father of practical auction design,” he said, “and Paul Milgrom could easily have won a second Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of information”.

Beyond the beauty of auction theory, the reason this matters is that governments have turned to auctions over the past few decades to allocate resources including logging rights, mineral exploration rights and the rights to use particular frequencies of radio spectrum for television or mobile phones. The alternative — handing out the resources cheaply to whoever spins the most plausible story — offers some conveniences to both buyers and politicians but is hardly in the public interest.

A well-designed auction forces bidders to reveal the truth about their own estimate of the prize’s value. At the same time, the auction shares that information with the other bidders. And it sets the price accordingly. It is quite a trick.

But in practice it is a difficult trick to get right. In the 1990s, the US Federal government turned to auction theorists — Milgrom and Wilson prominent among them — for advice on auctioning radio-spectrum rights.

“The theory that we had in place had only a little bit to do with the problems that they actually faced,” Milgrom recalled in an interview in 2007. “But the proposals that were being made by the government were proposals that we were perfectly capable of analysing the flaws in and improving.”

The basic challenge with radio-spectrum auctions is that many prizes are on offer, and bidders desire only certain combinations. A TV company might want the right to use Band A, or Band B, but not both. Or the right to broadcast in the east of England, but only if they also had the right to broadcast in the west. Such combinatorial auctions are formidably challenging to design, but Milgrom and Wilson got to work.

Joshua Gans, a former student of Milgrom’s who is now a professor at the University of Toronto, praises both men for their practicality. Their theoretical work is impressive, he said, “but they realised that when the world got too complex, they shouldn’t adhere to proving strict theorems”.

The peak of the excitement around spectrum auctions came at the turn of the century, when European countries auctioned spectrum rights at the height of dotcom mania. But auctions continue to be used to allocate scarce resources, and there is ample room to use them in future — for example, allocating the rights to fly to hub airports or the right to emit carbon dioxide, deciding which environmental projects should receive subsidies, or providing central bank loans to the banking system in times of stress.

Spectrum auctions have already raised many billions of dollars across the world; Milgrom, Wilson and another auction designer, Preston McAfee, were awarded a Golden Goose Award in 2014 — the award celebrates apparently obscure research which yields large social benefits.

And it is not just governments who use auctions. Every time you type a search term into Google, the advertisements you see alongside the results are there because they won a complex auction. Auctions helped to allocate the infrastructure on which the internet runs. Now they help to allocate our attention.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 12 October 2020.

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Why the polls got it wrong

Irving Fisher, who a century ago was one of the most famous economists on the planet, once declared: “The sagacious businessman is constantly forecasting.” Well, perhaps. But how sagacious is it to be constantly forecasting, when the forecasts seem so often to be wrong?

Significant amounts of money, not to mention incalculable reserves of intellectual and emotional energy, were invested in the problem of figuring out who was going to win this week’s US presidential election. The polls repeatedly and consistently suggested a huge win for the Democrats’ Joe Biden. That is not how things have panned out.

What did we know beforehand? That if the polls were wrong in the same way as in 2016, the election would end up with Donald Trump very close in Florida and Pennsylvania. A polling error fractionally bigger than 2016 would put us exactly where we found ourselves — on the edge of our collective seats, if not losing our collective minds.

No one is really that surprised. Yes, Mr Biden’s lead was larger and more stable than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Yes, pollsters had in principle corrected for their earlier mistakes. Yes, while polling errors could still be expected, it was as likely that Mr Biden would overperform and grab Ohio and Texas as that he would underperform, failing to win Florida. Yes, yes, yes. But no one could quite believe the polls. And it seems we were right to doubt.

The state-level polls were indeed off in much the same way and in much the same places as they were in 2016 and the 2018 midterms. Pollsters do not want to be wrong, and they particularly dislike being wrong in the same way twice in a row. So while polling errors are common, it is a surprise that lightning struck twice in the same place.

At this early stage one can only guess at what went wrong, but it is worth underlining the difficulty that pollsters face. Consider the situation in Florida, where polls suggested Mr Biden would win 51 per cent of the vote and Mr Trump 48-49 per cent. (The actual result was the reverse.)

The pre-election numbers suggest that in a typical poll with 500 positive responses, 255 went for Mr Biden and 243 for Mr Trump. But typical response rates are 5 in 100 — often lower, says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and prominent election modeller. He says that only around 1 in 100 people respond to opinion polls. So now picture 10,000 people, 255 who called their vote for Mr Biden, 243 for Mr Trump and 9,500 who never responded. How confident are we feeling now?

Worse, the people who do reply will be systematically different from those who do not: older and whiter, more likely to be women. Pollsters may try to correct for these factors to ensure that the demographics of the poll match the demographics of the census. Perhaps Cuban-Americans in Florida are under-represented in the poll by a factor of three. Fine: let’s say the Cuban-Americans who do reply count triple. But does this help? What assurance do we have that the tiny minority who bother to respond are a good proxy for the vast majority who do not? One pollster told me: “Half the time, our adjustments make things better. Half the time they make things worse.”

Complicating matters still further is the question of turnout. Someone may tell the pollsters that they are planning to vote. But will they? This caused problems for forecasting the Brexit referendum in the UK. Older, less educated voters told pollsters they would show up in force to vote Leave. Prior elections suggested otherwise. Pollsters who placed more weight on history than on their own raw data were tripped up. Turnout in this US election has been unusually high, giving pollsters another headache.

We shouldn’t exaggerate the problem. Polls do generate information. Every single state that the Financial Times confidently predicted would vote for Mr Biden, voted for Mr Biden. Every single state that the FT confidently predicted would vote for Mr Trump, voted for Mr Trump. Those calls were not made by leaps of political intuition, but by looking at where the polls predicted a safe margin. Mr Trump needed to win most of the marginal states to have a chance, and promptly bagged three of the four big ones, Florida, Ohio and Texas, denying Mr Biden the quick and decisive victory for which he might reasonably have hoped.

It’s not that the polls told us nothing. It’s that they could not tell us what we yearned to know. We want certainty, but we can’t always get what we want. In a close-run election where most people refuse to speak to pollsters, opinion polls cannot do away with the uncertainty.

Fisher was quite right to highlight the need to think about the future. We must, after all, weigh up our chances and make our decisions. But, as his contemporary John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, sometimes “we simply do not know”. And since Fisher was eventually ruined, while Keynes died a millionaire, a little agnosticism comes in very handy.

In any case, we must learn to live with uncertainty. Perhaps we should obsess less about the question, “Will it happen?” and devote more thought to what we would do if it did.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 November 2020.

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What I’ve been reading: science and magic

I picked up a copy of Bad Advice by Paul Offit a few months ago but have only now started to give it a proper read. Offit is a paediatrician and vaccine specialist, but the focus of this book is to discuss the importance of science and science communication. Offit is funny, and I learned quite a lot about the science of vaccines too – but the real eye-openers are the war stories he shares about his experience trying to communicate scientific ideas on network television in the US – and in particular, dealing with militant anti-vaxxers. Recommended.

Blackwells (UK) – Powells (US) – Amazon

Because I believe in delayed gratification, I’ve put off reading The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin, having caught up on the original Earthsea trilogy and the fifth (?) book Tales from Earthsea. I haven’t been disappointed. Le Guin ties together the themes of the original trilogy – particularly The Farthest Shore – while staying true to themes she later felt were underdeveloped, such as the perspective of women. While Tehanu (Book 4) was a brutal, painful change of emphasis – to the extent almost of rejecting her earlier work – here Le Guin manages to balance both the earlier and later visions of Earthsea. Spellbindingly good. I am inspired!

Blackwells (UK) – Powells (US) – Amazon

My NEW book How To Make The World Add Up is OUT NOW!

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“Fabulously readable, lucid, witty and authoritative.” – Stephen Fry

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Lockdown sceptics vs zero-Covid: who’s got it right?

Covid in the UK hasn’t been quite as polarised as Brexit or the political landscape of the United States. But it is polarised enough. At one extreme are the zero-Covid advocates; at the other, the lockdown sceptics. Who is right?

Some lockdown sceptics have advanced a variety of dishonest or deluded views over the course of the pandemic. Months ago, one correspondent wrote to assure me that the infection fatality rate was just one in 2,000. This implies 33,500 deaths if the whole UK population was infected. We have suffered 67,500 excess deaths; am I to conclude that we have all had the virus twice? Then, in what now looks like a line from a Shakespearean tragedy, there is Donald Trump’s early declaration: “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

But there is an honest argument against lockdowns — namely that while the disease is dangerous, the lockdown cure is worse. The virus has the power to kill many more people than died in the first wave. Yet in England and Wales, the vast majority of those who have died were 65 or over, with two-thirds of them aged 75 or over. The honest lockdown sceptic asks, is it wise or fair to impose radical limits on the freedom of all with no apparent end in sight? Thousands of lives are being saved — but millions of young people are seeing their prospects sacrificed. Is their sacrifice worthwhile?

The zero-Covid position reaches the opposite conclusion from the same starting point: since there will be no end to the suffering as long as the virus is circulating, the answer is to eliminate the virus in the UK and Ireland. We are island nations, like New Zealand. If community transmission can be stopped, then border controls — plus contact tracing for the occasional outbreak — can keep the virus out.

The most prominent British advocates of the zero-Covid approach are the scientists calling themselves “Independent Sage”. In July, they explained that the first step would be to apply lockdowns until we reached “control”, defined as one new case per million people per day. Thereafter, a contact- tracing system, plus support for people in isolation, would eliminate the virus on these shores.

Both sides of this debate hold out tempting rewards if only we are willing to suffer now. But both are mistaken. Zero-Covid looks prohibitively costly for European countries. A relentless lockdown would be needed even to reach the “control” step, with no guarantee against backsliding.

One example of “control” listed by Independent Sage was Germany, but it has never met their definition. It has rarely averaged below five cases per million people per day and is currently at more than 20. South Korea did reach the “control level” for months but the virus spiked again. Elimination seems endlessly elusive.

As for the lockdown sceptics, we should not pretend that we could simply tough out a rough couple of months. If the virus spread uncontrolled, tens of millions would catch it, and several hundred thousand people would die.

Far more likely is that as the virus smouldered and the deaths mounted, many people would retreat from public spaces out of justifiable fear for themselves and their loved ones. The struggle would go on for many months. I would not give much for the chances of reviving tourism, cinemas or the West End.

Sweden, darling of the sceptics, has done important things right — notably, kept schools open for younger pupils. It has preserved individual freedoms, which is no small matter. But it has suffered vastly more deaths than its Nordic neighbours for no discernible economic benefit. It is hardly a slam-dunk case against lockdowns.

In summary: zero-Covid looks like a prohibitively expensive quest for a fleeting goal. But the death toll and endless grind of damn-the-consequences reopening looks equally unacceptable, and it is telling that many lockdown sceptics have been unwilling to be frank about the true dangers of the virus.

Is there no answer? Of course there is. It lies not in the extreme ends of the debate, but in the tedious, complex business of basic public health. Lockdowns can work if they allow a properly run contact-tracing programme to take over.

Consider Germany. It slowed the first wave by establishing a test-and-trace capacity quickly. The German lockdown thus came much earlier on the epidemic curve, saving many lives but also ensuring that the country could reopen after just six weeks — despite being nowhere near Independent Sage’s definition of “control”.

Since then, Germany has learnt to live with the virus as a constant yet contained threat. The secret is no secret: lockdown suppressed the virus enough to allow contact tracing, mask-wearing and general vigilance to take over. In July, at a time when the British were still emerging from their homes, blinking in the sunlight, I visited Bavaria. Masks and sanitisers were everywhere, but it was thriving.

The UK had the same opportunity but we are squandering it. Our contact-tracing system was slow to grind into action, our testing capacity was overwhelmed by the predictable surge in demand as schools reopened and, most recently, a technical error led to many thousands of positive test results not entering the contact tracing system promptly.

Forget the clash of grand ideas, of Sweden versus New Zealand. Just stop bungling the basics. It is not much of a slogan. But it might just be a solution.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 October 2020.

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What I’ve been reading: linguistic puzzles and the alchemy of advertising

I am a sucker for Alex Bellos books – they’re just such fun, full of unexpected ideas and charmingly written. (My very favourite is Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (in the US, titled Here’s Looking at Euclid).) His latest offering is The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which offers a hundred puzzles based on a variety of languages (often obscure), codes, counting systems and writing systems. If you like puzzles this is a delightful and original approach and you’ll pick up a lot of quirky delights along the way.

Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense gives Rory’s idiosyncratic take on life, commerce and particularly marketing. It’s very funny and full of original ideas. My favourite page is page 43, which contains this: “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say” (sometimes attributed to David Ogilvy) and this disarming admission, to Sutherland, “Look, to be frank, I don’t like reading novels all that much, but I find if you have read a few Ian McEwan [novels] you can pull a much better class of girl”. Not especially enlightened, but a useful peek at someone’s internal monologue.

(A complaint, though: Rory misses no opportunity to take a kick at economists. Sometimes we deserve that. But he works hard to insist that game theory is not economics (Milgrom, Schelling, Myerson? etc) experiments are not something economists would do (Duflo, Banerjee, Smith? etc) behavioural science is something diferent (Thaler, Kahneman, Shiller? etc) and “economics treats all markets as though they were the same” (Ostrom, Roth, Akerlof? etc). By my count nearly three quarters of the people who have won Nobel memorial prizes in economics in the 21st century are in disciplines Rory insists aren’t economics. The straw-manning is not necessary: the book stands up perfectly well without it.)

Both books are a light read, easily consumable in bite-size servings – and they both look rather beautiful too.