Tim Harford's Blog, page 60

Book of the Week 2: Dreyer’s English

Yes, a book about how to write, by a celebrated copy-editor. Benjamin Dreyer offers an enjoyable tour through all the rules of grammar and style that people break, making their prose dull or ridiculous. He also rails against the pedants who insist on rules that any good writer would happily break, such as prohibition on splitting infinitives.

It’s fun – even funny. Dreyer’s humour is on every page; one reviewer described it as ‘relentless’ but I was glad to have the jokes to keep me company. This is, after all, a book about grammar and linguistic precision. It needs jokes, and some of Dreyer’s are good enough to have me annoying my wife by reading them out to her. (Sorry.)

The book was easily good enough to keep me reading despite the fact that I wasn’t learning very much. I was aware that the book was a combination of advice I already knew and advice I would promptly forget, although one or two observations may stick.

Perhaps I am the wrong reviewer. Not only I have read similar books before, there is the small matter of having been on the receiving end of 14 copy-edits (7 books in the US, 7 in the UK). I have absorbed certain predilections of copy-editors by osmosis by now. I suspect a reader with less of this painful first-hand experience might learn more, but no matter: the point of this book is to be enjoyed, rather than to serve as a style manual. And enjoyable it is.

One thing that was missing from the book is a sense of just what it’s like to be an author on the receiving end of a copy-edit, although Dreyer does mention one author who scrawled in the margin of one edit, “WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK”. Just so.

An alternative offering is Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, which seemed much briefer to me, and is really two good books in one. The first is all about the cognitive science of why communication is hard, and it’s very good. The second is – again – that list of grammar and style rules that one should obey or ignore. Like Dreyer, Pinker has little patience with old-school pedants; like Dreyer, he’s funny.

Also consider Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Williams and Colomb, if you can find a copy. I haven’t read this book for many years but it made a big impression on me. Williams and Colomb go beyond the tired grammar advice.  They and pull sentences and paragraphs apart to show why some writing is confusing in its very structure. This book is superb, and a real eye-opener. Fewer jaunty jokes, but more likely to improve your writing.

My book “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy” (UK) / “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy” (US) is out now in paperback – feel free to order online or through your local bookshop.

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How Sesame Street set a gold standard for education

The children’s television show Sesame Street just celebrated its 50th birthday. I know my favourite character should be Count von Count, who shares my fondness for numbers. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Mr Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s best friend.

Mr Snuffy was thought by every adult on Sesame Street to be imaginary despite being as real as Elmo. It’s a good joke: Mr Snuffy, a strange anteater-mammoth hybrid, is colossal. How could the adults not notice him?

After the gag had run for 14 years, the adults finally realised that Mr Snuffleupagus was real, and apologised to Big Bird for doubting him. This was a weighty decision: Sesame Street’s writers were concerned about child abuse, and reflected that it might be unwise to portray the adults as endlessly disbelieving what the childlike Big Bird told them.

This was typically painstaking behaviour from a show that has always had ambitious ideas about helping children. In 1967, a former TV producer named Joan Ganz Cooney wrote a report for the Carnegie Corporation titled “The Potential Uses of Television in Pre-school Education”. She made the case that carefully crafted television could “foster intellectual and cultural development in pre-schoolers”. Two years later, her vision became reality, in the Children’s Television Workshop and Sesame Street.

It was a radical idea: just a few years earlier, Marshall McLuhan had infamously argued that “the medium is the message”. It seemed natural enough to many that television was an inherently superficial medium with, therefore, a superficial message.

By contrast, Sesame Street was a bet that good television could make a real difference to children’s readiness for school, particularly for those starved of other opportunities to learn. Not only would it help them to read and count, but it would be racially integrated. Over the years it would tackle issues including death, divorce, autism, infertility, adoption and HIV.

Researchers swarmed all over Sesame Street, trying to figure out whether it actually worked. This wasn’t as easy as one might think. One early study, conducted by Samuel Ball and Gerry Ann Bogatz, aimed at a conventional experiment: some families, chosen at random, would be encouraged to sit preschoolers in front of this brand new show, while a control group of other families would receive no encouragement.

The problem was that Sesame Street became so popular, so quickly, that it became hard to distinguish between the two groups; everyone was watching. Nevertheless, the study authors did the best they could. They found that children who watched more Sesame Street learnt more, and that “in terms of its own stated goals, Sesame Street was in general highly successful”. Perhaps the message is the message after all.

Yet it is hard to be sure about causation. Did Sesame Street help kids learn? Or was the programme attractive to children who were already flourishing?

A recent study by two economists, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, approaches the problem from a different angle. Professors Kearney and Levine noted that in the early years of Sesame Street, some geographical areas simply couldn’t receive the broadcast signals that carried the show. Two-thirds of US children could watch the show, and many did, but one-third could not.

Based on this accidental experiment, Profs Kearney and Levine concluded that the children who had lived in a region where Sesame Street was available were less likely to fall behind at school. The effect was about as large as attending the US Head Start early childhood education programme — impressive, given that TV is so cheap. The benefits were particularly large for children who lived in deprived areas.

It is hard to read about this study without being reminded that Sesame Street was born in a very different world — one where children received Sesame Street via UHF broadcast, rather than watching Baby Shark on YouTube, where a version produced by the South Korean media brand Pinkfong has nearly 4bn views.

Like the Children’s Television Workshop 50 years ago, Pinkfong has lofty educational goals: its videos are supposed to teach English to Korean children. It has more than twice as many YouTube subscribers as Sesame Street, which struggled financially in recent years before cutting a deal with HBO.

But the vast, cosmopolitan and mysterious world of toddler YouTube seems unlikely to deliver the same educational benefits to children as Sesame Street, which was continually tweaked to help children learn rather than being relentlessly optimised for the clicks. As Alexis Madrigal observed in a long report for The Atlantic on toddler YouTube, the viral videos tend to be fast-paced and full of superfluous details. These features may attract the attention of preschoolers, but educational experts think they are unhelpful.

I’m an optimist. Online video could surely be even more educational than Sesame Street, given its ability to be interactive and to gather data on an individual child’s progress. But it would have to be carefully designed and tested, in the same way that Sesame Street was. An educational revolution doesn’t happen by accident.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 November 2019.

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Extreme Economies – disaster zones with lessons for us all

In the 17th century, a boy named Hugh Montgomery fell from his horse and lost part of his rib cage; doctors replaced it with a metal plate and he survived — with a living heart that could be inspected by the pioneering doctor William Harvey. Phineas Gage survived a metal spike through his head in 1848, and the changes in his character inspired fresh understanding of how the brain works. If we can learn about the healthy human body by studying people who have suffered catastrophic injuries, might a similar trick work for economics?

That is the premise of Richard Davies’s book, in which he reports on economies that he views as unusually resilient, such as Aceh after the dreadful tsunami of 2004, or dysfunctional, such as Glasgow and Kinshasa, or otherwise extreme, such as Akita in Japan, where the average age is 53.

This is an unconventional approach. Economists and business journalists tend to focus on the same broad trends in the same major economies. But Davies suggests, plausibly, that many parts of the world will eventually have the demographics of Akita, the inequality of Santiago or the squandered environment of Darien, Panama, and so a journey to the extremes gives us a glimpse of our own future. Even when it does not, there is always the thrill of exploration.

I sympathise with the conceit. One of my own books, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, lingers on RA Radford’s remarkable 1945 account of an economic system emerging in a prisoner-of-war camp. Quite apart from the grim fascination of the subject matter, a prison camp teaches us a surprising amount about how a real economy works.

Similarly, Davies studies the irrepressible markets inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary. There’s the mackerel economy — mackerel being light, standardised and durable, it makes a good currency — and the “dot” economy. In the outside world, Green Dot pre-paid plastic cards, as good as cash in most stores, can be loaded with value by purchasing a “MoneyPak”, which is essentially just a 14-digit code, the “dots”. Inside the prison, prisoners can bribe guards or pay each other large sums, untraceably; all they need is for an associate to pass them the “dots”.

Extreme Economies makes two promises: to give us a global tour of disaster and recovery, showing us places we would never see first-hand; and to teach us something about how ordinary economies work by studying extreme ones. Davies delivers impressively on the first promise, with crisp and sensitive reporting from an extraordinary range of inaccessible places.

The lessons, however, are more uneven. Davies notes, for example, that after the Aceh tsunami, the few survivors were able to sell their gold jewellery to local gold traders Harun and Sofi, who could access the international market price. That gold was always intended as saving for hard times, and Davies tells us it worked as intended, in “contrast with the western financial system”. Yet while gold bracelets worked, bank accounts would have worked better — it took three months for the gold traders to be up and running again. If there is a lesson for the reform of the western banks here, Davies does not tell us what it is.

While the post-1945 decline of Glasgow’s shipyards is well described, it is not fully explained: the yards on the Clyde did not invest in dry docks, says Davies, but he does not say why. And in the camp of Zaatari in Jordan, Davies praises the entrepreneurial spirit of Syrian refugees, noting that in 2016 the ratio of new to established firms was world-beating. He fails to acknowledge that since Zaatari was barely four years old at the time, it is surprising that the ratio wasn’t higher. One sure way to have a high ratio of start-ups is to live in a place that until recently did not exist.

That aside, the descriptions of Zaatari are a triumph. Davies takes us inside, introduces us to the residents and deftly sketches both their many struggles and some of the pleasures of life in the camp. The contrast with another camp, Azraq, is unforgettable: Azraq is better planned but much more tightly controlled. Life there is equitable but joyless. As a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of markets versus planned economies, Extreme Economies is one of the most subtle and surprising I have read. Davies sets the austere modernism of Azraq against the messy improvisations of Zaatari. It’s not just about access to material goods, but the way Azraq is “desolate, empty and depressing”. The homes in Azraq are sturdier, the electricity supply more reliable — and yet few people wish to move from Zaatari to Azraq.

Davies returns to Zaatari, and sits on a rooftop sipping orange soda and eating grilled chicken, contemplating the camp’s joys and sorrows. Here he delivers on his promises, giving us a glimpse into a different world, and a lesson learnt about our own.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 December 2019.

Catch up on the first season of my podcast “Cautionary Tales” [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

My book “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy” (UK) / “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy” (US) is out now in paperback – feel free to order online or through your local bookshop.

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Book of the Week 1: A World Without Work

I’ve set myself the goal of writing a short book review every week in 2020. Let’s see how that goes. Happy New Year!

Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work is, primarily, an excellent guide to the economics of automation and to the latest progress in artificial intelligence. Susskind begins by describing “a history of misplaced anxiety” about the machines taking the jobs, before outlining the influential Autor-Levy-Murnane (ALM) paradigm of 2003.

ALM emphasise tasks, rather than jobs: automation is far more likely to encroach on a narrow task (such as adding up the prices of goods at a supermarket checkout) than to completely replace a job such as a checkout assistant. We should therefore expect automation to reshape jobs, not replace them.

So far, so good – and Susskind’s contribution is to deliver a crystal-clear explanation of the received wisdom in economics, with plenty of examples. It’s a model of popular academic writing.

Susskind then moves to argue that many economists are underestimating what automation is now achieving. The ALM idea of “routine” and “non-routine” tasks is starting to break down – consider the progress in image recognition, legal document analysis (something Susskind has studied deeply), or translation. Is Google Translate really performing a “routine” task? What about AlphaZero, the self-trained system that destroyed the best Chess and Go players in the world, human or computer?

Susskind’s point is that the ALM paradigm needs rexamining: we can no longer simply assume that large numbers of tasks are “non-routine” and therefore robot-proof. Neither can we assume that almost all humans will find it straightforward to earn a living. We need to adapt to a world where technological unemployment may arrive on a large enough scale to cause real misery and disruption.

Finally Susskind reviews solutions, such as a basic income, education, and – speculatively – a “meaning-creating state”, by which he means a state that is able to produce a sense of purpose, meaning and identity that in the 20th century was provided by our careers. I think he’s right to identify the goal of helping people find a sense of meaning and identity; I’ve no idea, however, what a “meaning-creating state” would really look like. But perhaps that is less a criticism of Susskind and more a recognition of how deep and complex the challenge might become.

Recommended!

Compare Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap, a book which is intimidatingly weighty but is well-written and accessible. Frey was one of the researchers behind the viral “xx% of jobs are vunerable to  automation” claim, but this book is much more than a book about robots taking jobs – it’s a history of automation from pre-industrial times.

So far I’ve only read the (penultimate) chapter on artificial intelligence; it’s excellently written, full of examples and studies I hadn’t previously encountered, and I learned a lot. Not obviously contradictory to Susskind’s book, and it is intriguing that there are so many ideas out there that the overlap is modest.

Catch up on the first season of my podcast “Cautionary Tales” [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

My book “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy” (UK) / “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy” (US) is out now in paperback – feel free to order online or through your local bookshop.

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Exit, voice, or loyalty… what should we do when things go wrong?

“Under any economic, social or political system, individuals, business firms, and organizations in general are subject to lapses from efficient, rational, law-abiding, virtuous, or otherwise functional behavior.”

That is the first sentence of the economist Albert Hirschman’s book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, published in 1970. No kidding; look around. Rational, law-abiding, virtuous and otherwise functional behaviour is in short supply.

Hirschman’s book is about how we register our discontent with such lapses, and whether our discontent makes a difference. Do we walk away? Do we protest? Or do we suffer in silence?

The instinct of the economist, used to studying competitive markets, is to think of “exit” as the most straightforward and powerful protest. If we don’t like the product or we don’t like the price, we take our custom elsewhere. The alternative is “voice”: we complain, in any form from a muttered grumble to a Molotov cocktail.

In many ways, exit is easier than it has ever been. A citizen of the US can move to a different state; a citizen of the EU can move to a different country. (Irish passports have become popular among the British citizens who can obtain them; people value the option to exit.) We have an endless choice of entertainments to enjoy, news sources to consume, companies from which to purchase. Niche political movements abound. The exit door never seems far away.

And yet, many of us have rarely felt so trapped. Yes, it’s possible to leave Facebook or stop using Google. But it is hardly as simple as switching to a different brand of toothpaste.

And for an age in which politics is supposed to be in endless flux, it is surprising how little changes. US president Donald Trump’s unpopularity is astonishingly consistent, with disapproval ratings of 53-56 per cent. The popularity of his predecessors ebbed and flowed; Mr Trump’s is frozen in ice.

In the UK, the sense of paralysis is palpable: we’ve had an election, a generationally defining referendum, a new prime minister, another election, another new prime minister, and now yet another election. Lots of politics but not a lot of progress. And nobody has managed to assemble a policy platform that commands broad support.

What is going on? Hirschman pointed to an intriguing case study: railways in Nigeria in the 1960s. Despite poor roads and an 800-mile journey from the peanut farms of northern Nigeria to the ports of Lagos and Port Harcourt, Hirschman observed that trucks comfortably outcompeted the railways. Why?

One might have expected that as peanut shippers quit trains and leased trucks instead, the railways would have responded. Hirschman argued that the reverse was true. The railways were propped up by the Nigerian state, so exit was no threat. Instead, the threat was voice, in the form of unhappy customers lobbying the government and generally raising hell. But those customers didn’t bother; they quit instead.

Typically, we think of exit and voice as complementary. Your complaints will be taken more seriously if you can credibly threaten to leave, as anyone who has called to cancel a mobile phone contract can attest. But sometimes exit can silence voice. That is particularly true when “voice” means something more than a mere complaint — taking time-consuming action such as attending council meetings, going on strike or actively campaigning. If you have another option, it is tempting to walk away and take it.

A similar logic applies to the two-party system that defines the US and remains strong in the UK. Like the Nigerian railways, the dominant parties seem to be a part of the landscape. They are propped up by tradition and the logic of first-past-the-post voting. Exit seems to be no threat to them, especially not to the hardliners who would rather lose than compromise.

What about voice? As with the Nigerian railways, voice has been weakened by exit. Some moderates have been thrown out of their own parties — notably Philip Hammond, who was UK chancellor of the Exchequer just a few months ago. Many others have decided they’ve had enough, and few people begged them to stay. What is true for members of parliament is true for party members, too. The extremists are delighted. The moderates have quit in disgust. The parties have moved ever further from the median voter.

That might matter less if both parties had not decided to give the final say over leadership to the party base, rather than to MPs, who know what it takes to get elected. It is an idea that looks better on paper than when put to the test. As it is, both the Conservatives and Labour are led by men who seem to inspire rapture among a narrow clique of supporters, but whom many voters find somewhere between laughable and contemptible.

The situation seems unsustainable. But will it change? As Hirschman was finishing his book, Nigeria was consumed by civil war. The country’s railways continued to stagnate for decades. I am hopeful that British democracy will bounce back a little more quickly; I just wish I could see exactly how.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 29 November 2019.

My new podcast is “Cautionary Tales” [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

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Cautionary Tales Ep 8 – You Have Reached Your Destination

More than two and a half thousand years ago – so the story goes – King Croesus of Lydia consulted the oracle at Delphi. And the oracle assured him that if he went to war against Persia he would destroy a mighty empire. Reassured, Croesus launched his war, and was defeated. The oracle had been correct, but the mighty empire that Croesus destroyed was his own.

Our modern oracles are predictive algorithms. And perhaps the strange old tale of King Croesus has a great deal to teach us about how to interact with these silicon prophets.

Featuring: Archie Panjabi, Toby Stephens, Rufus Wright, Melanie Gutteridge, Mircea Monroe and Ed Gaughan.

Producers: Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. Sound design/mix/musical composition: Pascal Wyse. Fact checking: Joseph Fridman. Editor: Julia Barton. Recording: Wardour Studios, London. GSI Studios, New York. PR: Christine Ragasa.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Heather Fain, Mia Lobel, Carly Migliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course, the mighty Malcolm Gladwell.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

 

Further reading and listening

Both stories about the oracle at Delphi are in Herodotus: The Histories.

Tom Knudson did the original reporting on “Death by GPS” for the Sacramento Bee. Reuters covered the Carpi / Capri confusion. Both stories – and others – are discussed in Greg Milner’s  excellent book Pinpoint.

Gretchen Morgenson covered AIG’s woes for the New York Times in “Behind Insurer’s Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk” 27 Sep 2008.

Esther Eidinow discusses what we can learn from how the Greeks consulted their oracles in “Oracles and Models” at The Conversation.

The Pierre Wack quote about forecasts is in “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead” Harvard Business Review Sep/Oct 1985.

The original study of the illusion of explanatory depth is Rozenblit, Leonid, and Frank Keil. “The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth.” Cognitive science vol. 26,5 (2002): 521-562. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1

The study of how forecasting tournaments nurture humility is Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock, Hal R. Arkes, Forecasting tournaments, epistemic humility and attitude depolarization, Cognition, Volume 188, 2019, Pages 19-26

The study of a 1980s diagnostic aid is Wyatt J., Spiegelhalter D. (1991) Evaluating Medical Expert Systems: What To Test, And How ?. In: Talmon J.L., Fox J. (eds) Knowledge Based Systems in Medicine: Methods, Applications and Evaluation. Lecture Notes in Medical Informatics, vol 47. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

The study of navigating around Kashiwa with or without GPS is Toru Ishikawa, Hiromichi Fujiwara, Osamu Imai, Atsuyuki Okabe, “Wayfinding with a GPS-based mobile navigation system: A comparison with maps and direct experience” Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 28, Issue 1, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.....

 

 

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Algorithms judge us; how can we judge them?

If there was ever a demonstration that people think with their guts, it was the furore over the idea that Apple Card is “a f***ing sexist program”. David Heinemeier Hansson, a successful entrepreneur and programmer, complained on Twitter that his wife had a far lower credit limit than he did, and soon everyone from the US senator Elizabeth Warren to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to the New York Department of Financial Services were weighing in to show their support.

The idea of women being treated badly by Big Tech and by banks seems all too plausible. Apple is quite literally an iconic brand. Goldman Sachs, the bank that issues and manages the Apple-branded credit card, is nearly as famous. So the ingredients for a viral story are all there, however thin the anecdotal evidence. I

s the Apple Card actually sexist? One definition of equal treatment for men and women would be that credit was extended equally to both, regardless of the fact that women tend to be paid less than men. Another would be that people with the same income got the same credit, regardless of gender. You might have spotted the problem: it’s impossible to offer both forms of equal treatment simultaneously.

This isn’t just some clever piece of logic-chopping. If two groups of people are measurably different, then any rule about how they are treated — be it an algorithm or human judgment — will end up looking unfair, if not by one measure then by another. Is the Apple Card sexist? Arithmetic suggests that, for one definition of sexism or another, it must be.

This doesn’t excuse cases where decision processes — algorithmic or otherwise — are grossly biased, grotesquely inaccurate or both. Our problem is that we don’t know which ones they are, so we tend instead to believe emotionally resonant stories about famous brands. In the algorithm-saturated world we are entering, we need a way to distinguish the good from the bad, the ethical from the outrageous. We should be demanding better evidence that the algorithms that shape our lives are doing so fairly and effectively.

Goldman Sachs says that gender, race, age and sexual orientation are never explicitly part of the decision-making process. The company also says that the process is scrutinised both by consultants and an internal department to ensure that there is no accidental bias. You and I, however, are just going to have to take their word for the robustness of that scrutiny.

Companies are learning the hard way that people now want serious explanations: Goldman claims the Apple Card is unusually transparent, but people evidently want more.

Transparency might help — but it is neither a panacea nor an easy option. Netflix once released anonymised data about movie preferences as part of a competition to improve its recommendations. Alas, because some customers had posted reviews for both Netflix and the Internet Movie Database, it wasn’t hard to link the anonymous serial numbers with real names and intimate film reviews. One woman sued Netflix for potentially revealing her sexual orientation to her husband and children. Transparency is hard; Goldman cannot simply dump its data set and invite us all to poke around. But it could give access to independent assessors.

The philosopher Onora O’Neill argues that anyone who would like to be trusted should be trying to demonstrate trustworthiness. Trustworthiness, she adds, can be bolstered by “intelligent openness”. In the case of algorithms, we should expect a clear and prominent explanation of how the algorithm is making its decision — and perhaps more importantly, we should expect independent experts to be able to assess the claims that are being made.

There are arguably more important algorithms out there than the one that sets your Apple Card credit limit — such as the Facebook news feed or Compas, which is widely used in justice systems to assess the risk that a criminal will reoffend. I am not qualified to assess their fairness or effectiveness. But I know people who are, if they were allowed to see more information.

Compas has now been exhaustively analysed by academics, and worrying features have been exposed. But the analysis was only possible after a team at ProPublica published a painstakingly assembled data set for all to use. It should be easier for independent experts to scrutinise the algorithms that shape our lives.

One reason I am sanguine about the Apple Card is that other credit cards are available. If Goldman is mistakenly turning down creditworthy people, other companies will want their business. That is not a guarantee of fairness but it is, at least, a powerful force pulling in that direction.

In other cases there is no such force: if a criminal is denied parole on the word of an algorithm, there is no option to shop around. When companies peddle software systems that are supposed to identify the best teachers or the worst criminals or the children most at risk of domestic violence, we should demand proof. If not, we will be sold statistical snake-oil.

 

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 22 November 2019.

My new podcast is “Cautionary Tales” [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

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Cautionary Tales Ep 7 – Bowie, jazz, and the unplayable piano

He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett’s career – but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne’s opera house. The only piano at the venue was a wreck. His musical contemporaries David Bowie and Brian Eno proved through their collaboration that staying in your comfort zone isn’t always the best option and that disruption can feed creativity. But Jarrett was famed for liking things just so…. would he risk humiliation in Cologne and play the broken piano or would he walk away?

Featuring: Archie Panjabi, Ed Gaughan, Rufus Wright, and Mircea Monroe.

Producers: Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. Sound design/mix/musical composition: Pascal Wyse. Fact checking: Joseph Fridman. Editor: Julia Barton. Recording: Wardour Studios, London. GSI Studios, New York. PR: Christine Ragasa.

Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Heather Fain, Mia Lobel, Carly Migliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course, the mighty Malcolm Gladwell.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

 

Further reading and listening

I urge you to listen to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, David Bowie’s “Heroes”, and Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. But you should also listen to a superb oral history, “For One Night Only: the Koln Concert” produced by the BBC.

For a fuller exploration of the ideas in this episode I tentatively suggest my own book, Messy. Paul Trynka’s biography of David Bowie is Starman. Sasha Frere-Jones has a fine profile of Brian Eno in the New Yorker, but my main source is my own discussions with Brian.

The font study is : Diemand-Yauman, C., et al. “Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes.” Cognition (2010), DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012

The murder mystery study is: Katherine W. Philips, Katie A. Liljenquist and Margaret A. Neale “Is the Pain Worth the Gain? The Advantages and Liabilities of Agreeing With Socially Distinct Newcomers.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin Vol 35 No 3 March 2009 p. 336-350

The tube-strike study is: Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch, Tim Willems, The Benefits of Forced Experimentation: Striking Evidence from the London Underground Network, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 132, Issue 4, November 2017, Pages 2019–2055, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx020

 

 

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Extend gratitude beyond platitudes

You know that blur of movement on Christmas morning when children meet presents and presents meet children, scraps of wrapping paper fly into the air and float down, confetti-style, all over the living room? Five minutes later, the presents are all unwrapped, the children sit panting, and everyone wonders what to do next.

It does not happen in the Harford household. For the past few years we have had a rule: you cannot unwrap the next present until you have written a thank-you note for the last one.

At first, this was merely my inner economist thinking about efficient incentives. I want my children to write thank-you letters and this generally requires some kind of bribe. At Christmas, that is easy: we are surrounded by gift-wrapped bribes. Using the next gift to incentivise the previous thank-you letter is an idea so elegant I am surprised it is not ubiquitous.

I then realised that this system had unexpected benefits. It forced us to slow down, to look seriously at each gift, to think about what was good about it, and to reflect on the giver. Gratitude as a chore became replaced by gratitude as a mindful counting of blessings.

The practice of gratitude is fashionable; some people advocate a daily gratitude journal as a way to get a quick shot of happiness. Robert Emmons, who studies gratitude, complains of the spread of “gratitude lite”, the sense of gratitude as an easy means to an end. He is the author of books including Gratitude Works! A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity (US) (UK), so perhaps he should take some ownership of this trend. But I know what he means about treating gratitude as a mere tool.

Gratitude is, after all, a complex thing. There is gratitude as mindfulness: noticing something good in the world. There is gratitude as politeness: remembering to say thank you to the shop assistant, even if you cannot be bothered to make eye contact. There is gratitude as reciprocity: writers from Adam Smith to Seneca underlined the idea of gratitude as a partial repayment of a debt.

A Catholic friend of mine says that gratitude is hard, like forgiveness. That seems true, when it is an attempt to find the silver lining to a lowering cloud. But gratitude often is, or should be, a simple matter of counting blessings in a world where there are many to count.

Violence and disease are rarer; most people are richer, healthier, and better educated than ever. There are still evils in the world, but not as many as 100 years ago. Why should gratitude be hard?

Nevertheless, it is. There are practical reasons why we pay more attention to what is difficult than what is easy. Problems require solving; non-problems do not. Psychologists call this “the headwinds / tailwinds asymmetry” inspired by the observation that a cyclist never notices when the wind is at her back. So being grateful requires some attention to what we easily ignore.

Mr Emmons has intensively studied the practice of keeping a gratitude journal, and he says that it is worth sticking with the habit, which gets easier. But rather than simply jotting down the same gratitude platitudes each evening, I’ve been thinking about expanding both the depth and the breadth of my thanks.

On depth, consider a study conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson. Participants were asked to write a letter expressing gratitude “to someone who had been especially kind to them but had never been properly thanked”. Then — this is the squirm-inducing bit — they hand-delivered the letter, read it to the recipient, and had a conversation. The warm glow of this process, for the letter writer, lasted for weeks. I have never hand-delivered such a letter. But I have written one, and it is a powerful experience.

As for breadth, expressions of gratitude are often about or directed to the usual subjects: family and friends, nice weather, good health. It is worth thinking more broadly — as did AJ Jacobs, author of Thanks A Thousand (US) (UK). He started by trying to be mindful of all the people around the world who contributed to the food he enjoyed, saying a sort of secular grace before each meal. But — challenged by one of his children — he decided to go much further, seeking out the many people who contributed to his morning coffee, and thanking them on the phone or in person.

Thanking the barista was easy, but he went on to thank the coffee taster, the lid designer, the pest control expert at the coffee warehouse, the farmers who grew the beans, the steel workers who made the pulping machine, the workers at the reservoir that was the source of the water, and about 1,000 others.

Writing a thoughtful thank-you letter when someone sends you a present requires far less imagination. It is the most elementary expression of gratitude. Still, it is not a bad place to start.

 

 

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 Dec 2018.

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Why we fall for cons

There may be times and places where it’s a good idea to talk back to a military officer — but Germany in 1906 wasn’t one of them. So the young corporal didn’t. The corporal — let’s call him Muller — had been leading his squad of four privates down Sylterstrasse in Berlin, only to be challenged by a captain.  Captain Voigt was in his fifties, a slim fellow with sunken cheeks, the outline of his skull prominent above a large, white moustache. Truth be told, he looked strangely down on his luck — but Muller didn’t seem to take that in. Like any man in uniform, Captain Voigt appeared taller and broader thanks to his boots, smart grey overcoat and Prussian-blue officer’s cap. His white-gloved hand rested casually on the hilt of his rapier.

“Where are you taking these men?” he barked.

“Back to barracks, sir,” replied Muller.

“Turn them around and follow me,” ordered Voigt. “I have an urgent mission from the “all-highest” command.”

Direct orders from the kaiser himself!

As the small group marched towards Putlitzstrasse station, the charismatic Captain Voigt saw another squad and ordered them to fall in behind. He led his little army on a train ride towards Köpenick, a charming little town just south-east of the capital.

On arrival, the adventure continued: bayonets were to be fixed for inspection. It had been an extraordinary day for Corporal Muller and his men. But it was going to get a lot more extraordinary: what they were about to do would be the talk of newspapers around the world.

 

Captain Voigt’s impromptu strike force burst into Köpenick town hall and into the office of the mayor, a man named Georg Langerhans. Langerhans, a mild-looking fellow in his mid-thirties with pince-nez spectacles, a pointed goatee and a large, well-groomed moustache, stood up in astonishment and demanded an explanation. Voigt promptly placed him under arrest, by order of the kaiser.

“Where is your warrant?” stammered Langerhans.

“My warrant is the men I command!”

Voigt ordered the town treasurer to open the safe for inspection: fraud was suspected. The safe contained three thousand five hundred and fifty seven marks, forty-five pfennigs. Captain Voigt was punctilious about the count, confiscated the money, and handed over a receipt to be stamped.

It was nearly a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money.

Captain Voigt sent a pair of soldiers to find and detain Mayor Langerhans’s wife. She, too, was a suspect. He then searched the town hall office while his men kept the officials under arrest. Failing to find what he sought, he decided to wrap up the mission. The officials were to be driven to a police station where they would be detained and interrogated.

Captain Voigt himself walked to Köpenick railway station. He collected a package from the left-luggage office, and stepped into a toilet cubicle. A minute or two later, he stepped out again — and he was almost unrecognisable, having changed into shabby civilian clothes. He ambled, bandy-legged, across the station concourse. This anonymous fellow boarded the train back to Berlin, with his uniform neatly folded under one arm, and a bag of money under the other. Just like that, the “Captain of Köpenick” was gone.

Meanwhile, Corporal Muller dutifully presented his prisoners at the police station in central Berlin. The situation quickly became baffling to all concerned. Nobody had heard anything about the “all-highest” demanding the interrogation of the Mayor of Köpenick — nor his wife. After a phone call to headquarters, the head of the German general staff himself, General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, arrived to resolve the situation. But nobody had received any orders from the kaiser. Nobody could see any reason to detain the mayor, or his wife, or his treasurer. And nobody could recall ever having met a “Captain Voigt” before.  No wonder. Except in the minds of the bemused soldiers and their civilian prisoners, Captain Voigt never existed. They met instead Herr Wilhelm Voigt, an ex-convict, an ex-shoemaker, a nobody, who possessed nothing more than a confident manner . . . and a very nice uniform.

 

The tale I just told you is a famous one in Germany. It became a play, and an Oscar-nominated film. (The most comprehensive English-language account I could find is by the historian Benjamin Carter Hett.) When the Germans tell the story they tend to linger on the prelude to the heist. What kind of a man does this? Who was Wilhelm Voigt, and what inspired his audacious confidence trick? Voigt was a crook, no doubt about it — his crimes included armed robbery. But the judicial system had treated him harshly, stuffing a legitimate appeal into a filing cabinet. In this version of the story, Voigt was persecuted by a cruel bureaucracy, driven to ransacking the mayor’s office looking not for money but for the paperwork he needed to get a job. No wonder he became seen as a sympathetic figure in German literature.

The English-speaking world drew a different lesson from the reports that filled their newspapers: that the Germans are a sucker for a shouty man in a uniform. The Morning Post named Voigt “the most humorous figure of the century”. The writer GK Chesterton could scarcely contain his glee upon reading the “comic” reports from Köpenick of the “absurd fraud (at least, to English eyes)”. An Englishman, mused Chesterton, would have seen through the bluster immediately.

Yet four years later, a group of young upper-class pranksters including the novelist Virginia Woolf and the artist Duncan Grant managed to arrange for a tour of the Royal Navy’s flagship, HMS Dreadnought, by putting on turbans, brown make-up and fake beards, and claiming to be from the royal family of Abyssinia.

“Bunga bunga!” they boomed as they greeted each other, and when they had to improvise further, they spoke scrambled fragments of ancient Greek poetry they’d learnt at school. Faced with this ridiculous, and to our modern eyes profoundly offensive prank, the Royal Navy responded with a commensurate display of ignorance: it treated the visitors with all the honour it could muster, including the flag and anthem of the nation of Zanzibar rather than Abyssinia. That was apparently close enough to satisfy everyone.

It’s easy to laugh — as GK Chesterton did — when it happens to someone else. But the closer I looked at the story of the Captain of Köpenick, the less funny it looks. Faced with the right con, we’re all vulnerable. Any one of us could have been the hapless Corporal Muller. And if we don’t understand how the trick worked, Wilhelm Voigt’s modern-day successors will do far more damage than he could ever have imagined.

 

Since Wilhelm Voigt persuaded people to obey orders that they should not have obeyed, you may already be thinking about Stanley Milgram. Milgram is the psychologist who, in the 1960s, conducted the most famous and controversial psychological experiment of all time — an experiment that I think we tend to misunderstand. Milgram recruited unsuspecting members of the American public — all men — to participate in a “study of memory”. On showing up at the laboratory, in a basement at Yale University, they met a man — apparently a scientist, just as Voigt had apparently been a Prussian army captain — dressed in a tie and grey lab coat.

“Very straightforward and professional, just what you’d expect from Yale,” one participant recalled. (Gina Perry’s book Behind The Shock Machine is an authoritative account of the experiments.)

The man-dressed-as-a-scientist supervised proceedings. Participants would be assigned the role either of “teacher” or “learner”. The learner was then strapped into an electric chair while the teacher retreated into another room to take control of a machine with switches labelled with terms including: “slight shock”, “moderate shock”, “danger: severe shock” and, finally, “XXX”.

As the learner failed to answer questions correctly, the teacher was asked to administer steadily increasing electric shocks. Although the teachers had received a painful shock themselves as a demonstration and had witnessed the learner complaining of a heart condition, many proved willing to deliver possibly fatal shocks while listening to screams of pain from the other side of the wall.  Of course, there were no shocks; both the screaming “learner” and the scientific supervisor were actors. The true experiment was studying the “teachers”: how far would they go when following direct orders?

In the best known study, 65 per cent of experimental subjects went all the way to 450 volts, applying shocks long after the man in the other room had fallen silent. Under the guise of science, Stanley Milgram had perpetrated yet another of these grim hoaxes.

Milgram’s research agenda was influenced by the shadow of the Holocaust and a desire to understand how it had been possible. He made the link explicit, and argued that his experiment was all about “obedience to authority”. But modern scientists no longer see Milgram’s research in quite that way.

There’s a lot we could say about those experiments — about their ethics, and about the more than 20 experimental variations. But the most fundamental objection is that these experiments may not be about obedience at all. Alex Haslam, a psychologist who has re-examined the studies in recent years, found that when the man in the lab coat gave direct orders, they backfired. One pre-scripted instruction produced universal disobedience: “you have no other choice . . . you must continue”. Experimental subjects concluded that this was simply untrue; nobody continued after that order. People need to be persuaded, not bullied, into participating.

So if these experiments weren’t about blind obedience, what were they about? Here’s a detail that is usually overlooked: Milgram’s shock machine had 30 settings, fine increments of 15 volts. It’s hard to object to giving someone a tiny 15-volt shock. And if you’ve decided that 15 volts is fine, then why draw the line at 30 volts? Why draw the line at 45? Why draw the line at all?

At 150 volts, the “learner” yelled out in distress. Some people stopped at that point. But those who continued past 150 volts almost always kept going to the full 450 volts. They were in too deep. Refusing to administer a shock of 225 volts would be an implicit admission that they had been wrong to deliver 210. Perhaps Stanley Milgram’s experiments weren’t a study of obedience so much as a study of our unwillingness to stop and admit that we’ve been making a dreadful mistake. We’re in too deep; we’re committed; we can’t turn back.

Think back to that day in Berlin, in 1906. Voigt stopped Corporal Muller in the street and demanded to know where he and his men were going. What was Muller to do? Demand proof of identification? Of course not. Muller didn’t want to risk a court martial over answering a simple question.

Voigt then asked Muller’s squad to follow him. That’s a bit more of a stretch, but Muller had already obeyed one order, already addressed this stranger-in-a-uniform as “sir”. Marching down the street behind him was just one small action further.

The pattern repeated itself with the second squad: when they first saw Captain Voigt, he was already at the head of half a dozen men; that was the evidence he was who he said he was. Why not fall in? Why not get the train to Köpenick? Why not fix bayonets for inspection? It’s really only at the moment that they burst into the town hall that the doubts might occur.

But by then, the whole business was already well beyond the 210-volt mark. They had travelled all the way across Berlin. They had been following Wilhelm Voigt’s instructions for a couple of hours. It would have been very late in the day for Corporal Muller, or anyone else, to have the presence of mind to stop, think and challenge their new captain.

Georg Langerhans, the young mayor, saw the situation very differently — he immediately demanded to see a warrant. Langerhans, of course, was effectively being asked to apply a 450-volt shock without preamble. No wonder he was sceptical.

At first glance, then, Wilhelm Voigt’s con and Milgram’s shock experiments are evidence for the idea that we’ll do anything for a figure of authority wearing the right outfit. But look deeper and they’re evidence for something else — that we’re willing to help out with reasonable requests, and that step by step we can find ourselves trapped in a web of our own making. Each small movement binds us more tightly to the con artist. We become complicit; breaking free becomes all but impossible.

That said, the right outfit matters. And here I want to think bigger than the world of the con artist. Yes, we fall for cons. But we fall for all kinds of other superficial things that shouldn’t matter, like a nice uniform, and those superficial things are constantly influencing our decisions — including decisions that we may later come to regret.

 

Almost exactly 110 years after Wilhelm Voigt’s audacious heist, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump squared off in one of three televised debates. You might remember it. In a town-hall format, the candidates were able to roam the stage. And Trump certainly did roam, following Clinton around as she answered questions, looming behind her, always on camera, clearly visible over the top of Clinton’s head.

After the debate, that was all anyone could talk about. Was it an attempt at intimidation? Perhaps. But there’s something else about that footage of Donald Trump stalking Hillary Clinton: he towers over her.

Voters were being offered all kinds of choices in that election but one that was never really articulated was this: would you like to elect the third-tallest president ever, or the shortest president since James Madison two centuries ago?

There’s not much doubt that some voters were influenced by the disparity in height. The US does elect a lot of tall presidents. Trump was taller than Hillary Clinton. Obama was taller than McCain. Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr were the same height — towering over tiny Ross Perot, the feisty independent challenger they beat into third place. Bush Sr was taller than Dukakis. Reagan was taller than Carter, Nixon was taller than Humphrey, Kennedy was taller than Nixon, Truman taller than Dewey. Lyndon Johnson was taller than pretty much everyone. Are we electing a president here, or picking a basketball team? Of course there are some exceptions to the rule: when Carter beat Ford, it was a victory for the little guy.

But serious statistical analysis concludes that taller presidential candidates are more likely to win the election, more likely to win re-election, and more likely — unlike Donald Trump — to win the popular vote. Since the dawn of the television age, the only person ever to have overcome a height deficit of more than three inches was the incumbent George W Bush running against John Kerry.

Hillary Clinton would have been the first female president, true. She would also have been the first president to win despite a 10in height disadvantage since 1812. Americans may not have elected any female presidents over the years — but they haven’t elected any short men, either — not in a long, long time.

This isn’t just about presidential elections and it isn’t just about height. Across the world, voters favour candidates based on the most superficial characteristics imaginable. For example, one study — by economists Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro — found that people were fairly good at predicting the victor of an election for state governor after being shown a brief piece of video of a gubernatorial debate with the sound turned off: just looking at the candidates seemed to be enough to judge who voters would pick. In fact, giving people audio too actually made the predictions worse, presumably because it distracted them from what mattered: appearances.

We hairless apes seem to go for simple proxies when judging someone’s capacity for leadership. That 400-page manifesto? We’re not going to read it. But we pay close attention, whether we realise it or not, to the fine details of a candidate’s posture, styling, clothes — and, of course, height.  Corporal Muller and his men were completely taken in by Wilhelm Voigt’s appearance and mannerisms. But they’re not the only ones to pay attention to appearances.

Consider the advertising classic, “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”  And then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, the man who admits he isn’t a doctor goes on to tell us what brand of cough syrup to buy. Even Wilhelm Voigt would not have been quite as audacious as to announce: “I’m not a captain, I’m just wearing the uniform.”

And yet the advertisements work. We buy the cough syrup from the man who tells us, “I only look like a doctor”. That’s how powerful appearances can be. And what about “I’m not a successful businessman, but I play one on TV?” Oh — I think I know that guy.

 

Fraudsters using the playbook of Wilhelm Voigt trick people every day. First, they get the appearances right. Maybe it’s a text message that looks like it’s from your bank — the phone number is right, after all. Maybe the doorbell rings and the man is standing there with an official-looking ID; he wants to come and check your electricity meter. That ID does look genuine. Maybe it’s a smooth-talking politician with a good suit. Milgram well understood the need to get the clothes right. In a variation where the experimenter didn’t wear a lab coat, few people went to 450 volts.

Second, fraudsters put people into what psychologists call a “hot state”. We don’t think so clearly when we’re hungry, or angry, or afraid. Wilhelm Voigt yelled at Corporal Muller. A politician who wanted to put people into a hot state might announce that the country was being taken over by gangs and terrorists, and that his opponent should be locked up. Whatever works.

Third, they pull the heist one small step at a time. They start with the request for information: where are you taking these men? You are Ms Jane Doe, aren’t you? I’m sorry to report that your bank account has been compromised, Ms Doe. Just enter your password and username — just like you usually do — and we’ll sort it out for you.  Give us someone who looks or sounds the part; apply a bit of fear, anger, lust or greed; and then proceed in salami slices from the reasonable to the insane, so smoothly that we don’t stop to think. That’s how Wilhelm Voigt fooled Corporal Muller. But it’s how he would have fooled any of us, if he caught us at the wrong moment.

At first it looked as though Voigt would enjoy the fruits of his acting skills in peace. But as he relaxed with his money, a former accomplice of his saw the reports of the daring heist in all the newspapers and remembered a prison conversation in which Voigt had dreamt of such a coup. He promptly reported Voigt to the authorities.

When four detectives burst in to his apartment at six o’clock in the morning, they found Voigt enjoying breakfast. He protested that the timing was inconvenient. “I should like a moment to finish my meal.”

So the detectives watched him break open another crusty white roll, spread on a thick layer of butter, and wash it down with his coffee. You can’t help but admire the audacity.

At trial, Voigt became a folk hero. The judge sympathised with the way he had been treated, gave him an unexpectedly short sentence, then took off his judge’s cap and stepped down to clasp Voigt by the hand. “I wish you good health throughout your prison term, and beyond.”

The German authorities felt that — in light of the popularity of the Captain of Köpenick — even more ostentatious clemency was required. They pardoned him after less than two years in jail. The kaiser himself was said to have chuckled, “amiable scoundrel” at the deed.

Statues of Voigt were erected and waxworks made of him — including one in Madame Tussauds in London. He was paid to record his story so that people could listen to him recount his deeds. He went on tour, posing in his uniform and signing photographs of himself for money.

A local restaurateur begged him to come and dine as often as he wanted, free of charge, knowing that his presence would attract other customers. A wealthy widow gave him a pension for life. Never let it be said that the Germans lack a sense of humour. But while the comedy is undeniable, we should not be too fond of the Prussian prankster. Perhaps Wilhelm Voigt’s adventure did little harm in the long run. The same cannot be said for some of the con artists who followed in his footsteps. It is exciting to read about a fraud — from a distance. It is not so funny to live through one.

 

This article is based on Episode 2 of my new podcast,“Cautionary Tales”. [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Published in FT Magazine, 16/17 November 2019.

 

Further reading

The best English-language account I could find of the Kopenick story is by Benjamin Carter Hett. “The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ and the Transformation of German Criminal Justice, 1891-1914,” Central European History 36 (1), 2003.

I first read about the story in Nigel Blundell’s The World’s Greatest Mistakes. Other accounts are at Strange History  and The Rags of Time. Koepenickia offers various contemporary German newspaper accounts. There are many small differences in the accounts but the overall story remains just as remarkable.

The definitive account of Stanley Milgram’s experiments is Gina Perry’s Behind the Shock Machine and Alex Haslam was interviewed by Radiolab in a great episode about the same topic.

An overview of the evidence on tall presidents is Gert Stulp, Abraham P. Buunk, Simon Verhulst, Thomas V. Pollet, “Tall claims? Sense and nonsense about the importance of height of US presidents” The Leadership Quarterly  Volume 24, Issue 1, 2013.

The study of gubernatorial elections is Daniel J Benjamin & Jesse M Shapiro, 2009. “Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections” The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 91(3), pages 523-536, 02.

Daniel Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays looks at the overall evidence that appearances matter – including in politics.

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