Tim Harford's Blog, page 6
May 22, 2025
Cautionary Tales – 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“.)
Seven truths about trade
Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every other country on the planet somehow constitutes an emergency, and enough U-turns to make a ballerina dizzy — it is easy to lose sight of a basic fact: even a modest and predictable tariff is still a modest and predictable act of foolishness.
Let’s start with a simple truth about a complicated world. Everybody has to trade with somebody. Attempting complete self-sufficiency would, in the very best-case scenario, produce a Robinson Crusoe existence in which every waking minute had to be devoted to piercing coconuts or repairing the treehouse roof. The worst-case scenario would be to die simultaneously of starvation, exposure and an infected scratch.
A vivid example of this truth is The Toaster Project, the brainchild of conceptual artist Thomas Thwaites. Two decades ago, Thwaites decided to make a simple toaster from scratch. He found himself thwarted at every turn: iron smelting proved impossible without a microwave oven, starch-based plastic was eaten by hungry snails and nickel could be obtained only by purchasing commemorative coins. “I realised that if you started absolutely from scratch, you could easily spend your life making a toaster,” he told me. His toaster eventually cost about £1,000. It did not work.
The second truth about trade is that it’s beneficial even if you’re trading with someone who is better than you at everything. A classic example: your housemate can cook a meal in 30 minutes or do a load of laundry in 40 minutes. For you, cooking takes 90 minutes and laundry takes an hour. A Trumpian view of this interaction is that you’re doomed: the housemate is better at both cooking and laundry, so will do both while you do neither. A trade deficit! Sad! (Although exactly why this turn of events would be to your disadvantage is unclear.)
But if you offer to do three loads of laundry if your housemate cooks three meals, then both you and your housemate are getting clean clothes and home-cooked food for less effort. This, the principle of “comparative advantage”, is that rare idea in economics that is important, true, and far from obvious.
The third truth about trade is that, ultimately, it isn’t about all the stuff you get to sell. It’s about all the stuff you get to buy. Yes, jobs can give us a sense of meaning and purpose, but we do not do them in exchange for gold star stickers. We do them in exchange for money that we can spend on stuff.
The fourth truth about trade is that while deficits might not mean much, bilateral deficits mean nothing at all. The FT has a huge bilateral deficit with me: they send me money every month but they do not complain that I am failing to spend my salary on copies of the FT Weekend. Meanwhile, I have a large bilateral deficit with my local cheese shop, but it would be strange to insist that they bought more copies of my book How To Make The World Add Up. I’m not spending money at the cheese shop in the hope that they will buy my writing in return. I’m spending money in the confident expectation that what I will get in return is cheese.
At this point all the self-proclaimed Tariff Men who are still reading this might complain that I am cheating, because I have been talking about local trade rather than international trade. But economically speaking there is no difference. That is the fifth truth about trade: tariffs are imposed at national borders not for economic reasons but because national borders are an administratively convenient place to do so.
They are also culturally and rhetorically convenient. Politicians who otherwise wouldn’t dream of boasting about increasing taxes are happy to boast about increasing tariffs because tariffs seem to apply to foreigners. (The sixth truth: a tariff is nothing more than a tax.) Tariffs are actually a tax not on foreigners but on people who buy things from foreigners, but nevertheless that is an easier message than — say — taxing people from Birmingham who buy things from Manchester.
This is a question few Tariff Men have asked, let alone answered: if it is such a splendid idea to tax goods coming from Mexico into the US, why isn’t it a good idea for the government of Houston to tax imports from Dallas? Or to tax imports from Central Northwest Houston to East Downtown? In a modern economy something must be taxed, but transaction taxes are needlessly distorting, whether they are levied on a national border or somewhere else.
The seventh truth about trade is that it is often used as a scapegoat. There are many problems that look like they are caused by trade but are actually caused by something else. For example, the decline in US manufacturing jobs feels like it was caused by competition from China, and some of it was. But much of it was caused by competition from robots — which is why many of the jobs have gone but US manufacturing output keeps rising.
There are plenty of problems for which tariffs seem like they might be a solution — from encouraging a homegrown defence industry to discouraging the emission of greenhouse gases — but in almost all cases, there are better, more focused and less wasteful alternatives.
Yes, you may wish to support a homegrown industrial cluster, or to tax carbon dioxide emissions, or to diversify sources of energy. But pursuing complex economic objectives with a trade war is like trying to perform neurosurgery with a hammer. Even a skilled brain surgeon would struggle to produce a positive result — and I’m not sure the current team in the White House have yet earned that distinction.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 April 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
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 15, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Great Frenchman’s Folly (Panama Disaster 1)
Ferdinand De Lesseps, “the Great Frenchman”, was convinced that he was the man to build the Panama Canal. No, he wasn’t an engineer and no, he’d never actually been to Panama before. But he’d managed to dig the Suez Canal, and everyone had said that would be impossible too. How hard could it be?
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“.)
Cautionary Tales – Panama Disaster 1
Ferdinand De Lesseps, “the Great Frenchman”, was convinced that he was the man to build the Panama Canal. No, he wasn’t an engineer and no, he’d never actually been to Panama before. But he’d managed to dig the Suez Canal, and everyone had said that would be impossible too. How hard could it be?
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“.)
The value of institutional memory
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an easy day’s work. But what really had them stumped was a heavy iron chain on the canal bottom. After various attempts, they hooked the chain to their dredger. That did the trick. A firm pull removed the chain and the block of wood on the end of it. The gang took a well-earned break for tea.
The tea break was rudely interrupted by a policeman in a state of some excitement. He had been passing the normally tranquil waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool. By the time the crew returned to the scene, the canal had gone. “We didn’t know there was a plug,” protested one workman. And, in fairness, the canal was two centuries old, and so was the plug. Whatever records there may have been had been destroyed in the Blitz. The moral of the story: institutional memory is valuable, and if an organisation starts forgetting important matters (such as the existence of the plug) bad things happen. Expertise drains away alarmingly fast if not refreshed by activity.
It’s not easy, though. I was recently taken on a tour of the Bodleian Library’s portrait collection, and was struck by how hard our tour guides had had to work to recover basic information about the sitter and the artist, even in portraits just a few decades old. This wouldn’t be so remarkable, except that the entire reason for the Bodleian Library to exist is to preserve information in an accessible form. (Bodley’s librarian, Richard Ovenden, has written Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge and is president of the Digital Preservation Coalition.) But the Bodleian is a library, not a portrait museum, and without constant attention, the natural order of things is not to remember, but to forget.
That means trouble. Consider Volkswagen’s disastrous scandal, in which the company designed its cars to fool emissions tests by regulators. No, not the scandal of 2015, which cost the company its reputation, its CEO and well over €30bn in fines, settlements and legal fees. I mean the scandal of 1973, in which VW was accused by the US Environmental Protection Agency of designing its cars to fool emissions tests by regulators. VW settled out of court and, it seems, spent the following decades forgetting what should have been a chastening experience.
A more tragic example is the pair of fatal Space Shuttle explosions, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. These accidents seem very different. One was an explosion shortly after take-off, the other a break-up on re-entry. But the underlying errors that made them possible seem eerily similar. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report noted that the same basic questions had emerged: why did both shuttles keep flying with known problems? And why did Nasa managers decide that it was safe to launch despite warnings from their engineers? To set the stage for Columbia, Nasa first had to forget all the lessons of Challenger.
There is more to institutional forgetfulness than forgetting one big thing, whether that is “if you cheat the EPA, they may figure it out” or “the canal has a plughole”. Organisations can also just forget how to get things done.
As a boy I was fascinated by the Lockheed TriStar airliner because of its unusual configuration, with one engine in the tail. You don’t see it much these days — the TriStar was not a commercial success.
I wasn’t the only person to be intrigued by the plane, but the organisational psychologist Linda Argote had a different reason to scrutinise it. Most aircraft get much cheaper to make with the benefit of experience — they are the canonical example of learning by doing. But the TriStar stayed stubbornly expensive to make. Argote wanted to know why. Her idea flipped the idea of learning by doing: what about forgetting by not doing?
In a 1990 article Argote and Dennis Epple concluded that Lockheed had made so few planes they were forgetting faster than they were learning. In particular, in 1977 and 1978 production slumped to just 14 TriStars in total, and by the early 1980s costs in real terms were higher than in 1975.
The economist Lanier Benkard later estimated that Lockheed’s cost-saving expertise tended to drain away alarmingly fast if not refreshed by activity, with a half-life of just over a year. We can’t generalise too much from that. Planes are planes, and every case is different. Still, anyone who has ever filed tax returns can attest that a year is easily enough time to forget how to do any complex process.
Forgetting can happen for many reasons. People leave. Physical archives are vulnerable to mould and fire and being misplaced. Digital archives tend to become unreadable as technology changes — indeed the final reference in the Wikipedia entry on organisational memory is a dead link to a lost NHS website. And sometimes organisations deliberately forget. The underlying cause of the Windrush scandal in the UK was that one part of the Home Office decided to make onerous demands that UK residents prove they had the right to live and work in the country, without knowing — or much caring — that another part of the Home Office had destroyed the records that made such proof possible.
More than 100,000 US government web pages disappeared after President Trump took office. It remains to be seen what is gone temporarily and what has been lost for ever.
It is easy for organisations to forget, even when they are trying to remember. Let’s not make this worse than it has to be, or it will be more than the Chesterfield Canal that we lose.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 April 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
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 10, 2025
Donald Trump vs Mr Market
Who can predict what he will do next? Back in 1987, one of the world’s most celebrated experts opined: “Sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors . . . At other times he is depressed and can see nothing but trouble ahead.”
It might seem like an armchair diagnosis of the ever volatile Donald Trump, whose first inauguration speech conjured a vision of “American carnage”, while his second was “confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success”.
“[He] has another endearing characteristic,” the diagnosis went on. “He doesn’t mind being ignored.” Not Trump, then. No, the psychotherapist was the world’s most celebrated investor, Warren Buffett. Lying on Mr Buffett’s couch for psychoanalysis was a hapless gentleman named Mr Market.
Mr Market (a concept first devised by Buffett’s mentor, Benjamin Graham) represents a vivid portrait of financial markets as prone to frenzies and panics, periods of irrational exuberance or yawning depression — a stark contrast to the alternative “efficient market hypothesis”, in which markets swiftly fold new information into the price of assets.
In recent weeks, President Trump and Mr Market have been locked together in a self-destructive spiral, like two drowning men with their arms around each other’s throats. The undignified spectacle would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. And it raises questions: who is panicking about whom? Is Trump’s rollercoaster tariff policy really as shambolic as it seems, or, as his supporters claim and his opponents fear, is there some brilliant strategy behind it all? Has the market response reflected a cool assessment of the economic consequences — or is it the startle-reflex of a financial system jerked awake from a complacent snooze?
The curious thing about financial markets is that they do not respond to what most of us would regard as news.
In 1971, a young economist named Victor Niederhoffer published an intriguing piece of research titled “The Analysis of World Events and Stock Prices”. Niederhoffer — who would later manage money for George Soros — wanted to answer a question: do stock markets care about front-page news?
Niederhoffer studied the response of the S&P Composite index to news events between 1950 and 1966. As a proxy for a world-shaking story, he used any headline in the New York Times that spanned at least five columns. He found 432 such headlines — about one a fortnight. Did the market notice? Generally not. An existential scream on the front page of the Times was typically met with a yawn down on Wall Street.
There were a few exceptions. Really big moments such as the Suez crisis, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of President John F Kennedy were somewhat more likely to produce a large market reaction. But in general Niederhoffer demonstrated that Wall Street operates according to its own logic. Either investors had already anticipated most of the headlines or, more likely, events that seem significant to newspaper editors do not weigh heavily on the stock market.
To put it another way, for the actions of a politician to push global markets violently up or down is extraordinary. (Liz Truss’s 2022 “mini” Budget, it is true, was not in Niederhoffer’s data set.) To do it deliberately is utterly unprecedented. Then again, Trump is an utterly unprecedented politician.
The president began the month by announcing the most disruptive increase in tariffs that the US economy had ever seen — in size the import taxes rivalled the notoriously disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, but they were introduced more abruptly and in a vastly more integrated world trading system.
Trump then suspended some of the tariffs for a 90-day period. This was widely viewed as the president backing down, but it was more a lurch sideways than a U-turn. Because he dramatically increased the tariff on China, the average tax on US importers did not fall.
This second market-moving announcement was followed by a third: Chinese smartphones and other consumer electronics would be exempt from that punitive tariff. Shortly after that announcement came a fourth: the consumer-electronics exemption was itself temporary, and the White House was working on yet another tariff plan.
This is certainly not how to behave if the aim is to persuade manufacturers to bring their factories to the US. Any tariffs would have to be far steadier, more predictable and more credible than that. A cynic might note that it is exactly how to behave if you want to give your cronies the opportunity to trade on inside information (something the White House has denied). But the most obvious interpretation is probably the right one: Trump’s tariff policy keeps changing because Trump cannot make up his mind.
So how should we read the market reaction to Trump’s announcements? The S&P 500, the basic index measuring the performance of large American stocks, fell nearly 5 per cent on April 3 and 6 per cent on April 4. These were big falls, especially on consecutive days.
Yet there have been bigger. During the financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020, there were several days with larger drops in the S&P 500. On October 19 1987, the S&P 500 fell more than 20 per cent for no readily apparent reason. And of course there is the Great Crash of 1929: markets fell by more than 10 per cent on both October 28 and 29 of that year, and by nearly 10 per cent a week later.
Trump’s tariffs have no precise historical precedent, but the echoes of 1929 and 1930 are loud enough. The bear market that began in 1929 lasted nearly three years, and by the end of that long downward grind, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had lost 89 per cent of its value and the US was in the depths of the Great Depression. If that’s the closest forerunner we have, is there a case that the markets have been far too calm?
The problem with interpreting market reaction is that it remains unclear what exactly it should be reacting to. A pessimistic perspective is that, since Trump’s new taxes in effect sever trade between the world’s two largest economies, the US and China, as well as throwing spanners into the gears of the US-Canada-Mexico trading system, the stock market reaction wasn’t just calm, it was complacent. The downward jolt of the S&P 500 after the initial announcement merely undid a few months of recent gains — an investor who bought the index a year earlier would still have been showing a profit. That hardly suggests that Mr Market has fully internalised the risks of a severe downturn.
A more optimistic view is that the market was unperturbed by Trump’s tariff vows because investors assumed any tariffs would be modest. When vast tariffs were announced instead, the market reaction was sharp but small; again, investors assumed he didn’t really mean it. And when Trump promptly slashed some tariffs — temporarily, we are told — and then increased others, and then announced exemptions, and then announced that the exemptions were also temporary, stock market investors decided that the problem wasn’t really the tariffs, because they would come and go. The problem was the clown show in the White House.
Bond market investors appear to have reached the same conclusion, but are far more gloomy about what that implies. As volatility rose, investors sold US Treasuries and the dollar. This is not normal. Typically, investors respond to chaos by buying dollars and US Treasuries, even if the US itself is the source of the chaos.
This month we discovered the exception to that rule. Partly this is because things are already a little precarious: in its periodic fights over the US debt ceiling, Congress has displayed an unnerving willingness to borrow vast piles of money and then flirt with not paying it back. But also, surely, it is because with its tariffs on an island inhabited only by penguins, its pseudo-mathematical justification of the word “reciprocal” and its habit of swerving every few days, the White House has served up a display of policymaking so brazenly amateurish that it has struck shock and awe into bond markets.
The sheer uncertainty is disastrous for the real economy, too. Corporate decision makers would like to get on with the making of decisions. Should they redesign their supply chains? Relocate production to avoid tariffs? Shut down some operations and sack their staff? Start building and hiring elsewhere? For now the only reasonable response is to hold on tight to the giant mahogany desk in front of them and pray the world stops spinning. This is the paradox, then: stock market investors are cautiously optimistic because they expect that Trump is going to change his mind; physical investments are on hold because people are waiting to see what will happen after Trump changes his mind; and bond market investors are nauseated because Trump keeps changing his mind. But it is the bond market investors on whom the world’s financial system rests.
Trump has been in office for just three months. That leaves 45 months to go. What should retail investors do now?
The range of outcomes is not easy to discern. The US has clearly lost credibility — as an ally, as a place to invest, as a trading partner and as a country where the rule of law is paramount. If the world suffers no more than a recession as a result, we will have escaped lightly.
Yet a sunnier scenario is not hard to imagine: it is conceivable that Trump has finally gone too far, been so transparently incompetent and done so much damage to the people who supported him that the rest of the US political system will start constraining his urges.
If you care to make a bet on either of those outcomes you are braver than I am. But in a world where every old certainty seems to have been upended, it may be that a familiar investment strategy still makes sense: buy the boring stuff, diversify your investments and above all do not pay too much attention to the mood swings either of President Trump or of Mr Market.
An extraordinary study by the economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, published a quarter of a century ago, looked at the performance of more than 1,600 investors who embraced the internet revolution in the 1990s, moving from telephone-based trading to an early web-based trading platform. Barber and Odean compared those investors to similar ones who stuck with the familiar phone-based technology. “Those who switch from phone-based trading to online trading experience unusually strong performance prior to the switch,” explained Barber and Odean, “accelerate their trading after going online, trade more speculatively after going online, and experience subpar performance.”
What happened? The most plausible explanation is the “illusion of knowledge” — a well-established psychological phenomenon that people who are given more information don’t become much better at forecasting, but they do become much more confident. The new online platform gave investors false confidence and tempted them to trade too often, as well as making those speculative trades cheaper and easier. Paradoxically, if they had endured the apparent disadvantage of sticking to a slower, more expensive, less information-rich method of trading they would have done substantially better as a result.
That was the 1990s; this is 2025. But the principle still holds. Trump is a president who has mastered the art of capturing attention in a fast-twitch age, but investors who wish to prosper would do well to avoid social media and the frenetic stock-ticker world of business television. The FT Weekend, alternated with a good novel, may be the perfect information diet for the age of Trump.
One prediction can be made with some confidence: whether or not these chaotic weeks leave a lasting impression on our finances, they are likely to leave a lasting impression on our psyches. It is not often that a stock market move makes much impression on the ordinary citizen and, as Niederhoffer showed back in 1971, it is even more unusual for lurches in the market to be so clearly connected to White House decisions.
People may subconsciously carry this moment with them for a long time. In 2009, the economists Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel published a research paper titled “Depression Babies”. Malmendier and Nagel studied several decades of financial survey data and concluded that each cohort’s attitude to investment was shaped by their lifetime experiences of investment returns. For example, young investors in the late 1990s were keen stock market investors, because ever since they had been aware of the market it had been booming; older investors had seen harder times and were more cautious.
Malmendier and Nagel followed up with similar research showing how lifetime experiences of inflation shaped expectations of future inflation — even among central bankers, who would surely think of themselves as driven by hard data rather than hard knocks.
So what will the lesson be this time? Possibly that when — seven years ago — Trump tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”, he was mistaken. Possibly that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, even if the basket is the S&P 500 and it’s been having a wonderful run. Possibly that following every twist of the news will not give you an investment edge, even if it does give you an ulcer.
Whatever the judgment of history, there is something compelling about the frantic struggle between President Trump and Mr Market. Trump has demonstrated his remarkable capacity to dominate the headlines and an equally remarkable capacity to make things happen — even if they are bad things. Trump can make the market go down; he can make it bounce back up again.
But Mr Market does not bow and scrape to Trump with the deference of Republican politicians or craven business leaders. That’s just not how he rolls. He has absolutely no interest in appeasing the president. As Buffett explained back in 1987, Mr Market is sometimes euphoric and he is sometimes depressed. But Mr Market has one great virtue: he will always speak truth to power.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 19 April 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
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 8, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Lab Leak: Could Smallpox Come Back?
In 1978 the world is on the brink of declaring victory over smallpox. No cases have been seen for months, and it looks like the end for a deadly, painful disease. When a photographer in Birmingham begins to feel ill, doctors are mystified: it looks like smallpox, but how could she have caught it? As they try to contain the outbreak, questions about blame and lab safety erupt in a media frenzy, questions we still have to answer today.
Further reading
The most comprehensive account of the Birmingham lab leak is Mark Pallen’s book The Last Days of Smallpox: Tragedy in Birmingham. We also relied on Jonathan B Tucker’s book Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox, the report of the government enquiry, and coverage in outlets including The Birmingham Mail, The Birmingham Post, the BBC and the London Review of Books.
How to do without the Donald
Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.) If he is just a toddler having a full-blown meltdown, then the best strategy is to ignore him. Put on the noise-cancelling headphones and pick up a good book. If he’s a face-eating leopard, best to stay alert.
Unfortunately, this begs the question. If we don’t stay alert, how can we distinguish between the leopard and the toddler? Laughing and turning your back might be the appropriate response, but try that at your peril. Trump is a master at hijacking the way our attention works; we did not evolve to tune out loud, unpredictable activity in the vicinity.
It may be helpful to start with that, then, “in the vicinity”. Trump certainly seems to be in the vicinity: he’s on every TV screen, at the top of every homepage, in every social media feed. But his proximity may be an illusion. To be sure, if you are seeking a safe abortion in Houston, hoping to receive life-saving HIV medication in Kampala or fighting on the front line near Donetsk, then what Trump says and does matters very much indeed. Yet, every day I find myself talking to people who are as immune as anyone can hope to be from the actions of the most powerful man on Earth, yet spend more time thinking and talking about him than about their own spouses.
Some of the reasons for this are endlessly rehearsed. Traditional and social media both thrive on outrage and on unpredictability. Trump is guaranteed to deliver both. But switching off your phone and going for a coffee with someone is no guarantee of a Trump-free zone, because your coffee date will inevitably start talking about how terrible it all is.
This is particularly true if you don’t know them very well. One of the strange facts about human conversation is that it rarely exists to transmit new information. Instead, people instinctively grope towards topics with which everyone is familiar. Studies of groups making decisions, such as panels of recruiters considering candidates, find that people often fail to bring novel information to the table. Instead we chat about what everyone already knows. It’s the same with small talk. Rather than learning something new and interesting about where to find new knitting patterns, how to train for a half-marathon or the best places to visit on a weekend break in Copenhagen, you will find yourself nodding along as you both agree that JD Vance seems to be a terrible fellow altogether.
In Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, Hoff learns a lesson when he tries to convince Winnie-the-Pooh to listen to the radio. “That thing?” responds Pooh, sceptically. “Certainly,” Hoff responds. “How else will you know what’s going on in the world?”
Pooh suggests going outside instead. When the radio is finally turned on, the news is troubling: “Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles . . . ”
With the radio switched off again, Pooh is unconvinced that he has learnt anything of practical value. The birds are still singing. It’s still a nice day.
It’s a passage that delights some and infuriates others. Confronted with the enormous suffering of people you’ve never met, paying attention instead to the birds and the sunshine in your own small patch of the world is something you can only get away with if you are a fictional bear of very little brain.
An angry, sorrowful Pooh might be more socially acceptable, but would not resurrect any victims of the multi-plane pile-up.
When people solemnly declare that this is no time for complacency, what exactly do they suggest as a response? Voting makes a difference, especially if you happen to be an American citizen. So does political organising. But if your idea of resistance to Trump is actually just a combination of doomscrolling and self-induced insomnia, maybe you should pay more attention to the birdsong and the sunshine.
In his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman offers a sanity-saving perspective. The realm of national and international events is important, but it is not a place in which to live. It’s a place to visit. It’s fine to go there, and perhaps go there often, but after you have voted or organised or donated or volunteered or whatever it is you feel you should do (and many people do none of these things), then come back to the world of your immediate surroundings.
Some people have no choice, of course. Whether or not they are interested in geopolitics, geopolitics is interested in them. But most of us can choose, and perhaps we should try to focus a little more often on our immediate surroundings and communities. Not only is it more pleasant, but the chance of making a positive difference to the world is much greater if you start closer to home.
A few years ago, the writer Austin Kleon highlighted a passage from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Leonard and his wife, Virginia, would listen with horror to the speeches of Adolf Hitler. One day, “suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’” Six years later, they were.
There have been worse leaders than Donald Trump — much worse — and Hitler was not defeated by being studiously ignored by those whose lives he did not touch. But if there is a time and a place for stubborn resistance, there is also a time and a place to plant iris.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 April 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
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May 5, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Homo deceptus: Science’s Dirty Little Secret
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday.
In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years, and countless scientific articles later, a man at the Natural History Museum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn’t quite right.
Further reading
Two excellent and comprehensive books about the case are Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh, and The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell.
Other useful articles on the Piltdown forgery:
Freeman, E.F. (2017), Piltdown Man’s ‘Treasure Map’. Geology Today, 33: 108-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/gto.12187
Kate Bartlett Piltdown Man: Britain’s Greatest Hoax BBC History 17 Feb 2011
Nandini Subramaniam The Problem of Piltdown Man Science History Institute 4 May 2023
Robin McKie Piltdown Man: British archaeology’s greatest hoax The Observer 5 Feb 2012
Isabelle De Groote Solving the Piltdown Man crime: how we worked out there was only one forger The Conversation 10 August 2016
On the Data Colada Affair:
Gideon Lewis-Kraus Big Little Lies The New Yorker 9 October 2023 and How A Scientific Dispute Spiralled Into A Defamation Lawsuit The New Yorker 12 September 2024
Cathleen O’Grady Honesty researcher’s lawsuit against data sleuths dismissed Science 12 Sep 2024
Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can’t make this stuff up. Or, can you? Planet Money 28 July 2023
Dan Engber The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger The Atlantic 19 Nov 2024
Data Colada Posts 98, 109, and 118 – and their article False-Positive Psychology.
Tim Harford How To Spot Scientists Who Peddle Bad Data The Financial Times 8 September 2021
Kelsey Piper The staggering death toll of scientific lies Vox 26 Aug 2024
May 1, 2025
Cautionary Tales – “Dangerously near to absolute perfection”
In 1900, two friends in the flourishing Arts and Crafts Movement in London share a vision: to print the ultimate edition of the Bible. Together they create The Doves Press, and its unique font, Doves. But in their quest to make something beautiful, the friends spiral towards an act of incredible ugliness.
Further reading
Marianne Tidcombe The Doves Press
JP Romney and Rebecca Romney Printers Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History
Simon Garfield Just My Type
Michael Hornby, in Doves Press: The Start of a Worry Edited by Colin Frankin
Carole Cable, “The Printing Types of the Doves Press: Their History and Destruction,” Library Quarterly 44:3 (July 1974), 219-230.
John Dreyfus, ‘A reconstruction of the lecture given by Emery Walker on 15 November 1888’, Matrix 11 (Leominster: The Whittington Press, 1991), pp. 27–52.
Review of “The Doves Press by Marianne Tidcombe” by Marcella D. Genz The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, Vol. 74, No. 1 (January 2004), pp. 91-93 (4 pages)
“The Fight Over the Doves” The Economist 19 December 2013
Justin Quirk, “X Marks the Spot,” Sunday Times, Jan. 11, 2015
BBC News “One man’s obsession with rediscovering the lost Doves type”:
