Tim Harford's Blog, page 8

The selfish guide to decarbonising

Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global emissions is less than 15 per cent. It is a shame that the US administration can’t take climate change seriously, although a solid majority of Americans are concerned about the issue. But even without them, why can’t the rest of us just “act locally”?

That might seem a foolish question. The US stance undermines global agreement, and global agreement is important because climate change poses a collective action problem. Greenhouse gases emitted anywhere in the world, by anyone, mix in the atmosphere and contribute to the general problem of a warming world. It’s a little like splitting a restaurant bill between a large group. Order the Wagyu steak and vintage champagne, why not? Everyone else is sharing the cost. The trouble is that everyone else will do likewise and you’ll be paying for their extravagance, just as they pay for yours.

Finding a better way to split a restaurant bill is a topic so taxing that the writer Douglas Adams believed it needed its own academic discipline, Bistromathics. Finding a way to co-ordinate a response to climate change is even more of a challenge.

I was struck, then, by a new research paper with the intriguing title, “Does Unilateral Decarbonization Pay For Itself?” The paper, by the economists Adrien Bilal and Diego Känzig, argues that a US government entirely uninterested in global co-operation would still find it cost-effective to reduce America’s carbon emissions by more than 80 per cent. Much the same calculation applies to the EU.

If Bilal and Känzig are right, international agreements may be less important than they seem, because the major economies have selfish reasons to decarbonise. The logic behind this surprising conclusion is very simple: Bilal and Känzig estimate that the local damage from global warming is enormous. Acting alone, the US or the EU might only be able to make a modest contribution to reducing that damage. Yet they should still act, because a modest reduction of a catastrophic cost is something worth having.

The only problem with Bilal and Känzig’s argument is that it relies on their estimate of the costs of climate change. Those costs are uncertain, unknowable until it is too late, and endlessly contested. In the US, for example, the official benchmark for the social cost of carbon was $43 a ton under President Obama. The first Trump administration put it at between $3 and $5 a ton. Under the Biden administration, it was raised to $51 and then $190 a ton. Bilal and Känzig estimate it to be $1,367 a ton. Somebody who believes that the social cost of carbon is $3 a ton is not going to be much moved by the conclusions of economists who reckon it is 450 times higher.

There is, however, an alternative line of argument. Perhaps we should refrain from a diet of Wagyu beef and champagne, not because even our small share of the bill is too expensive, but because there are healthier and more interesting things to eat and drink. Or, in the case of climate change, perhaps we should decarbonise not just because it is perilous to trap more heat in the planet’s atmosphere, but because a low-carbon society offers many incidental benefits.

Some of these are obvious. Having more access to electricity from ever-cheaper wind and solar sources, coupled with energy storage, reduces our dependence on imported fossil fuels and our vulnerability to spikes in the price of those fuels — the kind seen after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Equally obvious, if people choose to walk or cycle instead of drive, they will reap the health benefits of their physical activity.

Other benefits are more surprising. Many of the richest and most productive places in the world are big cities, but these concrete jungles have much lower environmental footprints than sprawling exurbs. Urbanites live in more compact spaces that require less energy to heat and cool and they travel by mass transit, or that most efficient of mechanised people-movers, the counterweighted elevator. Far from perceiving all this as a deprivation, many people are willing to pay a premium to live in an eco-paradise such as Manhattan. (Let’s not even start on the topic of Venice, a city whose unparalleled charms depend not only on those beautiful canals, but also on the complete absence of cars.)

Chris Goodall’s recent book Possible gives further examples. Even though petrol and diesel vehicles are much cleaner than they once were, they still cause lung diseases and a significant number of premature deaths. Electric vehicles are quieter and emit no tailpipe air pollution. Gas hobs fill the home with harmful toxins. Induction hobs do not, and are a pleasure to use. There are plenty of technologies whose initial selling point — less carbon — is just one of a list of attractions.

The battle to slow climate change would be easier to fight with the US government on side, of course. But “act locally” is not just a hippie cliché. There is plenty we can do to decarbonise, and many of the benefits of doing so are closer to home than we might think.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 February 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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Cautionary Tales – Houdini’s detective and her 1500 dead husbands (Part 2)

Harry Houdini finds an ally in his fight against spiritualism, a brilliant detective called Rose Mackenberg, who’ll do whatever it takes to expose a fake. Together, the two head to Washington to try and get lawmakers to criminalise mediums. The hearing that follows will be violent, sensational and leave Houdini fearing for his life. 

This is the second of a three-part series. 

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Further reading

Our three episodes on Houdini rely on books including The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman; The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, by Joe Posnanski; Houdini & Conan Doyle: The Great Magician and the Inventor of Sherlock Holmes, by Christopher Sandford; Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle, by Massimo Polidoro; and the enthusiastically titled Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss – American Self-Liberator, Europe’s Eclipsing Sensation, World’s Handcuff King & Prison Breaker – Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini a Prisoner!!!, by Kenneth Silverman.

Houdini’s book A Magician Among the Spirits is available on Project Gutenberg. Helpful additional details came from the Wild About Houdini website. 

Newspaper columns written by Rose Mackenberg are collated in the book Houdini’s “Girl Detective”: The Real-Life Ghost-Busting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg, with an introduction by Tony Wolf. See also Rose’s obituary in the New York Times. 

The transcripts of the Congressional hearings are available online. The research referenced in the second episode is From beyond the grave: the legal regulation of mediumship by Steve Greenfield, Guy Osborn and Stephanie Roberts, published by Cambridge University Press.

Milbourne Christopher’s book Mediums, Mystics, and the Occult contains a helpful account of Arthur Ford’s career.

An alternative take on Trump’s favourite word

Since nothing seems to be off the table when it comes to trade policy, I thought I might put forward a modest two-step trade policy reform to make America great again.

Step one, levy a substantial tax on all exports, from aeroplanes to soyabeans. Such a tax will squeeze America’s most internationally competitive industries. That’s fine. America will never be great again unless the US soyabean industry suffers.

Step two, tax a generous selection of the inputs that corporate America uses to make its products — for example, the sugar that goes into American candy, the aluminium that goes into American drinks cans and, above all, chips and computers. When American businesses are overpaying for the inputs to the products they make, they’ll get tired of winning.

I’m not sure President Trump and his advisers would go for these ideas, although you never know. Trump tells us that he’s a “tariff man”, and has certainly been talking a lot about levying them. (Forgive me for skirting the specifics. Old-fashioned print deadlines mean that in the brief space of time between me writing these words and you reading them, any given tariff could have been introduced or abolished, or both.)

It is true, although far from obvious, that my two proposals — tax US exports and tax the inputs of US business — are actually identical to Trump’s signature policy of a tariff on imported goods.

The fact that a tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports is a famous result in economics. It was formally proved by Abba Lerner in 1936 but it was obvious long before then that there must be an intimate connection between exports and imports.

Back in 1640, Henry Robinson, a merchant who often wrote about economics, explained, “it is worth remembrance that a great part of foreign commodities brought for England are taken in barter of ours, and we should not have vented ours in so great quantity without taking them.”

A customs official named James Deacon Hume made the same point two centuries later, “[I] did not expect to hear it denied that every import must be paid for by an export.”

As trade policy expert Douglas Irwin explained in an elegant essay “Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy” (1996), the fundamental idea behind Lerner’s symmetry theorem is that a tariff on imports (such as computers) and a tax on exports (such as soyabeans) both have the same effect: they make it more attractive to try to produce computers instead of soyabeans. More people and more investment will flow to the US computer industry, and away from the US soyabean industry.

It is not always bad policy to whack your own soyabean industry in the hope of nurturing a laptop sector, but it is worth being clear-eyed about what is going on. While it is natural to frame this as some kind of struggle between foreign computer manufacturers and US computer manufacturers, it is more accurate to frame it as a struggle between US computer manufacturers and US soyabean farmers. Relatively efficient industries like soyabeans or crude oil will always tend to flourish, unless the government intervenes to tax their exports. Or introduce a tariff on imports — it’s all the same.

Imagine that some entrepreneur builds a magnificent laptop factory on the coast near Los Angeles. The factory uses a production process inspired by Dr Seuss: pour soyabeans into a huge hopper in the factory roof and out come laptops.

One day, a member of the FT’s intrepid investigations team infiltrates the factory to discover the truth: the factory isn’t a factory at all! It’s a port. Ships sail off to South Korea and Taiwan laden with soyabeans and come back with laptops on them. And if you want to stem the flow of imports, and favour a real laptop factory? Just tax the exports of soyabeans.

My second policy suggestion was to tax selected inputs of US businesses, making it more expensive to make products in the US. It is easy to see, but also easy to forget, how this policy is a side-effect of tariffs. Last year, half of all US imports were either business supplies or capital goods, and tariffs on such goods simply make US businesses more expensive to run. Tariffs on sugar hurt the US food manufacturing industry. Tariffs on aluminium and steel make life hard for US factories producing planes or cars. Tariffs on computers hurt pretty much everything.

Of course, tariffs on imported consumer goods straightforwardly make life more expensive for American consumers. But Irwin noted that this well-worn point seemed to lack much political salience. It felt superficial to complain about the rising cost of living when jobs were on the line. That was 1996. Maybe things are different now; the US voter may no longer feel so sanguine about a more expensive weekly shop.

Trump’s tariffs may play well politically, and he has decisively shifted the conversation about tariffs in the US. But economically speaking, tariffs are a strange policy lever to pull.

One comfort is that we’ve seen these policy confusions before. The Lerner symmetry theorem notwithstanding, it is perennially hard to grasp that a tax on imports and a tax on exports amount to the same thing. The US Constitution, after all, bans any tax on exports, while the first substantive act of Congress was a tax on imports. Trump is an unprecedented figure in some ways; in others, he’s reading from a garbled script as old as the republic.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 21 February 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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Cautionary Tales – Houdini: A message from the spirits (Part 1)

Harry Houdini is remembered today for his legendary escapes and illusions, but he also had a lifelong obsession with the paranormal. After dabbling in fake seances himself,  Houdini made it his mission to uncover fakes and expose mediums. This put him on a collision course with his spiritualist friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, and left him fearing for his life.

This is the first in a three-part series. 

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Further reading

Our three episodes on Houdini rely on books including The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman; The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, by Joe Posnanski; Houdini & Conan Doyle: The Great Magician and the Inventor of Sherlock Holmes, by Christopher Sandford; Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle, by Massimo Polidoro; and the enthusiastically titled Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss – American Self-Liberator, Europe’s Eclipsing Sensation, World’s Handcuff King & Prison Breaker – Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini a Prisoner!!!, by Kenneth Silverman.

Houdini’s book A Magician Among the Spirits is available on Project Gutenberg. Helpful additional details came from the Wild About Houdini website. 

Newspaper columns written by Rose Mackenberg are collated in the book Houdini’s “Girl Detective”: The Real-Life Ghost-Busting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg, with an introduction by Tony Wolf. See also Rose’s obituary in the New York Times. 

The transcripts of the Congressional hearings are available online. The research referenced in the second episode is From beyond the grave: the legal regulation of mediumship by Steve Greenfield, Guy Osborn and Stephanie Roberts, published by Cambridge University Press.

Milbourne Christopher’s book Mediums, Mystics, and the Occult contains a helpful account of Arthur Ford’s career.

What Elon can learn from the original Doge

As a tourist, the only reasonable response to Venice’s all-consuming beauty is to gasp in admiration after rounding every corner. As an economist, another response occurs: once upon a time, this city must have been incredibly wealthy. From Bruges to Kyoto, being eclipsed after making it rich has long been a reliable way for cities to look beautiful a few centuries later. None, however, has achieved the feat quite as completely as Venice.

Venice was originally a community of fishermen, huddled together for protection on some muddy, flood-prone islands in the middle of a lagoon. Invisible, ever-shifting sandbanks in the shallows that defended the early Venetians against attackers were their only natural advantage. They lacked wood, minerals, metals, even arable land. And yet Venice became a major military and economic power, with its churches and palazzi demonstrating its wealth, and the heaps of looted treasure in St Mark’s Basilica bearing witness to its military dominance. How did they do it?

At a time when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) is hogging the headlines for attempting to shred the federal government, I wanted to learn from the Doges of a different age. I draw five lessons, many of them still relevant today.

The first is that trade matters. Venetian wealth was built on trade, on merchants roaming to Egypt, the Levant and beyond Constantinople to the great river ports of the Black Sea, bringing the riches of the east into Europe. Venice never harboured the delusion that international trade was some kind of incontinence that needed to be stoppered. (A parenthetical bonus lesson: Venice did very well out of ignoring or circumventing the Pope’s trade embargoes with the Islamic world. Free traders generally find a way.)

Second, trade needs to be backed up with muscle. Venice’s merchants weren’t just given the freedom to roam across the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, they were supported by Venice’s navy and by an aggressive campaign to secure trading privileges at all the major ports. In the 21st century, where trade appears to happen automatically, and governments seem to contribute nothing to the process except paperwork, it is worth remembering that pirates would find container ships and oil tankers attractive targets, were it not for the presence of a cruiser (often of the US Navy) just over the horizon.

Third, military strength requires physical infrastructure. The most reliable way to get a warship is not to buy it but to build it yourself. Venice’s capacity to do this boggles the mind, with the arsenale, the great naval factory, occupying much of the eastern district of the city.

It was in 1201 CE that the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, was approached by crusaders asking for Venice’s help in ferrying an enormous crusader army to Cairo. Dandolo may have been both blind and in his nineties, but he was a brilliant operator. He contracted for a stupendous fee, and Venice’s shipyards and rope factories worked around the clock for months to produce 500 vessels, including 50 fast war galleys and enough large ships to carry an army of 33,000 men and thousands of horses. The result was a magnificent navy, acknowledged one of the French crusaders: “The Venetians had fulfilled their side of the bargain and more so.” It was an astonishing feat for what was then a city of about 80,000 people, and testament to the skill of the labour force and the economies of scale gained by standardising parts. It was also a mark of the vast investment Venice had made in its military industrial complex.

A fourth lesson is that governance matters. Venice was by no means a democracy, but it was far more pluralistic than the autocracies that surrounded it. The Doge was elected by Venetian patricians in an elaborate power-sharing process, and the Doge’s authority was checked and counterbalanced by a variety of deliberative and executive councils. Nobody in the Venetian elite wanted a popular dictator to seize control. The system was far from perfect, but the separation of powers gave La Serenissima stable government and pragmatic policy for centuries.

So far, so sensible. Yet for the high rollers in the new US administration, the Venetian experience suggests a fifth lesson that they might enjoy. Back in 1201, it was a huge gamble to agree a contract with the crusaders. For more than a year, Venice’s entire economy would be devoted to creating this great navy. Could the Venetians deliver? They could. Could the crusaders afford to pay? They could not. (A bonus lesson: beware deadbeats who promise the world and then don’t settle their debts.)

Then what? Then a string of risky, bullying, high-stakes improvisations. Dandolo first marooned the crusader army on the Lido, the very doorstep of Venice. Then he pressured them to settle their debts by attacking a troublesome rival city, Zara. After sacking Zara, the debt was still not fully paid, and Dandolo pushed the crusaders to join the Venetians in postponing the crusade to lay waste to Constantinople itself. That was barbarism. As punishment for their escapades, the Venetians were excommunicated by Pope Innocent III.

Still, the spoils of the victory adorn Venice to this day, and the trading privileges they won were perhaps more lucrative still. If there is a final lesson for the 21st century, perhaps it’s this: the richest of all are those who take reckless risks and get lucky. That lesson, I think we have already learnt.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 14 February 2025.

The paperback of “The Next 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy” is now out in the UK.

“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises — exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“Witty, informative and endlessly entertaining, this is popular economics at its most engaging.”- The Daily Mail

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Cautionary Tales – True Lies and Genuine Fakes

This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday.

In 1998, an art gallery gets a mysterious phone call. The caller claims they have been fooled by a master forger and that many of their prized paintings are fakes. Or are they? 
This is the story of the life and lies of the notorious Eric Hebborn. What did he do, and what does that teach us about how we can root out deepfakes without undermining our trust in reality? 

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Further reading

Eric Hebborn Confessions of a Master Forger

Eric Hebborn: Master Forger (BBC Profile)

Hannah Murphy “The rising threat to democracy of AI-powered disinformation” The Financial Times 11 January 2024

Radiolab Breaking News

Modirrousta-Galian, A., & Higham, P. A. (2023). Gamified inoculation interventions do not improvediscrimination between true and fake news: Reanalyzing existing research with receiver operatingcharacteristic analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(9),2411–2437.

Chesney, Robert and Citron, Danielle Keats, Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy,and National Security (July 14, 2018). 107 California Law Review 1753 (2019), U of Texas Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 692, U of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2018-21,

Robert Graham PERSPECTIVES-A MASTER FORGER AND HIS PACT WITH THE DEVIL.The Financial Times 4 May 1996

Geraldine Norman “An Old Master or Two to pay the bills” The Independent 29 January 1995

Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model” RAND Expert Insights 11 July 2016

Cautionary Tales – Would You Trust a Gangster Nanny?

Do we trust our fitness trackers too much? How do fraudsters gain our faith? Why do people trust podcasters? And would you trust a drug dealing nanny with a tambourine? Tim Harford is joined by trust expert Rachel Botsman to answer your questions. 

Rachel lectures in trust at Oxford University and her new audiobook How To Trust and Be Trusted is available via Pushkin.fm and wherever audiobooks are sold.

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The case for ‘late bloomers’

Highbrow pleasure recently: the Royal Opera House, and Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa. The opera was first performed when the composer was 50, and it was followed by an outpouring of new music, better than anything he had managed in his supposed prime. My favourites include Sinfonietta and Glagolitic Mass, both composed shortly before his death at the age of 74. If Janáček had faced mandatory retirement from composing at the age of 60, it seems unlikely that we would remember him.

One might say something similar about Vincent van Gogh, who was told at the age of 28, “You are no artist . . . You started too late.” Almost every one of his masterpieces was painted in the last two years of his brief life. Do we prematurely dismiss people on the grounds that they are too old? We recently marked the third inauguration in a row in which the incoming US president has broken the age record, so that might seem a curious concern.

But it’s a concern nonetheless. In her book The Future-Proof Career, my FT colleague Isabel Berwick reports a “breathtaking amount of ageism” in the workplace, with more than half of managers admitting they are not open to employing people over the age of 50. Presidents notwithstanding, we seem to think that only the young produce anything worthwhile.

Part of the problem was set out by Malcolm Gladwell in 2008, in his New Yorker essay “Late bloomers”. Gladwell argued that we assume great talents will announce themselves early. Think of Tiger Woods winning a 10-and-under golf tournament at the age of three. Or darts prodigy Luke Littler hitting bullseyes as a toddler. Think of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

But this is to confuse genius with precocity. What of the beloved poet Wendy Cope, first published at the age of 40? What of Julia Child, whose first, breakthrough cookery book came out the year she turned 50? For that matter, what of Janáček?

The economist David Galenson has pioneered the study of the creative lifecycle by finding proxies for creative achievement, such as the number of artworks reproduced in art textbooks, the auction price of particular pieces or the chart success of pop musicians. In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, Galenson argued that there were two different kinds of artists. Conceptual artists (think of Picasso or Bob Dylan) reimagined an artistic endeavour and broke through young. Experimental artists (Rembrandt, Fleetwood Mac) took their time to explore the territory and develop their skills. They peaked late.

This is an important corrective to the myth that the only kind of brilliance is youthful brilliance. But it is also of broader relevance. Most of us are no kind of genius at all, but we have more in common with Cope, Child and Janáček than with Littler or Dylan. In most careers we learn from experience, building skills and contacts that offset the advantages of youth.

Learning from experience doesn’t just mean deepening your skills in a particular field, it also means experimenting and figuring out what you like and where your talents lie. Van Gogh is a good example. He tried being an art dealer, a teacher, a missionary, a bookstore clerk and a pastor. When he started to draw and paint, he tried many styles before painting the artworks so beloved today.

In his book Range, David Epstein argues that we underrate this process of exploring the world to find a good match. He cites research by the economist Ofer Malamud, who compares the Scottish education system, in which students specialise late, with the English and Welsh system, in which they specialise early. The specialist students south of the border got off to a quicker start, but were then more likely to realise they’d chosen the wrong career path and have to start again. The unhurried exploration in Scotland might seem an indulgence, but it turns out to be a crucial way for young people to find their path in life.

Henry Oliver, author of Second Act, argues that there is really no need to explain why someone has bloomed late. There is nothing strange or unnatural about it. “Unexpressed promise”, he writes, “ . . . might be just as strong within a 40- or 50-year-old as in a 20-year-old”. Quite. Whether you are a Scottish pupil who has yet to specialise, or Van Gogh at 28, Cope at 40 or Janáček at 60, it is absurd to say “you started too late”. Everyone has the potential to do something worthwhile, regardless of how much or how little they may have achieved in the past.

Last summer, British athletics fans were captivated by the story of Georgia Bell, a once-promising junior runner who quit athletics for five years and was working full time in cyber security. After trying out her local Parkrun, she decided to take up running again. In the Paris Olympics, the 30-year-old took four seconds off her personal best and won bronze in the 1500m. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy,” she told the BBC.

But Bell had one advantage. She could let her track times do the talking. Most people aren’t in that position. If we’re to flourish unexpectedly late, we will often need to persuade some gatekeeper that we are worth backing, even though we don’t look the part. We shouldn’t write people off, and we shouldn’t write ourselves off. But too often, we do.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 7 February 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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Cautionary Tales – Lights, Camera, Tax Break

When Ernest Borgnine gets his big break in Hollywood, he can hardly believe his luck. But soon he discovers his supposed star vehicle, Marty, is not the dream gig he thought it was. 

In this episode of Cautionary Tales, recorded live at the Bristol Festival of Economics, Tim Harford examines what happens when the murky world of tax avoidance collides with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. 

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Further reading

ON ERNEST BORGNINE:

I Don’t Want To Set the World on Fire, I Just Want to Keep My Nuts Warm – My Autobiography by Ernest Borgnine: 2009

“I Was Marty: An Interview With Ernest Borgnine” Huff Post. 24 June 2011.

“Oscars: 1955 best picture ‘Marty’ conquered love, TV and film” By Susan King. LA Times Feb. 13, 2014

“THE ACTORS STUDIO AND HOLLYWOOD IN THE 1950s A History of Theatrical Realism” by Mario Beguiristain. 2006

ON BURT LANCASTER:

“1956: Lancaster flips for ‘Marty’” Variety.

Burt Lancaster: An American Life by Kate Buford. 2000

ON TAX:

“DODGING THE INCOME TAX IN USA: End Came to a Honeymoon” 13 Dec 1946

“OIL: The Hollywood Wildcats” Time. 10 Oct 1949

Rebellion, Rascals and Revenue Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod

It’s February. Time for another fresh start?

On the first of January, you can’t move without bumping into an article about new year’s resolutions. The same cannot be said about the first of February — and that may be part of the problem. Each year begins with us in full Bridget Jones mode, resolving to turn over a new leaf. Sometimes we keep our resolutions, often we don’t. Either way, everyday life returns, and we forget all about them.

We know quite a lot about how to make resolutions work. For example, it helps to think through the day-to-day process. Resolving to “get fit” or “lose weight” is fine, but things are likely to go better if you’ve made a more specific plan: work through the Couch to 5K programme, or sign up for an exercise class, or stop drinking alcohol on week nights.

Social pressure works. If you’re hoping to go to the gym regularly, find an exercise buddy. Agree regular times to meet, and make sure you show up to support each other. This gives you a positive and a negative reason to show up: to help your friend and not to wimp out in public. Gym sessions will also be more fun.

A public commitment works too. Want to stop smoking? Find a friend who’ll bet that you can’t. Hoping to learn to run? Sign up for a charity fun run and start collecting sponsorship.

It can be motivating to seek out signs of incremental progress. Sometimes the progress is obvious — faster times, heavier dumbbells, but, often, the interim goals need to be confected. They still work.

Most importantly, people are more likely to stick to resolutions if they find the whole business enjoyable. If you’re trying to eat healthy food, get some good recipes. If you’re trying to stop checking social media on your smartphone, carry trashy novels to read instead.

Those are five good ideas for sticking to your resolutions. But did you really need me to tell you any of that? The problem is that we don’t think about such things at the turning of the year when we don our pink-tinged spectacles and jot down our unrealistic dreams for becoming a better person. For most people, the resolutions we make are unserious.

At this point it might be useful to borrow an idea from educational psychology: “self-regulated learning”. (The psychologist Barry Zimmerman described this in more poetic terms as “how students become masters of their own learning”.) Some students are thoughtful about their own educational progress: they think about their strengths and weaknesses, pay attention to their results, and adopt the right tactics to do better, studying, practising and revising as appropriate. In the jargon, they enter a “self-oriented feedback loop”. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that self-regulated learners thrive at school and college.

I promise not to subject you to the phrase “self-oriented feedback loop” again, but ponder instead the following three questions that anybody should ask themselves about their resolutions. What am I doing? How is it going? What do I need to change?

For example, let’s say your resolution is to stop drinking alcohol, and you’ve succeeded — except when you see one particular group of friends in the pub, once every few weeks. Rather than beating yourself up for failing, or shrugging and giving up, have a think. Maybe you decide it’s fine to drink if it’s only with those friends every few weeks. Modify the resolution and declare victory. 

Or maybe you decide the resolution can’t be compromised. Fine. Meet your friends over coffee. Or try again, with renewed determination to drink only alcohol-free beer. The point is to think seriously about how the resolution is going and what might need to change, and this is something we rarely do.

If you find yourself flatly failing to keep a particular resolution, it’s useful to think about why. What exactly is stopping you? Is there a different angle that might work better? White-knuckle willpower hasn’t worked before (it rarely does), so what might work instead?

Which brings me back to the first of January. Katy Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School of Business and the author of How to Change, has researched and popularised the “fresh start effect” — that we are more likely to embrace new goals on landmark dates such as the first of January or our birthday. For example, with her colleagues Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis, she found that experimental subjects with a goal were more likely to sign up to receive a motivational email reminder if told that it would arrive on “the first day of spring” rather than the same date described instead as the 20th of March.

But if the first of January is an attractive time to make a resolution, when is a good time to reflect on your old resolutions, particularly the ones that have crumbled under pressure? One possibility is to set quarterly goals — for work, fitness, fun, whatever — and to review the old goals when setting new ones at the end of the quarter. For what it’s worth, this is what I do. 

That’s not for everyone. Here’s a simpler idea, then. When you write down any new year’s resolutions, write them down in your calendar on the 20th of March. Let’s call it the first day of spring, why not? On that date, take a good look at them. And then ask yourself those three simple questions. What have I actually done? How has it gone? What do I need to change?

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 31 January 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

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