Tim Harford's Blog, page 9
February 20, 2025
Cautionary Tales – the Nursery Rhyme that Ruined a Rock Band
“Down Under” was huge. This jokey ode to legendary Australian wanderlust helped Men at Work win a Grammy and was a key part of the band’s creative legacy. It had also been earning “Men At Work” a steady stream of royalties for nearly 30 years, when a game show pointed out the song’s subtle link with an Australian nursery rhyme…
Tim Harford examines one of the most controversial copyright battles in music history. Where does inspiration end and infringement begin?
Further reading
On the Down Under plagiarism case
Kylie Northover and Chris Johnson “How the song turned sour for a ‘beautiful man’” Sydney Morning Herald 20 April 2012 How the song turned sour for a ‘beautiful man’
Steve Collins “Kookaburra v. Down Under: It’s just overkill” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture :: SCAN | journal of media arts culture ::
BBC News. “Men At Work’s Colin Hay hits out over plagiarism ruling.” 5 Feb 2010 BBC News – Men At Work’s Colin Hay hits out over plagiarism ruling
Ham, L., & Arlington, K. “Kookaburra case: publisher hits back at Colin Hay’s ‘greed’ claim.” The Age 5 Feb 2010 Publisher hits back at Colin Hay’s ‘greed’ claim
Hay, C. (2010, February 4). Colin Hay’s statement on Down Under ruling. Retrieved February 8, 2010, from The Age: Colin Hay’s statement on Down Under ruling
BBC News “Men and Work Lose Plagiarism Case in Australia” 4 Feb 2010 BBC News – Men At Work lose plagiarism case in Australia
Daily Mail “ABC Star Adam Hills reveals simple Spicks Specks Question destroyed friendship” Adam Hills reveals how Spicks & Specks question destroyed a friendship
Cameron Adams “Men at Work’s Colin Hay says Down Under lawsuit ‘contributed’ to death of his dad and bandmate” 10 Aug 2015 News Corp Australia Network
On Marion Sinclair
The Australian Dictionary of Biography Biography – Marion Sinclair – Australian Dictionary of Biography
On copyright and plagiarism
Rebecca Tabrar “The Songwriters” Music Hall Memory Box https://rebeccatab.wixsite.com/musichallmemorybox/the-songwriters
Hansard 1902 MUSICAL COPYRIGHT BILL [H.L.] (Hansard, 17 April 1902)
Malcolm Gladwell “Something Borrowed” The New Yorker 22 November 2004 Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?
Tim Harford Copyrights and wrongs Copyrights and wrongs and The Rights and Wrongs of Copying The rights and wrongs of copying
On the Rutles
Mark Blake “The Rutles: the strange and surreal story of the original Spinal Tap” Louder Sound 19 April 2023 The Rutles: the strange and surreal story of the original Spinal Tap
Dan Rys “A Brief History of the Ownership of the Beatles Catalog” Billboard 20 Jan 2017 A Brief History of the Ownership of the Beatles Catalog
Neil Innes interview on Radio 4, 13 Sep 2009.
Can economic growth still make us happy?
Richard Easterlin died in December at the age of 98. He’s been called “the father of happiness economics”, and it’s hard to disagree. Fifty years ago, after struggling to find an economics journal with any interest in the topic, Easterlin published an article titled “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?”
It planted the seeds of what became known as the Easterlin paradox. Within any given society, richer people are substantially more likely to say they’re happy. The paradox says that despite this fact, richer countries are no happier than poor ones. Nor do countries become happier on average as they become richer.
Like many things with the label “paradox”, Easterlin’s is no such thing. It can easily be explained — too easily, in fact, since many different explanations seem reasonable. One was put forward by Easterlin himself in 1974: “the growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants”. Richard Layard, co-editor of the World Happiness Report, is more specific: in his book Can We Be Happier? (2020), Layard argues that our society functions as a zero-sum game, where we can only win if others lose. That would explain the pattern claimed by the Easterlin hypothesis.
A second explanation is that the paradox simply isn’t supported by the data. Andrew Oswald, a happiness researcher who believes there is now strong evidence in favour of the Easterlin paradox, nevertheless points out that there is only a faint sign of it in Easterlin’s 1974 article, which reported that Americans had become much richer and slightly happier between 1946 and 1970.
Researchers have since argued that there is a perfectly solid correlation between income and happiness. One famous example is a 2010 study by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, which found that more income tended to mean higher wellbeing, with no sign of the Easterlin paradox.
A recent working paper by Ekaterina Oparina, Andrew Clark and Richard Layard also finds countries with a higher average income do indeed have a higher average life satisfaction. In poor countries, this pattern is plain to see. In richer countries, it is indirect: higher income improves wellbeing not because of raw purchasing power but because it is correlated with freedom, longer life expectancy and social support.
A final explanation is that happiness data simply isn’t capable of making comparisons across the decades or across the globe. The French, for example, always complain to pollsters. Easterlin’s original article reported that in 1965 more than half of British respondents said they were “very happy”, but only 12 per cent of those from France. Such comparisons raise as many questions as they answer. Surely it means something when someone tells a pollster they are happy or miserable, yet it’s unclear that such sentiments can really answer Easterlin’s original question about whether economic growth improves wellbeing.
Perhaps that question has outlived its usefulness. After all, if British policymakers have been obsessed with boosting economic growth for the past two decades, that obsession has yet to bear fruit in the UK’s growth figures. Would they do any better if instead they obsessed over boosting wellbeing?
There is greater promise in using more focused data to shape more focused policy. For example, Layard points to the Avon Longitudinal Study at the University of Bristol, with a rich set of data about children born in the early 1990s, and their family circumstances. “If you were trying to explain emotional health in adulthood,” he told me, “which school a person went to explains as much as everything you know about their parents.”
Perhaps that is because of the ethos of the school, or perhaps there’s another explanation. Either way, it’s hard not to be curious about whether schools could do more to bolster the emotional health of their pupils, long into adulthood.
Another example of a targeted intervention is the widespread use of talking therapies in the NHS, championed by Layard and his long-standing collaborator David Clark. We need more evidence-based, cost-effective public spending like this, and there is no good reason to privilege physical health over mental health; suffering is suffering.
The UK Treasury’s “Green Book” — the manual for evaluating public expenditure — now explicitly allows for the use of subjective wellbeing measures in some circumstances. But it remains to be seen whether that will lead to different spending priorities.
My own suspicion is that policies to boost income are better aligned with policies to boost wellbeing than the hippies might have argued. Consider Layard’s worry about a zero-sum society. That suggests that policymakers should be trying to widen bottlenecks in social mobility. For example, young people now compete for places at elite universities, then struggle to afford homes. Why not, then, expand the best universities and build more homes? Yet a single-minded focus on economic growth would suggest much the same policies.
So does economic growth improve the human lot? I’d say yes, but five decades after Richard Easterlin founded the economics of wellbeing, the question remains unsettled. Thankfully, we have also started asking more focused questions and producing more practical answers.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 24 January 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
February 18, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Widow Who Disrupted Champagne
Cautionary Conversation: You may be surprised to learn that champagne as we know it today was invented by a nineteenth-century businesswoman.
Tim Harford is joined by Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business and the host of The Unshakeables podcast, to explore the story of the trailblazing Widow Clicquot – aka La Veuve Clicquot. Tim and Ben analyse how she defied expectations to build one of the most iconic brands in history.
This episode is sponsored by Chase for Business.
Further reading
The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar Mazzeo.
The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry by Natasha Gelling Smithsonian Magazine
Review of The Widow by Blake Grey Vinography
Veuve Clicquot: the effervescent widow who gave us the champagne lifestyle by Jacque-Marie Vaslin The Guardian
Madame Clicquot – Veuve Clicquot website
February 13, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Thrill and the Drop: A First Date Rollercoaster
Leah Washington and her new boyfriend Joe Pugh are on their first day out together. They’re at Alton Towers theme park, where they’ve chosen to ride the “Smiler” rollercoaster: a terrifying tangle of track that loops and swoops through a world-record 14 inversions. Leah and Joe are seated right at the front of the train, and as they reach the highest point of the ride, they steel themselves for the drop. But then, quite suddenly, the ride stops.
Down on the ground, the computer system that controls the rollercoaster is warning that another carriage is out on the track, right in the path of Leah and Joe’s train. The engineers are certain the computer is wrong…
Algorithms are often faster and cleverer than humans, and they can help us avoid accidents. But computers can make mistakes. When should we trust our own heads instead of the machine?
Further reading
Three key sources on the Smiler accident are Steven Flanagan’s expert report, the Health and Safety Executive’s Factual Report, and the judge’s remarks at the end of the court case.
On Paul Meehl’s ideas, see his Autobiography and his essay on when to use your head rather than the formula.
We also relied on reporting from the Mirror, and interviews with Leah Washington in Cosmopolitan and on “This Morning“.
Want to change? Consider your situation
Imagine that a certain person — let’s call them Robin — is walking across a college campus when they pass a doorway and notice a man slumped on the ground. The man coughs and moans as Robin passes. Will Robin stop and help? To answer the question, we might want to know more about Robin. What is Robin’s personality? Is Robin a member of a religious group, or perhaps a volunteer at a charity? Does Robin have a track record of altruistic behaviour? We might speculate that Robin might be more likely to stop if she is female, and thus stereotyped as caring and empathetic. Or perhaps a male Robin would be more likely to stop, less nervous about his personal safety.
In their classic psychology textbook, The Person and the Situation, Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett declare that such questions are overrated. Instead of asking about Robin the person, we should ask about the situation. Did the man in the doorway look ill, or drunk? Was he smartly attired or dressed in dirty rags? Or perhaps a more trivial-seeming question: was Robin in a hurry? In short, argue Ross and Nisbett, our personalities are less important as a prediction of our behaviour than we might think, and a powerful influence on what we do, often overlooked, is the situation.
In the early 1970s, the psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson staged Robin’s situation 47 times, for 47 unsuspecting (male) theology students at Princeton. Each was recruited to give an impromptu talk, and told that it would be filmed in a building nearby. On the walk to the filming location, he would encounter an actor, slumped in a doorway, pretending to cough and moan. Who stopped?
No personality trait measured by Darley and Batson had any power to predict the answer to that question. Some students were asked to give their talk about career options for seminary students, and others to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan. (Who said academic researchers don’t have a sense of humour?) The choice of topic made little difference.
The one variable that had a huge influence on whether the student stopped? Whether they were in a rush. Some students were told they were running late, while others were reassured they were ahead of schedule. Only 10 per cent of those in a hurry stopped to help. Sixty-three per cent of those with ample time diverted to see if the man in the doorway needed assistance.
The situation matters, then — something to bear in mind before leaping to judge others, and a lesson that has been taken to heart by policy wonks in “nudge units” around the world.
But perhaps it is also something to bear in mind as you contemplate the wreckage of your new year’s resolutions. Every year, many of us resolve to change our ways. And every year, many of us fail.
One reason may be that we keep imagining changing ourselves as a person, rather than changing our situation. We tell ourselves to eat better food, drink less and exercise more. But perhaps we would do better if we told ourselves to sign up for a weekly vegetable-box delivery, and join a running club that meets on Friday evenings instead of going to the pub.
Ross and Nisbett give the example of someone changing their situation to become more intellectual. “By the academic and occupational choices they make, by the people with whom they pursue friendships, by the reading material they purchase (and maybe even by the decision they make to disconnect the television set because it is too tempting a situational influence to overcome), intellectuals effectively create their own environments.”
Whether your goal is to become an “intellectual” or something else, the point stands. If we want to act differently, we should surround ourselves with things and people who are likely to encourage us. As for disconnecting the TV (adorable!), this is a simple example of a commitment strategy. If you’d like to drink less, don’t keep booze in the house. If you don’t want to be distracted by your phone, delete the most troublesome apps and switch it off when you’re trying to concentrate, or to sleep.
One puzzle is why we don’t use such commitment strategies more often. The answer, in part, must be our endless capacity to surprise ourselves with our own fallibility. This time, we tell ourselves, it will be different. It won’t.
But perhaps there is also a stigma to using these commitment hacks, such as the app that blocks your screen time, or even a commitment service such as Stickk, which will take a cash sum from you and promises only to return it if you stick to your own pledge. Researchers Ariella Kristal and Julian Zlatev have investigated reactions to commitment strategies, and found that we distrust people who use them instead of willpower. Apparently, downloading an app feels like cheating (let’s not even talk about weight-loss drugs).
The truly virtuous choice, we assume, is to grit your teeth and rely on pure determination. I’m not so sure. There’s not much virtue in a failed attempt at willpower, and there is much to admire in someone who recognises their own weaknesses and acts to forestall them. So delete those social media apps, place a regular order for those vegetables and, above all, find yourself a new year’s exercise buddy.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 January 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
February 10, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Disaster Favours the Daring: Shipwreck at Honda Point
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday.
In 1923, legendary navigator Captain Dolly Hunter led a squadron of warships into America’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe. The mission was supposed to be a speed trial, a display of the squadron’s skill. But it ended in a maritime pile-up, with some destroyers stranded on rocks, others sinking fast, and deadly oil leaking into the Pacific Ocean. How?
Further reading
CC Lockwood and HC Adamson Tragedy at Honda
Steven M. Casey Set Phasers On Stun
Gary Klein Seeing What Others Don’t
Noah Andre Trudeau “A Naval Tragedy’s Chain of Errors” Naval History Magazine February 2010
Frankie Witzenburg “Disaster at Honda Point” Naval History Magazine October 2020
Gordon Smith “United States Navy’s Disaster at Honda Point 1923”
February 6, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Dr Brinkley’s Miracle Cure for Impotence
Cautionary Conversation: In the 1920s, a conman convinced America that goat testicles were the secret to male virility. Tim Harford and Dr Kate Lister (Betwixt the Sheets podcast) dive into the bizarre and grisly tale of “Doctor” John Brinkley – a snake oil salesman who successfully mobilised the power of radio marketing. Brinkley built an empire on selling goat gland transplants and other quack “cures”.
He might have got away with it – were it not for the efforts of his nemesis, tenacious physician Dr Morris Fishbein.
You can listen to Betwixt The Sheets wherever you get your podcasts, created by our friends over at History Hit
Further reading
“That Troublesome Old Cocklebur:” John R. Brinkley and the Medical Profession of Arkansas, 1937-1942 by Albert J. Schneider
The Goat-Gland Transplantation by Sydney Blanchard Flower
The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley by R. Alton Lee
John R. Brinkley: A Quintessential American Quack by Phillip C Smith
Nuts! Documentary film by Penny Lane
Do you want the good feedback, or the bad feedback?
Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look out of my window to notice a car travelling east down my quiet little street. That is unremarkable, you might think — except that the street is one-way, running west. The street doesn’t function as a cut-through, so my guess is that these drivers aren’t flouting the rules. They’ve just failed to realise they’re making a mistake.
And why would they realise? I’ve noticed something curious about one-way street signs in the UK. If you’re driving the right way, you will notice white arrows on a blue background indicating as much. But if you’re driving the wrong way? Nothing. If you miss the No Entry sign at the start of the street, there are no “stop, turn around, this is potentially a disaster” signs. Instead you must notice subtle clues — like the alignment of the cars parked on the side of the road, or perhaps the expression on the face of the oncoming driver.
This is a curious design decision, it seems to me. Of two drivers heading towards each other down a one-way street, surely it is the one driving the wrong way who is most sorely in need of feedback.
Yet perhaps the one-way street is a good preparation for life, which many of us must navigate like a series of one-way streets. When we’re doing it right, we can expect regular nods of empty approval: “This is great.” “Good job.” “So useful.” When we’re doing it wrong? Silence, rarely but rudely punctuated by the crunch of a car crash. It is unusual to get a focused note of timely, specific and usable criticism before things go too badly wrong.
Sometimes the signs are in front of us, but we avert our eyes. In 2019, two researchers at Chicago’s Booth school of management, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, published an article presenting several studies of the effect of feedback on learning, in which subjects were offered two plausible answers to a difficult question, and invited to pick one. In most cases, this was a guess, and a toss-up. After 10 answers, the subjects were either shown all the answers they had got right, or shown all the answers they had got wrong.
Logically speaking, since these were all binary questions, that amounts to the same thing. But Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach found that the emotional framing mattered. When people were shown their successes, they learnt — and did better on a follow-up test with tweaked but related questions. When people were shown their failures, they did not improve. The researchers suggest that people don’t much care to contemplate their errors, and so are quick to move on and forget — especially in an experiment such as this, when the consequences of further errors are trivial. When shown their successes, they pause to savour the moment.
This may help to explain why so many of us are faced with the one-way-street problem: everyone is happy to share a friendly word of reassurance, but few people are keen to offer criticism, even when specifically requested. So what to do? One tactic is to ask for advice, instead of feedback. A Harvard Business School working paper written by Hayley Blunden and colleagues finds that when people ask for advice, it tends to prompt more useful comments: critical, actionable and focused on the potential for future improvements.
A second approach involves a neat two-step, demonstrated by author and psychologist Adam Grant. I interviewed him on stage a few months ago, and we had a great time. Afterwards, he asked me for marks out of 10 for our performance. Oh, nine and a half, I suggested. (There’s always room for improvement, right?) In a flash, the eager follow-up question: “What would have made it a 10?” Clever. If he’d just asked for my comments I’d have told him — truthfully — that I thought he was superb. But having persuaded me to admit that there was some fractional room for improvement, I then had to think about how.
Sensible organisations will try to make constructive feedback a routine matter. This column is read by several colleagues with the aim of preventing typos, non-sequiturs, libel and clichés. My Cautionary Tales podcast episodes go through a paper edit, and then a “table read” in which the team will identify confusing passages and suggest ways to enliven the storytelling. Because these sessions are focused on a piece of writing, not a person, and suggest improvements at a safe moment, they tend to be simple, straightforward and even fun. But constructive feedback of a more general nature remains elusive.
One idea I’ve played with recently has become popular in tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons — it’s called “stars and wishes”. Running a good game requires a huge variety of skills and plenty of quick thinking, and nobody is ever perfect. So after running a game I sometimes ask the players for their “stars”, which are moments which they particularly enjoyed, and “wishes”, which are things they’d like to see in the next session. Wishes open up a friendly space for constructive, actionable ideas. Not everyone responds and not every response is useful. Still, I learn a lot more when I ask than when I don’t.
I’m not sure how your boss would respond to a request for “stars and wishes”, but the spirit is the right one. If we want timely, useful criticism from others, we must be clever in how we ask for it. Otherwise our colleagues will be as tactfully uncommunicative as those non-existent signs for those driving the wrong way down my street.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 10 January 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
January 30, 2025
Cautionary Tales – The Night of the Mugger
Winston Trew has just been arrested for mugging. It’s 1972, and the crime has recently made its way to Britain from the United States. Dangerous thugs, replicating their American counterparts, have made the city of London their hunting ground – so Winston’s eventual conviction is a win for the police and the press.
The problem is, 22-year-old Winston is completely innocent.
Further reading
The key source on Winston Trew’s wrongful conviction is Rot at the Core: The Serious Crimes of a Detective Sergeant (2021), by Winston Trew and Graham Satchwell. Winston also self-published an earlier book called Black For A Cause (2010), where he tells his story.
Reporting by the Guardian was useful for this episode – in particular Simon Hattenstone’s long read “‘I just went bent’: how Britain’s most corrupt cop ruined countless lives‘” (2024).
Numerous Victorian newspaper articles formed the basis of our coverage of the garotting panic.
Two articles by contemporary historians were also very useful: Jennifer Davis’ “The London garotting panic of 1862: a moral panic and the creation of a criminal class in mid-Victorian England” (1980) and R. Sindall’s “The London Garrotting Panics of 1856 and 1862” (1987).
We drew on Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978) by Stuart Hall, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, which briefly touches on the similarities and differences between the mugging panic of the 1970s, and the garotting panics of Victorian Britain. We also drew on Tom Gash’s book Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things (2016).
For more on Paul Slovic and collaborators, see Lichtenstein, Slovic et al, “Judged Frequency of Lethal Events” (1978); and Barbara Combs and Paul Slovic “Causes of Death: Biased Newspaper Coverage and Biased Judgements” (1979).
Other Sources
Winston Trew biography
“Night of the Mugger”, by Tom Tullet, Daily Mirror, 17th August 1972
“Murderous Attack on Mr Pilkington MP”, The Times, 18th July 1862.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Garotting-Panic
“Garrotting”, Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser, 5th December 1862
“Garrotting and Burglaries”, Evening Mail, 28th November 1862
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/19th-century-you-wouldnt-want-be-put-treadmill-180964716
January 23, 2025
Cautionary Tales – Missing on “Dead Mountain”: A cold war cold case
In the bleak Russian winter of 1959, nine experienced hikers set out on an expedition. None of them made it back alive.
When their campsite was finally discovered, it told a chilling story: tents slashed open, bodies scattered across the snow. The hikers’ injuries were as baffling as they were gruesome. One had had his head stoved in; bits of bone had been driven into his brain. Others were missing their eyes and their tongues.
Had the hikers angered the local Mansi tribespeople? Had they witnessed a secret military experiment? Or had something even more strange and sinister unfolded on Dead Mountain?
Further reading
On the Dyatlov expedition:
The Dyatlov Pass Mystery. By Lucy Ash. BBC News. December 2019.
Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959. By Nature. Johan Gaume & Alexander Puzrin. 28 January 2021.
Has an Old Soviet Mystery at Last Been Solved by Douglas Preston. The New Yorker. 10 May 2021.
On USSR:
Transcript of Khruschchev’s Speech
The Real Secret of Khrushchev’s Speech. By Tom Parfitt. The Guardian. 24 Feb 2006.
The Secret Speech That Changed World History. By John Rettie. The Observer. 26 Feb 2006
Three Crucial Crises in the Development of the Khanty and Mansi Unique Culture by Victoria Vorobeva, Zoya Fedorinova, & Ekaterina Kolesnik. Nov 2015.
On Disinformation:
Hope For Cynics. By Jamil Zaki. 2024.
