Tim Harford's Blog, page 73

Understanding the wisdom and madness of crowds

James Surowiecki’s modern classic The Wisdom of Crowds (UK) (US) set a very high bar for the field. (Why has James not written another book?) This is one of those books that gets talked about a lot, with the emphasis on the idea that the average opinion of the crowd can be very smart indeed – hence prediction markets, etc. etc. etc. All that is true and interesting, but in fact Surowiecki discusses lots of other situations where a group needs to make a decision and covers groupthink and all that good stuff. In short it is a messier and more complex – and also deeper and more interesting – book than many people realise. Well worth a read, or a re-read.

Then there’s Philip Ball’s superb book Critical Mass (UK) (US) – which really lit my fire when I read it back in 2005. Ball’s book asks what social scientists can learn from ideas in physics and chemistry about how large groups of decision-makers behave. Lots and lots of interesting ideas and good stories. A good alternative, although I do not recall it so vividly, there is Steven Strogatz’s Sync (UK) (US); it has been commercially successful so the wisdom of crowds suggests you might take it seriously.

Michelle Baddaley’s new book Copycats and Contrarians (UK) (US) is a good accessible survey of what different academic disciplines have to say about herding, fashion, group dynamics and all such things. I blurbed the book and said, “‘A wide-ranging cross-disciplinary perspective of why we run with–or avoid–the crowd, and why it matters, from choosing a restaurant in a tourist trap to believing fake news. I learned a lot, and you may too.”

 

Then on the psychology of group decision-making there is Wiser (UK) (US) by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie. I love this book – my favourite by Sunstein, even better than Nudge. Lots of fascinating ideas about polarisation, echo chambers – and plenty of intriguing research.

Or, try Scott Page’s The Diversity Bonus (UK) (US). Page writes with great clarity about complex ideas in algorithms and complexity science, so you’ll learn a lot about those subjects. But the book is also an excellent argument in favour of embracing cognitive diversity in problem-solving teams.

Next up: the always-interesting Francesca Gino has published a brand new book about breaking out of groupthink called Rebel Talent (UK) (US). It’s next on my list to read.

My own book Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World discusses group dynamics and creative friction in the second chapter, and that’s one of the chapters that seems to have struck a chord with readers.

Come for the complex network analysis of the teams which made the best computer games in history, stay for the mind-blowing “Lord of the Flies” research into 10 year old boys at summer camp. The book is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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Judge the value of what you have by what you had to give up to get it

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 April 2018.

I’m not one to collect inspirational slogans, but here’s one I like: “Judge the value of what you have by what you had to give up to get it.” Perhaps I took it more seriously because it was pinned to the corkboard of an inspirational friend; she always seemed to be off for another expedition to Mongolia or Patagonia.

But my fondness for the motto may reflect that it describes an under-appreciated idea in economics: that of opportunity cost. And I’ve come to realise that our collective failure to think rationally about opportunity costs can be used as a weapon against us.

The principle of an opportunity cost does not at first glance seem hard to understand. If you spend half an hour noodling around on Twitter, when you would otherwise have been reading a book, the lost book-reading time is the opportunity cost of the tweeting. If you decide to buy a fancy belt for £100 instead of a cheaper one for £20, the opportunity cost is the £80 shirt you could otherwise have bought. Everything has a cost: whatever you were going to do instead, but couldn’t.

We should weigh opportunity costs with some care, mentally balancing any expenditure of time or money against what we might do or buy instead. However, observation suggests that this is not how we really behave. Ponder the agonised indecision of a customer in a stereo shop, unable to decide between a $1,000 Pioneer and a $700 Sony. The salesman asks, “Would you rather have the Pioneer, or the Sony and $300 worth of CDs?”, and the indecision evaporates. The Sony it is.

This vignette was sketched in a research paper entitled “Opportunity Cost Neglect”, published by five behavioural scientists (in 2009, hence the mention of CDs). What makes the anecdote curious is that it is hardly an act of genius to figure out that buying the $700 Sony stereo would save $300, nor that $300 will buy $300 worth of CDs. It is not that the indecisive shopper couldn’t work this out, but that the explicit trade-off never crossed his or her mind.

Various experiments in the research paper supplement the anecdote with some data. And other research in psychology suggests that our attention is far narrower and more fleeting than it seems. As psychologist Nick Chater explains in a remarkable new book, The Mind is Flat (UK) (US), the brain generates powerful illusions of continuity. It stitches together what is actually a patchwork of fleeting impulses and perceptions.

We feel intuitively that we are able to check our phones while simultaneously keeping an eye on the road ahead, but we can’t. We think we can summon to mind a clear image of a tiger, whiskers twitching, fur shining, licking its lips. But asked to draw a tiger we start to struggle. Do the stripes on its legs loop laterally around, or run vertically?

It is the same with opportunity cost. We tend to feel that our choices reflect the whole picture: as crisp and vivid as the tiger, a balanced consideration of all the alternatives. But often we spend money simply out of habit or instinct.

Drawing our attention to opportunity costs, no matter how obvious, may change our decisions. The notorious falsehood on the campaign bus used by Vote Leave during the 2016 referendum campaign was well-crafted in this respect: not only could the UK save money by leaving the EU, we were told, but that money could then be spent on the National Health Service.

One could certainly debate the premise — indeed, the referendum campaign sometimes seemed to debate little else — but the conclusion was rock solid: if you have more money to spend, you can indeed spend more money on the NHS. (Just another way in which that bus was a display of marketing genius.)

We would make better decisions if we reminded ourselves about opportunity costs more often and more explicitly. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of time. Many of us have to deal with frequent claims on our time — “Can we meet for coffee so that I can pick your brains?” — and find it hard to say no. Explicitly considering the opportunity cost can help: if I meet for coffee I’ll have to work an hour later, and that means I won’t be able to read my son a story before bedtime.

There may also be situations where we make the opposite mistake. If you save £100 in some act of thriftiness, that is £100 you can spend on a case of wine, or a good shirt, or dinner for two. But you cannot spend the same £100 on all three. While we would be wise to explicitly consider what else we might do with our money, we should be careful not to spend it over and over again — something political manifestos have a tendency to do.

So, the inspirational motto is right. We should judge the value of anything by what we had to give up to get it. And we should get in the habit of doing this deliberately. If it was an automatic process, we would need no inspirational motto to remind us.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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Understanding Algorithms

You’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of algorithms about these days, doing everything from recommending a walking route to figuring out how to beat the world’s best players at Go. But what are they, really, how do they work, and how will they change the world?

I’ve read some excellent books recently on the subject and have a few recommendations.

 

For a fun and memorable discussion of how specific algorithms work (even how you might use them yourself to sort out your sock drawer or find a nice apartment) then try Algorithms to Live By (UK) (US) by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I enjoyed this book very much, although not quite as much as Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human (UK) (US), which is all about how to have a better conversation, whether you’re a human or a bot. It’s one of my favourite books, ever.

 

On the economic and social implications of artificial intelligence, I strongly recommend Prediction Machines (UK) (US), by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Since I wrote “What We Get Wrong About Technology”, I’ve been telling people not to overlook simple, cheap innovations (paper, the shipping container, concrete). Space travel and supercomputers get all the press. Just being cheap doesn’t. But being cheap can transform the world. “Prediction Machines” gratifyingly chimes with this idea: the authors argue that artificial intelligence is best thought of as a way of producing super-cheap predictions; predicting what you might buy, predicting whether a shadow on a scan is cancer, predicting what the Japanese translation of this sentence might be.

Implication 1: good predictions reduce uncertainty, and lots of things we do are a response to uncertainty. For example, freezers (uncertainty about what and when I will want to cook) Airport lounges (uncertainty about how long it will take me to get to the airport means I show up early). AI is therefore bad for airport lounges.

Implication 2: sufficiently good predictions are game-changers. If Amazon’s recommendation engine gets good enough, they can take the risk of shipping me stuff I haven’t yet bought.

Implication 3: “judgement” becomes an important complement to predictions. How bad is a false positive when I predict a fraudulent credit card transaction and annoy my platinum card holder? What about a false positive diagnosis of cancer?

Implication 4: AI rarely replaces an entire human job directly. It tends to replace specific tasks – small slices of what we think of as a job. Reimagining/reengineering workflow will be an important competitive advantage.

As a bonus, the book has lots of good examples and is written clearly. I learned a lot.

 

For a sceptical take on the limits and the toxic side-effects of machine learning, there’s Cathy O’Neil’s passionate, political and very readable Weapons of Math Destruction (UK) (US) or the new book Artificial Unintelligence (UK) (US) by Meredith Broussard, which I have barely skimmed but seems to contain a very good mix of storytelling, history and technical ideas. Promising.

 

 

 

Finally, I’ve been fortunate enough to read the manuscript of Hello World (UK) (US) – out in September – by Hannah Fry. This is really a superb overview: lots of good stories, clear explanations, and it’s wide-ranging. I think if you want a general guide to the new world of data-driven computing you couldn’t do much better than this.

 

 

 

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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A Monetary Remedy for the Mid Life Crisis

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 March 2018.

“The time has come when we boomers are going to have to reach into our own pockets.” That was the view of David Willetts — formerly UK minister for higher education — a few weeks ago.

It sounds as though Mr Willetts was calling for a tax on the over-55s, but he was in fact drawing attention to the more mainstream idea of raising taxes on wealth. But perhaps we should be bolder. Why not raise taxes on the over-55s? It seems like a terrific policy to me, at least until I grow a little older.

We do have age-related subsidies, such as Medicare in the US and state pensions in many countries. The UK government even waives its quasi-income tax, national insurance, when working people pass pension age. But these explicitly aged-based measures are rare.

It is more common to see policies that redistribute between the generations as a side effect of something else. The introduction of higher university tuition fees in the UK — thanks in part to Mr Willetts himself — was designed to fund the expansion of universities at the expense of those who benefited from them. Alas, it also spared anyone who already has a degree while burdening the young with debt.

Then there is housing: tight planning restrictions from San Francisco to London help to squeeze house prices higher. That benefits people who already have houses, and they tend to be older than those who rent.

Low interest rates cut both ways, pushing the price of assets higher, but making it harder for retirees to live off their accumulated savings. Each policy has a differential effect on different generations that is largely accidental.

Perhaps we should be more deliberate about this. But trying to figure out which generation, if any, is more deserving is not straightforward. Should we look at a snapshot, or a life cycle?

The snapshot view is that at any given moment, young people have low-wage jobs and debts, while older people have higher-wage jobs and assets, so we should tend to redistribute from old to young.

The life-cycle view is that at any given age, each cohort tends to be richer than its forerunners, so we should tend to redistribute from young to old. Recently, the young have been worse off either way, which does at least resolve the dilemma.

Another question is whether we should focus on money. That seems natural; money is easy to redistribute. But money is not necessarily what matters most.

Young people have little cash, but they are fitter than the rest of us. They are taut and pert where we are flabby and saggy. And they have yet to have their dreams dashed.

All this becomes abundantly clear when we ask people about how they feel their lives are going. Gallup uses the following question: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally stand at this time?”

Without exception across the continents, people in their late teens and early twenties tend to give the most positive responses to this question. According to young people, young people are doing just fine.

In Africa and ex-communist nations, life just gets worse as you get older. In anglophone countries, the story is more of a midlife crisis then recovery. There is a dip in people’s life evaluations between the mid-twenties and mid-fifties, followed by a marked improvement; I am 44, which puts me right in the middle of the Slough of Despond.

There may be something quite deep behind this. A team including primatologists, psychologists and the economist Andrew Oswald has even found evidence of a midlife crisis in great apes.

A new research paper from Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate in economics, also finds that we are all persistently disappointed by life. Around the world, people tend to feel that in five years’ time they will have climbed a rung or two on life’s ladder, but most of us fail to do so. It is not quite clear why: did we not get as much money, status and sex as we were hoping for? Or did we get the money, sex and status, but found that it left us wanting?

Prof Deaton explicitly takes on the question of redistributing between the generations, more as a thought experiment than a firm policy proposal. Yet even the thought experiment is intriguing. In the US, he finds that the people who would have their wellbeing most improved by a cash injection are the middle-aged, people between their forties and their sixties. Yes, we have money, but we could really use some more.

The young and the aged do not really need money anyway: they are enjoying themselves regardless. Perhaps they could be prevailed upon to give a bit more to us? I will have a word with my father and my children. I am sure a dose of economic analysis will cure them of any doubts.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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Books to make you feel better about the world

I recently reviewed the excellent Factfulness (UK) (US) by the late Hans Rosling, his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna. It’s an absolutely terrific, inspiring, and wise book, which among many other things is likely to make you feel better about the world. This is not because everything is rosy, but because most people’s perceptions of the world are badly skewed by a mixture of outdated ideas, dramatic media stories, and our own instincts to spot the worst and most frightening facts about the world. Hence “Factfulness” is a relaxing condition.

Bravo – everyone should read this book. But there are some others to look out for.

Charles Kenny, in Getting Better (UK) (US), also points to dramatic progress in achieving some (not all) of the goals that really matter, and in showing the connections between economic growth and progress on health, education, freedom and happiness. He also explores what else needs to be done to get the most out of development aid and to make development work for everyone; this is a nice complement to Factfulness, which is more focused on helping people understand the world.

Steven Pinker, in Enlightenment Now (UK) (US) also reviews this progress. But where Pinker differentiates himself is in Better Angels of Our Nature (UK) (US), which even for an optimist like me is surprising in its message that violence, torture and cruelty – measured in a variety of ways – has been in widespread decline for centuries. Well worth your attention, and I found Pinker persuasive in rebutting many of the obvious objections.

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell (UK) (US) takes a different tack, telling stories of the way people respond to disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina or the Blitz. Solnit argues that the famous “stiff upper lip” is a common response across communities. We scare each other with tales of looting and anarchy, but in fact most communities pull together.

One of the best and most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read – although sadly it did not make me feel as good about the world as the others – is David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air (UK) (US). David, who died far too young, goes step by step through the way we consume and produce energy, teaching us how to make estimates, what really matters, and what the most promising sustainable energy sources might be. Spoiler alert: sustainable energy will probably involve some very hard choices. Utterly brilliant book and it is available online as a free resource.

I suppose I should mention my own Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy (UK) (US) – although I don’t see the book as making an argument for progress as such, it’s impossible to ponder the list of ideas and inventions, from the contraceptive pill to the cold chain, the S-bend to the light bulb, without feeling grateful for those who went before us. It’s true that barbed wire was a bit of a mixed blessing and leaded petrol was an unmitigated disaster – but still, where would we be without paper, or beautiful beautiful concrete? A French journalist told me that the book put me squarely in the category of optimistic Anglo-Saxons, so there.

 

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Even in Trump’s White House, chaos has its limits

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 March 2018.

“So many people have been leaving the White House. It’s actually been really exciting and invigorating,” said Donald Trump earlier this month. “I like turnover. I like chaos. It really is good.” It is not clear whether he was joking — the remark was made during a light-hearted dinner speech — but, for Mr Trump’s sake, one hopes he meant it.

The past month has seen the resignation of his communications director Hope Hicks, the downgrading of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s security clearance, the resignation of his senior economic adviser Gary Cohn, the sacking-by-tweet of the secretary of state Rex Tillerson, the escorting-out-of-the-building of his aide John McEntee, the firing of Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI – and now HR McMaster has gone too.

Along the way Mr Trump has railed against the investigations of special counsel Robert Mueller. Chaos reigns.

It remains unclear how much method there is in all this madness, but there may be more than we think. Mr Trump does not drink, but his leadership style is reminiscent of “drunken boxing” — a style of martial arts associated with staggering around unpredictably until your opponent lets his guard down, whereupon you pop him in the mouth.

The disadvantage of chaos is that it is destabilising; the advantage is that it may destabilise your foes more than you. About four decades ago the US military strategist John Boyd (UK) (US) gave a series of influential talks about this idea. Boyd, whose admirers included senior Republican Dick Cheney and management guru Tom Peters, argued for rapid, confusing manoeuvres, improvised if need be, with the aim of disorienting the enemy. Create enough chaos and you could completely paralyse your foe. If the chaos made life uncomfortable for your own side, no matter. Synchronisation, said Boyd, was not for organisations, but for watches.

This messy, improvised approach to tactics is not entirely new. Sun Tzu, the near-mythical author of The Art of War, declared that “quickness is the essence of war”, but also advised being “without ascertainable shape”. This sounds like the incessant, incomprehensible activity of the Trump White House.

It also sounds like the campaign for the UK to leave the EU in 2016. The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

On the battlefield, the master of messy improvisation was the German general Erwin Rommel. He championed swift, energetic action, even if it left his own men scrambling to figure out what was happening. “I have a feeling that things are in a mess,” lamented one Berlin-based general of Rommel’s north Africa campaign in 1941. They were, but for many months the chaos took a worse toll on the British than the Germans.

The same fast-paced seizing of opportunities has worked for some businesses. In the early years of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was clear that he needed to get ahead of rivals such as Barnes & Noble and Toys R Us, even if it meant chaos within Amazon. A more methodical start-up would have been caught and crushed. “It’s a messy process,” Mr Bezos told his biographer, Brad Stone (UK) (US), but there was simply no time to be meticulous. A visitor to an Amazon warehouse in the run-up to Christmas in 1999 would have said the company was a shambles, but the chaos paid off. Amazon bled money but shipped on time, while rivals have been struggling to catch up ever since.

Of course the more ponderous forces of planning and organisation may reassert themselves in the end. Mr Trump has an uncanny ability to dominate the news cycle, change the subject whenever he wants, and turn the spotlight away from his critics and towards himself. This was a huge asset during the election campaign but is a mixed blessing in government.

Facebook’s old mantra, “move fast and break things”, suddenly looks less clever. Mark Zuckerberg must now explain exactly what he has broken.

The Brexiters are running into the limits of the improvisation, ambiguity and self-contradiction that worked so brilliantly as a campaigning strategy, and indeed as a way of managing their own divisions. On a playing field criss-crossed by technical and legal details, EU negotiator Michel Barnier’s ploddingly careful preparation now seems to be paying dividends.

Even the unpredictable Rommel was eventually defeated, by Bernard Montgomery’s cautious and meticulously planned application of force at El Alamein. Montgomery was in no hurry as he assembled everything he needed. Mr Trump may have noticed that Robert Mueller is displaying the same patience.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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The past, present and future of banking

(Business seals; Rishengchang Museum.)

Not long ago I was fortunate enough to visit the Rishengchang in Pingyao – which I tentatively understand to be the oldest “draft” bank in China, allowing merchants to send money across the nation. Pingyao is well worth a visit, if ever happen to be in that part of China. It put me to thinking about some fine histories of money and banking I’ve read in the past few years.

I knew a little about the Chinese system of Feiquan or “flying money” from reading William Goetzmann’s excellent Money Changes Everything (UK) (US), which has a vast trove of material on money and finance in China.

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy (UK) (US) also described the Chinese inventions of paper, paper money, and forms of banking. I just loved the way that paper money blew Marco Polo’s mind.

For another magisterial take on money and banking, try Felix Martin’s Money: An Unauthorised Biography (UK) (US).  Martin writes deftly and his book, especially the first half of it, is packed with fascinating historical anecdote and colour.

For a take on banking in the great depression, try Lords of Finance (UK) (US) by Liaquat Ahamed. This book won the FT’s Business Book of the Year award a few years back – a riveting account of how the Great Depression could have been prevented, and wasn’t.

And for the present and future of banking, I strong recommend John Kay’s Other People’s Money (UK) (US), which begins with the question: if we were designing a financial system to do what we say a financial system is supposed to do, would it look anything like Wall Street today? (Spoiler: the answer is no.) Kay is an elegant writer, a well-informed historian and a superb economist. This is a terrific book.

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Stephen Hawking’s restless scientific curiosity pulled us all in

A few months ago, my teenage daughter and I went to see a lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. The event had been postponed once because he was unwell; I worried that his body might finally give out, albeit five decades later than doctors had expected. Yet a new date was set and Hawking duly arrived, as if from another world, to deliver a spellbinding talk in his distinctive synthetic voice.

I had given a lecture myself at the same venue earlier, striking a pessimistic tone: it was easy to pollute the stream of conversation about science and statistics, I said, and simply intoning the facts would not dispel misinformation. Hawking, who died this week, went some way to restoring my hope. He showed that it was possible to communicate difficult ideas, if you went about it in the right way.

What was his secret? He acknowledged that his disability attracted the spotlight, but there was much more going on than the spectacle of a brilliant mind in a malfunctioning body.

First, he did not patronise his audience: presenting the most complicated ideas was a sign that he respected our intelligence. If we did not grasp everything, we would still be better off for having tried.

“I know the book is difficult,” he commented after his A Brief History of Time (UK) (US) had become a bestseller. “It does not matter too much if people can’t follow all the arguments. They can still get the flavour of the intellectual quest.”

That instinct was right. His talk demanded concentration. Most of it was beyond my daughter. Much of it was beyond me. Then Hawking would crack a joke about hairy black holes, and the audience would all be back on the same page, laughing, and ready for another attempt to scale the intellectual heights.

Second, he was immensely curious. “My goal is simple, “ he said. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

That sort of curiosity is contagious. It makes us want to join his hunt for answers, rather than passively receiving (or rejecting) information from an expert who claims to know them already.

The third quality followed from the first two: unlike some public intellectuals, Hawking was not very interested in conflict for the sake of it. The economist Paul Krugman and the biologist Richard Dawkins are instructive contrasts to Hawking: both are brilliant communicators, but they often present their ideas as a battle between good and evil, wisdom and stupidity.

When you have a noble cause it can be tempting to pursue it in an antagonistic way: Economy, a charity that aims to improve economics literacy, has been fundraising with an endorsement from writer George Monbiot saying that economists are “a pox on the planet”.

These insults seem to work, at first. If you call out your opponents as fools, knaves, or even transmissible diseases, you enthuse your own supporters. But you will win few new converts when every issue becomes a matter of tribal loyalty.

We humans are social creatures. Given a choice between being right on a partisan question (abortion, guns, Brexit, globalisation, climate change) and having mistaken views that our friends and neighbours support, we would rather be wrong and stay in the tribe. This becomes clear in surveys of views on climate change: college-educated Republicans and Democrats are further apart on the topic than those who are less educated.

If our goal is to persuade, the curiosity-driven approach works better than the conflict-driven one: the evidence suggests that curious people are less subject to the temptations of partisanship. When the national conversation becomes polarised, we need to encourage curiosity about how things work rather than them-and-us tribalism.

Hawking, of course, did have robust political views. He criticised the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt for cherry-picking evidence on the National Health Service and spoke out against Brexit. But after the referendum went the other way, he continued to argue in favour of mutual understanding and solving problems together, rather than dismissing voters as ignorant.

If experts want to persuade us to wrap our minds around a complex issue, they need to get us to abandon our cynicism towards unwelcome information. It does no harm to be the most recognisable scientist on the planet, but Hawking also understood that insults do not work. Instead, he treated us with respect and fired our enthusiasm.

Towards the end of his lecture, after a difficult discussion of quantum effects near the boundary of a black hole, Hawking offered a simpler idea: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”

It was a message any teenager could hold on to. I sat next to my daughter and thought about how Hawking had lived such a rich life under the burden of an apparently unbeatable illness.

We have been told that people have had enough of experts. That is true for some experts. It wasn’t true for Stephen Hawking.

 

 

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 March 2018.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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In praise of Factfulness

“I use normal statistics that are compiled by the World Bank and the United Nations. This is not controversial. These facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.”

That was Hans Rosling, delivering a celebrated smackdown  on Danish television to a journalist with an excessively gloomy view of the world. And although the quote displays just one facet of the the late Professor Rosling, it isn’t a bad place to start in considering his posthumous book, Factfulness (UK) (US). Rosling takes something rather ordinary – “normal statistics” – and turns it into a passionate, witty, and encouraging view of the world that also happens to be far more realistic than the “realists” have to offer.

Hans Rosling – perhaps most famous for a series of hugely popular TED talks – was the greatest and most versatile communicator I ever met. He would use spectacular graphics, but also props such as jugs of juice, bayonets (for his sword-swallowing demonstrations) and rolls of toilet paper. He was a magnificent storyteller, an inspiring guide to a complex world, and – when the situation demanded it – could display flashes of righteous anger. He was also much more than a showman: he spent long periods of time living in poorer countries and working for underfunded healthcare systems across the world, most recently participating in the fight against Ebola in Liberia.

Factfulness was co-written with his daughter-in-law Anna and his son Ola, although it is in Hans’s distinctive voice. It is a wonderful guide to an improving world, as well as being a well-stocked source of sound advice as to how to think about factual and statistical claims. The book identifies ten often-unhelpful instincts, such as the Negativity instinct (we, and our media, find sudden bad news more interesting and memorable than slow-burn good news) or the Destiny instinct (we feel that some things never change – that, for example, Nigeria will always be poor for “cultural reasons”, when in fact all societies, including modern western societies, are constantly learning and changing). And it suggests antidotes or reality checks for these instincts.

This structure works well enough, but the real joy of the book is the string of surprising facts and unforgettable stories to illustrate them: the Tanzanian midwife whose dearest wish was for a torch, so that when walking barefoot at night to a birth she could spot snakes more easily; the time Hans Rosling’s student nearly lost a leg because she tried to keep open the door of an Indian elevator (which, unlike Swedish elevators, did not have a safety sensor fitted); Rosling nearly drowning in sewage (in Sweden); Rosling thinking on his feet to avoid eating lavae in Congo; Rosling being humbled by the quality of his fellow medical students in Bangalore; and Rosling confessing to numerous mistakes over the course of his life, some embarrassing and some tragic.

The book is a pleasure to read – simple, clear, memorable writing – and when you’ve finished you’ll be a lot wiser about the world. You’ll also feel rather happier, because while Hans Rosling has seen far more suffering and premature death than most of us ever will, he also saw that suffering and premature death are on the retreat almost everywhere. Hence, “Factfulness” – the relaxing peace of mind you get when you have a clearer view of how the world really is.

I strongly recommend this book. (UK) (US)

Meanwhile here is a programme about the fight against Ebola that we made with Hans a couple of years ago; here is a radio obituary; here is an interview I conducted with him on our first meeting; and here is my favourite Hans Rosling talk.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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My favourite indy projects

I am, of course, not sure what the definition of “indy” really is these days, but I’ll leave that one to the philosophers.

I’ve written before about Can You Brexit? (Without breaking Britain) (UK) (US) – a fabulous, well-researched and very funny choose-your-own-story gamebook by Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson. It casts you in the role of the Prime Minister the morning after the Brexit referendum, in a parallel but highly-recognisable universe. (The leader of the Labour party is the dishevelled hard-leftist “Barry Scraggle”, while one of the leading Brexiters is the near-Edwardian “Tobias Tode”.) The book achieves two notable feats: it makes the chewy details of Brexit engaging, and one starts to sympathise – or at least empathise – with the plight of the Prime Minister who has the impossible task of keeping all sides happy.

For music, try the remarkable loops of Duotone, aka Barney Morse-Brown. It’s hypnotic, and he is the most astonishingly talented musician. (One of his side gigs, I believe, is that he plays cello for Birdy.) Ropes (UK) (US) was my introduction to Duotone, but his new album “A Life Reappearing” is out very soon – here’s the single, “Martha”.

I’m still loving Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd, a lavishly illustrated, simple and elegant role-playing game for parents and young children to enjoy together – often in the time it might take to enjoy a bedtime story. My 6 year old has just created a new character, “Death Man”, whose special skills include “Smashing” and “Eating”. Marvellous. Martin has pared role-playing to its essentials, designed a system that involves rolling funny-shaped dice (indispensable), and offered many ideas for keeping things fast and fun and not too scary.

And while my podcast feed is packed with high-production-value shows assembled by large production teams with talented presenters, somehow whenever Futility Closet drops into the feed, I pause everything to listen to Greg and Sharon Ross chat about the latest quirky historical story, go through an increasingly thought-provoking mailbag, and solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Production values have improved, but the show still sounds a little amateurish in the best possible way. Unique, engaging, and well worth a listen.

 

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.

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