Why Is Thinking Clearly So Difficult? - Tim Harford

1. 0:00 – 2:00

   Intro

   1. THTim Harford0:00

      I found that people were falling into a trap when it came to anything involving statistics. There was a reflexive skepticism. You can prove anything with statistics. Or this famous book, How to Lie With Statistics. And just this idea that you seem kind of really clever if you say, "Oh, well, yeah, you can prove anything with, with, with statistics." But if you're basically just rejecting everything on the grounds that it's got statistics in, well, that's not smart either. (air whooshing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:23

      Tim Harford, welcome to the show.

   3. THTim Harford0:25

      Oh, it's great to join you.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:27

      What would you say your area of expertise is? It seems like a relatively diverse background.

   5. THTim Harford0:35

      Yeah. It's a good question. I, I'd say I'm a professional nerd. Does that help? Uh, I mean, I trained as an economist. A- actually also as a philosopher, but that sounds slightly pretentious. So, let's just say I trained as an economist, uh, and then, uh, after a few other adventures, became a writer in print, books, Financial Times column, so obviously writing about economics. Uh, and then began a radio for BBC Radio 4 program about statistics, and so I had to learn pretty quickly about statistics. And over time, it's just got more and more, uh, into anything that's interesting in social science, behavioral economics, psychology, economics, statistics, data, data visualization. And along all of that, I've become very, very interested in stories, which, which I explore in my Cautionary Tales podcast and, and all my books.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:28

      What's the single thread that's tying all of that together?

   7. THTim Harford1:32

      I think the single thread is I'm fascinated by evidence-based ideas, uh, and I just love telling people about those ideas and, and te- I, I'm not, I'm not so much in the self-help, like, here's how to use these ideas to make, make a million dollars or whatever. I'm like, I have to tell you a story about this time that this thing happened and what this teaches us about whatever, game theory, loss aversion, whatever it is. Uh, so yeah, nerd stories.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:59

      Did

2. 2:00 – 11:50

   Innovations from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz & Rory Sutherland

   1. CWChris Williamson2:00

      you read Seth Stephen-Davidowitz's, uh, Don't Trust Your Gut earlier this year?

   2. THTim Harford2:06

      I skimmed it. I enjoyed the, his first one, which was what, Everybody Lies?

   3. CWChris Williamson2:12

      Yes.

   4. THTim Harford2:13

      I got mo- I got more out of Everybody Lies, I think possibly because he was coming at questions that I've been thinking about for a very, very long time in Don't Trust Your Gut. So, I was like, "Oh, this is great, but I, I know this stuff." But Everybody Lies I thought was really interesting, that, uh, that kind of insight that what people type into Facebook and what people type into Google are different, and what people type into Google tells you what they really want to know, and what people type into Facebook, 'cause it was Facebook at the time, tells you about the way they try to present themselves to the world. And that just from that very simple insight, I think so much came out.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:54

      For the people that haven't read Stephen's first book, there's a, a great example where he looks at the most common "my boyfriend is" sentences, and he compares what it is on Facebook and what it is on Google, and, and on Facebook, it's things like, "My boyfriend is so loving, the best, caring," so on and so forth. Uh, (laughs) "my boyfriend is" on Google is, "My boyfriend is not having sex with me. My boyfriend is having an affair. How can I tell? My boyfriend is falling out of love with me." And, uh, yeah, I mean, sometimes Google, we tell Google things that we don't even tell ourselves, you know?

   6. THTim Harford3:33

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:33

      We just decide to type something in to check it out, and it's maybe something that we don't want to say internally too much. But yeah, I mean, the, the, the, uh, stated and revealed preferences is something that I've been increasingly fascinated with recently. Have you looked at that much at all?

   8. THTim Harford3:50

      Well, I mean, it's a, that's a classic thing i- in economics, and, and, and economists, I think, historically have been too, too uninterested in stated preferences. We've basically said, "Well, we don't, we don't take people seriously at all. We only look at what they do." So, people can say they want something, but it doesn't matter. Look at what they actually do, and that is the real guide to their preferences. Uh, and I think behavioral economics has, has given us a, a slightly richer lens to think about that. Um, but I mean, that, that fundamental distrust of cheap talk, I think, you know, it's, it's still a useful insight.

   9. CWChris Williamson4:26

      Yeah, having skin in the game I think is a, a generally a good heuristic for everybody to assess what's going on with. I know that you're a fan of Rory Sutherland as well.

   10. THTim Harford4:35

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson4:35

       And, um, his most recent book when he was talking about transport for humans, uh, and some of the challenges.

   12. THTim Harford4:41

       That's a great book. It's a great book. Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson4:43

       It's so fantastic. Um-

   14. THTim Harford4:44

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson4:45

       ... and yeah, I think some of the relatively cheap but incredibly effective signals there that, uh, companies can do, 'cause it's not just interactions between humans, right? It's interactions between brands, between experiences. What was that thing, you wrote a blog post about being delayed on the Channel Tunnel?

   16. THTim Harford5:04

       Yeah, it was on, it was on the, on the Eurostar. So, all, it was a Financial Times column, but all my FT columns after a month get put on my website, timharford.com. So, you know, as long as you're willing to wait, you can read them. You don't have to subscribe. Although you should subscribe 'cause the FT is the best paper in the world. But (laughs) the Eurostar, basically it's the usual kind of story are massive queues and no one would tell us what was going on, and we were all standing around. Everyone's super stressed, and it's 30-degree heat, which I know is 85, 90 degrees in, in, uh, in Fahrenheit, and you know, and so on and so on, and we missed the train, and we still knew- nobody knew what was going on. And the, the point that I made is, I actually wrote that column in an hour on the train while the train was still stationary. But the point was, I was, it was air conditioned. I was sitting down. I had power. I had space, and I knew that, I knew we'd get to London eventually (laughs) . Uh, and so it's one thing to have a delay...... but the conditions of the delay, I mean, the, the, the train company only measures the delay. Like, they get punished by regulators if there's a delay of more than three hours, et cetera, et cetera. But for the passenger, there's all the difference in the world between "I'm sitting in comfort with power and I can work and I know what's going on," versus, "I'm standing, I'm, I'm stressed, I have no idea, no one's telling me anything." But to the, to the train company, delay is a delay, it doesn't make any difference.

   17. CWChris Williamson6:34

       Yeah, I think, uh, it's the difference between being stuck in the departure lounge with no idea of when the plane's going to arrive or whether you're going to take off, if you're on the tarmac with no idea of when you're going to take off, or on the tarmac with that countdown. It's the same reason-

   18. THTim Harford6:52

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson6:52

       ... the, the reason that Uber was revolutionary wasn't because, oh, you can call a cab from anywhere and it's a single app that works pretty much across the entire world, but it was the countdown. It was knowing exactly how long it's going to be until your taxi arrives. I had some-

   20. THTim Harford7:06

       And, and, and it being reasonably accurate.

   21. CWChris Williamson7:08

       Yes.

   22. THTim Harford7:08

       'Cause of course, some, some of that is cheap talk, but you're like, "Oh yeah, thi- this is basically correct." Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson7:13

       Sam Tatum, who is the head of Ogilvy's behavioral science unit, I think was on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he was one of the guys that contributed to the Heathrow complaint reduction thing for security.

   24. THTim Harford7:27

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CWChris Williamson7:27

       Did you ever look at Rory's stuff that he did with that?

   26. THTim Harford7:30

       I, no, I'm not familiar with it. I can imagine the kind of thing, but tell me more.

   27. CWChris Williamson7:33

       Yes. So, you've got anybody that's been to Heathrow knows, especially if you're going internally, especially terminal five, you just get backed up. There's huge volumes of people flying in from all over the place to then go internationally, or perhaps the reverse, coming internationally to then go domestically. And, uh, they were getting tons of complaints and they needed to fix it. And classically, like engineers do, they looked at it like an engineering problem. "Okay-"

   28. THTim Harford7:57

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CWChris Williamson7:58

       "... so how can we fit more of the scanners within this particular time? Can we train the staff in a different way so that they can speed people up? Are there ways that we can prepare the humans so that their bags are better done i- in advance?" It was a, a operations logistical problem, and before they decided to invest probably hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to fix this problem, Rory and his guys said, "Let's just try a behavioral change, a, a psychological trick before we do that." And the same way that they do at Disney World, they put, "50-minute wait from here, 40-minute wait from here, 30-minute wait from here," just signs all the way along and complaints just went through the floor. Because it's not necessarily-

   30. THTim Harford8:37

       Yeah.
3. 11:50 – 17:40

   What People Get Wrong About Inflation

   1. CWChris Williamson11:50

      I, I saw you do a blog post about what people keep getting wrong about inflation.

   2. THTim Harford11:55

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson11:55

      And that's, I mean, inflation must be perhaps a, uh, contender for word of the year 2022.

   4. THTim Harford12:03

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson12:03

      So, what, what should we understand about inflation and what do people keep getting wrong about it?

   6. THTim Harford12:08

      ... people think of inflation as prices going up. Uh, and, and indeed it's measured by CPI, Consumer Prices Index, which measures prices going up, and journalists, very good journalists who, who know what they're talking about will talk about, "Oh, CPI was 10%. That means inflation is 10%. Prices went up 10%." I mean, and it's not wrong, but it's missing a really, really important insight which is y- your classical pure textbook inflation is basically everything, the price of everything going up by roughly the same amount, including your wages, so the price of your labor is also going up. So basically nothing is really getting any more expensive in real terms 'cause the price in the store went up by 10% and your salary went up by 10% and kind of... The problem is it's all a bit confusing. Um, here's another form of inflation, which I would say is not really inflation at all, but it- it's still gonna come out in the price indices, and that's, um, Vladimir Putin turned off the taps for the global energy system. The price of food went through the roof. The price of natural gas went through the roof. The price of oil went through the roof. And we spend a lot of money on food and natural gas and oil, especially in Europe, uh, and so that went... you know, absolutely skyrocketed, and so on average prices have gone up by 10%. But the prices of a lot of stuff haven't gone up by 10% and importantly your salary didn't go up by 10%. Your take home pay didn't go up by 10%. So that's a relative price change, and in many ways that's much worse than inflation because you're actually poorer 'cause the stuff you want to buy, the stuff you need to buy is more expensive. Now having explained that difference you might say, "Well, sure, but why d- why does that matter?" Well, it matters because, um, the way a central bank should respond to that is totally different. I mean, the way a central bank should respond to the price of everything is going up about the same including wages is, well, that's a problem, you need to sit on that quite hard, raise interest rates high. But the price of energy goes through the roof because there's a war. That's not something the central bank should really be trying to deal with at all. And what makes the current situation difficult is we've got a mix of both and central banks are trying to figure out which of these two types of inflation to respond to. Um, and when I wrote that, uh, piece which again was a Financial Times column, two of the best economists in the Financial Times, I showed it to them and said, "What do you think?" And they said, "You're absolutely right, of course, but I'd just add one more thing." And the just one more thing they wanted to add was two, two pieces of sort of policy advice that completely contradicted each other, 'cause one of them thought central banks should start raising interest rates and the other thought that central banks weren't raising interest rates nearly enough. And, you know, and they're g- they're really, really smart guys. That's the mess we're in, and that's why, you know, the, the problem that central banks face and the problem we're all gonna face is, is not a straightforward one.

   7. CWChris Williamson15:11

      Even the experts don't agree.

   8. THTim Harford15:14

      No. And there's a lot of talk about how there was this famous line in the Brexit referendum in, in the UK that people have had enough of experts. There's a lot of anti-expert talk, um, and then there's this sort of the pendulum swing so now people are saying, "Well, you're an idiot. You should listen to the experts." And the truth is, well, the experts probably know more than you and me about whatever it is that they're expert in, but knowing more, having more expertise, having more experience, having more training doesn't guarantee that you get it right. So you sort of, you wanna listen to the experts, but you don't want to make the mistake of thinking the experts are infallible. Uh, and as, as you were saying, you can overcook anything. You can overcook the skepticism of the experts. You can overcook the, the faith of the experts, um, which is why this whole game of trying to understand the world and think clearly is, it's an endless project.

   9. CWChris Williamson16:04

      You've got a quote that says, "Indiscriminate doubt is at least as dangerous as indiscrimate belief." That must be very similar.

   10. THTim Harford16:14

       Yeah. So my... That is a point I made in my most recent book which is called The Data Detective in the US, and it's called How To Make The World Add Up in the UK. And it's a book about how to think clearly about the world, but in particular how to use numbers, how to use data to think clearly about the world. And the point I, I observed is I found that people were falling into a trap when it came to anything involving statistics. There was a reflexive skepticism or like lies, damn lies and statistics, or you can prove anything with statistics, or this famous book How To Lie With Statistics, and just this idea that you seem kind of really clever if you say, "Oh, well, yeah, you can prove anything with, with, with statistics." But if you're basically just rejecting everything on the grounds that it's got statistics in, well, that's not smart either. And so the challenge is to be discriminating in what you doubt and what you believe. Um, but all too often we just let our emotions lead us astray and we just pay... you know, we believe whatever we want to believe. We disbelieve whatever we want to, to disbelieve. But when it's framed too much as, "Oh, people will believe anything and they should be more skeptical," I'm not so sure about that. I mean, think about the, um... think about QAnon. You know, what's going on with QAnon? I mean, are these people who believe anything or are these people who doubt everything, who are skeptical of everything and every source of authority? You can frame it either way.

   11. CWChris Williamson17:39

       That's an interesting

4. 17:40 – 25:05

   The Laziness of Toxic Cynicism

   1. CWChris Williamson17:40

      horseshoe that I hadn't thought of. Yes, the fact that they seem to net out at a very similar sort of position. The people... I, I did a conversation with Peter Thiel a, a little while ago and he gave this great example of, um, climate skepticists and, uh, climate optimists, uh, net out at the same position. That the people that say, "We're gonna be absolutely fine with technology. It's gonna come down the pike and ch- e- everything will be sweet. Just hold on." And the people that say, "W- we're locked into this terrible future." Both of them net out at the same position which is we don't do anything right now.

   2. THTim Harford18:09

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson18:09

      And the way that they get to that is different and the futures that they envision are also very different, but they net out at the same position. I think, um...... the reflexive heterodoxy or reflexive contrarianism is a very easy way for people to seem smart. And that, to me, seems to be the primary seductive quality-

   4. THTim Harford18:29

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson18:29

      ... that taking that on has. That, I mean, uh, w- is that what your position is as well? Would you think that mostly what people are doing is looking cool by being a cynic?

   6. THTim Harford18:41

      I think that that's definitely part of it. I think that, uh, s- smack downs work on social media. If you're calling somebody an idiot, that works a lot better than saying that somebody's, somebody's great. So they, they're more likely to go viral, they're more likely to get purchased. But a- another thing that's driving this push towards excessive skepticism, this sort of toxic cynicism, is just that it's, it's generally easier to think of negative arguments than positive arguments. So there's, I discuss some of the evidence for this early on in, in my book, The Data Detective: Or How to Make the World Add Up, um, where, um, psychologists ask people to reason, uh, to produce arguments about a politically contentious issue. I think it was, um, capital punishment at the time. It was the, the work was done in the 1990s. Um, and as you would expect, people find it much easier to, to generate arguments on their side or, or against the side that they oppose. That's not a surprise. But the arguments that were, mm, easiest to generate were arguments attacking the opposing belief. If you ask people to, to come up with reasons why the other side is stupid, they could do that, uh, so many arguments, they find it incredibly f- um, easy to do that, that those arguments just flow really, really freely. Um, people also find it easy to come up with positive arguments for their own side, but not, it's not as easy. So there's that, the power of negativity, I think, is really fundamental there.

   7. CWChris Williamson20:08

      Why do you think it is that it's so much easier for people to come up with dunks on the other side than arguments for their own side?

   8. THTim Harford20:16

      I'm not sure. I mean, it may just be there's more ways to be wrong than to be right.

   9. CWChris Williamson20:20

      Yeah.

   10. THTim Harford20:20

       (laughs) Um-

   11. CWChris Williamson20:21

       Yeah.

   12. THTim Harford20:21

       But, but, uh, yeah, I'm not absolutely sure. It's an interesting question.

   13. CWChris Williamson20:24

       Yeah. I, uh, I, I think that certainly the credentials that you get on Twitter come from dunking, right? Twitter's just a dunk porn fest for the most part.

   14. THTim Harford20:34

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CWChris Williamson20:34

       Very rarely do you see, this is something, uh, uh, interesting I noticed online, if somebody crosses a line with, um, the type of language that they're using, the insults that they draw, whatever it might be, I haven't seen, uh, in as long as I can remember on Twitter, someone breaking the fourth wall of the argument and saying, "You've gone too far. That's out of order. That's unacceptable."

   16. THTim Harford20:55

       Mm-hmm.

   17. CWChris Williamson20:56

       No one ever seems to say that. They want to continue playing this sort of dry, side eye, satirical, I don't care about, you can't affect me, bro, type debate. That's the game of tennis that appears-

   18. THTim Harford21:09

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson21:09

       ... to be being played. It's very rarely, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're, you're not allowed to say that. That's too much," because that would indicate that they'd actually finally got to you, even if they perhaps had, but people will put up this front. So you have public, uh, s- you have public self-deception, which is probably reflecting internal self-deception as well. But that person may very well go away and spend the rest of the evening stewing over what their-

   20. THTim Harford21:36

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson21:36

       ... detractor online just accused them of.

   22. THTim Harford21:39

       Yeah. And, and social media are, are built for engagement, and engagement is driven a lot by emotions, and often it's the negative emotions. Not always. I mean, cat videos, that's, that's positive emotions. But, uh, a lot of it is driven by negative emotions. Um, I'm quite struck by the fact I've got nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter. I never get any retweets. No one ever, no one ever engages with anything I post because I'm, I mean, maybe I'm boring, but I like to think that it's 'cause I'm calm. I just sort of s- you know, say reasonable things. And p- you know, that, people might like it, people might follow me, but they don't retweet that stuff. And the, the few tweets I've had that have gone viral are often something like, "Oh, it's a direct quote of a former government minister admitting that the government that she just left is completely ridiculous," or something like that. And then that's something that people can really get into. "Oh, finally this, you know, these politicians have admitted what hypocrites they are," whatever. Hundreds, thousands of retweets. But, um, you know, that's rare because I'm not, I'm not really interested in, in playing that game. And the statistician Andrew Gelman, though, he makes an interesting point. So I think in a longer form, like blogging for example, there's more of a bias towards excessive positivity. So there's no harm in writing a blog post about other people's ideas and basically just saying, "Hey, they're great. These ideas are great." Da da da da. You know, that's fine. There's no cost to that. No one's gonna complain about that. If, on the other hand, you write a blog post, uh, or, you know, uh, a long social media post on Facebook or Medium, whatever, Substack, whatever the, the format is, if you write something taking somebody down, um, there, there are consequence- consequences for that. You've got to get your facts right, otherwise you could get sued, for example. No one cares if you've got your facts right if you're just being friendly to everyone. So, you- yeah, it, it's an interesting observation, that the bias towards positivity or negativity-

   23. CWChris Williamson23:39

       Mm.

   24. THTim Harford23:39

       ... depends on the, the scale of the media and the type of the media. And actually this, it's related to a point I make in, in my latest book, uh, about how the scale of news, just the time scale of news relates to the kind of news stories we pay attention to. So if you're, if you're checking the news hour by hour, it's gotta be gossip, market moves, um, stuff blowing up. Um, if you look at the news once a year, you can actually pick up totally different sorts of events. And if you were to look at the news once every ten years, you could actually start to track stuff that really means something important, like the decline in, um, childhood mortality or the increase in global temperatures. Uh, impossible-... to track these on a daily or weekly basis. But 10 years, 25 years, you can see them.

   25. CWChris Williamson24:30

       Yeah, do not confuse the noise for the signal, I think. And that's what everybody's doing. Another really terrifying insight that David Perell came up with is that almost all of the content that we consume will have been created in the last 24 hours.

   26. THTim Harford24:45

       Mm-hmm.

   27. CWChris Williamson24:45

       You know, there's, there's, uh, entire social media platforms that are dedicated to producing and publishing content that expires after 24 hours.

   28. THTim Harford24:53

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson24:53

       It's the only way that you can consume it. And for anyone that knows what the Lindy Effect is, the, it, they are platforms that are designed to be anti-Lindy. That there is literally no way that it gets to stick about.

   30. THTim Harford25:04

       Mm-hmm.
5. 25:05 – 30:08

   How the Pandemic Impacted Trust in Experts

   1. CWChris Williamson25:05

      thinking about the concern that people have over relying on statistics, that sort of reflexive heterodoxy, I understand coming out of the back of a period where many experts said things, and then went back on saying things, and then did a double U-turn, and then kept on going a- again. I, I, I wonder whether it's a British thing, but I think we're kind of perennially orderly, and the respect of authority, uh, seems to be a little bit better in the UK. Maybe we don't have that rebel spirit that the US does, uh, and maybe Australia as well. But even for me, I, you know, I've come out the other side of the last two years with a very different view of experts and expertise and the people in power. And I think it, uh, for me, it seemed very much like a mask-off moment that it's the same degree of idiocy all the way up. And that's not a bad thing. It's idiocy all the way down as well, all the way down to me. But, uh, realizing the humanness and just how flawed the people that are given positions of, um, prestige, power-

   2. THTim Harford26:14

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson26:14

      ... expertise, um, I, I, I think that's gonna be very, very difficult to regrow. And I wonder whether it can ever be done, uh, at least in the sort of medium-term future.

   4. THTim Harford26:24

      I think... I, I'm not sure that it can. I think one of the interesting things is that, uh, we tend to want to take an expert in one field and ask them to opine in other fields. Uh, and it can be very difficult, both for us and for the experts to realize they've, they've strayed outside their area of expertise. So, for example, uh, in the pandemic, you might have somebody with really deep expertise in, um, tracking virus variants and understanding mutations and what impact those mutations might have. And then you, then you might say, um, "Well, uh, y- you know, should we have another lockdown?" Um, which actually immediately gets you into questions of, uh, compliance. Would people accept another lockdown? How would they behave? Um, epidemiology, how would it spread if there was another lockdown? If, if com- And you sort of move from... And it seems like, "Oh, this is an expert in COVID, therefore I should ask him a question about COVID." But actually, no, they were expert, an expert in, um, viral mutations, and now you're asking them about behavioral science, in fact. Um, but... Which is ridiculous, but it doesn't seem ridiculous. And I think even to most experts, it wouldn't seem ridiculous 'cause they do know something. Wouldn't seem ridiculous to, to ask them to speculate. I mean, I, I interviewed, um, a British statistician called David Spiegelhalter, uh, many times. Uh, he's kind of a national treasure here in the UK. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, former president of the Royal Statistical Society. And he's terrific, but he's one of the few experts I encountered who would, you know, wax lyrical with, with great confidence about something, and then you'd ask him a question and he'd say, "Oh, I don't know anything about that." And that's... It was striking because it's so unusual for people to, to say, "No, not a clue. Ask me another question." Um, but I think it's 'cause he's so good. He's such a great communicator, and he's got that confidence to say what he knows and then to shut up when he thinks he doesn't know anything. I mean, he still gets things wrong. We all get things wrong. But it's a good start.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:34

      It's a signal of trustworthiness, I think, and honesty. It's actually something that people could hack. Um-

   6. THTim Harford28:43

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson28:43

      But I wonder whether ego defeats desire to manipulate when it comes to this, that people can't get their own egos out of the way, that the opportunity to pretend that they don't have a particular opinion on something, that they maybe don't actually know anything about, uh, is pushed to one side in place of the opportunity to, uh, proliferate, uh, to propagate their ideas-

   8. THTim Harford29:06

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson29:06

      ... about the fact that they could or should be this polymath of solutions.

   10. THTim Harford29:12

       Well, think about the media ecosystem as well. If you're a, say, a radio producer, you want to get an expert on to talk about COVID or, or anything else, the economy, whatever it is, um, you don't want someone who you ask them a question and they give you an answer, and then you ask them a second question and they say, "I don't know. I don't know about anything about any of that stuff."

   11. CWChris Williamson29:30

       (laughs)

   12. THTim Harford29:31

       I mean, of course you could go super deep into their area of expertise. But, but, but, you know-

   13. CWChris Williamson29:35

       Who wants that?

   14. THTim Harford29:36

       Well, yeah. I mean-

   15. CWChris Williamson29:37

       Good Morning Britain doesn't want that.

   16. THTim Harford29:38

       I, I... I often want that. But yes, Good Morning Britain doesn't want that. The... Most mainstream outlets don't want that, for good reason, right? That's, that's not what, uh, not what most, um, consumers of information want either. "Give me a broad overview." Um, but th- yeah, then you ha- you select into the very few people who are actually capable of giving that broad over- overview or the large number of people who are happy to, you know, go on TV and, and just bluff it.

6. 30:08 – 34:39

   Negative Consequences of Growing Skepticism

   1. THTim Harford30:08

   2. CWChris Williamson30:08

      I really like the term toxic cynicism. I think that it's a, uh, wonderful way to package up the current milieu that you really see online. The fact that it is, uh, uh, really excessive skepticism applied across everything, apart from things that you have a prior that you want it to be true.

   3. THTim Harford30:31

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson30:32

      ... previously, people would have already had biases around whatever motivated reasoning they've got. But I'm not convinced that their degree of skepticism or cynicism about everything else would be quite as tuned up as it has been. So what you have now is an even greater bias, uh, functionally, an even greater bias toward the things that people want to believe and an even greater cynicism against the things they don't want to believe.

   5. THTim Harford30:56

      Yeah. And it's reinforced by all of the things we're very familiar with, you know, the echo chamber effect, the political tribalism, and so on and so on, I'm sure.

   6. CWChris Williamson31:04

      Audience capture.

   7. THTim Harford31:04

      Uh, things that I'm sure you, you've discussed many times on the podcast. But, yeah, it, it, it doesn't help. It doesn't help at all. I mean, wh- when I, when I think about why, why we get things wrong, w- why we sort of make mistakes when we're consuming information in a, from social media or media, I mean, fundamentally, it, I think there are, there are three different things happening and we, uh, and we, we pay diff- different amounts of attention to them. So the first, the most logical is like, oh, we get stuff wrong because we don't know enough, so it's kind of incompetence. You don't have the expertise, you don't have the skills, you need more training, more information, you need to learn more about statistics or more about the history of Ukraine or more about whatever. And that's fine, that information deficit model is obviously important. Um, the second thing that's going wrong is these echo chambers, it's motivated reasoning, I want to reach a particular conclusion, um, and that's incredibly important. That's why I... one of the first chapters in my book, which is also one of my cautionary tales is all about this great art critic falling for this terrible fraud, I mean, really terrible forgery that he should never have fallen for. And my point is, this guy knew more about Vermeer, as it was a Vermeer, this guy knew... well, (laughs) or it wasn't a Vermeer, I should say. This guy knew more about Vermeer than anybody in the world. You couldn't have given him any more information, you couldn't have given him any more skill, he still made the mistake. He made the mistake because he was just so desperate to believe. So that's your second thing. You've got lack of skill, you've got the motivated reasoning, the, the desperation to believe. Then there's a third thing I think we often miss which is, which is we're just not really paying attention. You're scrolling through on a small screen and, you know, there's 144 characters and you s- you know, it's so easily just read something and you think you read something but actually, you read something else, or, um, you know, you didn't stop to think for a moment, is that actually true? Could that be true? Um, it's a- and it's amazing, and in all three cases, uh, we've got this, we've also got a meta problem which is a, a lack of awareness. So the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, unskilled and we don't know we're unskilled, um, but you've also got motivated reasoning and the I'm not biased bias, 'cause think about it, if you thought you were biased, you, you wouldn't be biased, right? I mean, obviously you think you're occupying a reasonable p- position on the spectrum, right? Otherwise, if you thought it was an unreasonable position, you'd move your position. And then of course, the brain's incredibly good at creating these illusions that we really are paying attention, that you, you really can drive and look at your phone at the same time, you really can read the paper and listen to a podcast at the same time, and, and, and of course, you, you can't. Um, so we make these three mistakes and we also make these meta-mistakes where we convince ourselves that actually this stuff doesn't really apply to us.

   8. CWChris Williamson34:04

      I suppose as well the fact that we need to deceive other people, the easiest way to deceive other people is to believe the deception ourselves.

   9. THTim Harford34:12

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson34:13

       Right? The fact that if it is... And, and this is an adaptive quality. In fact, I, I remember seeing something about one of the justifications or one of the reasons that was put forward as to why humans have got theory of mind and consciousness at all, is that it allows us to be able to model what other people might think-

   11. THTim Harford34:30

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson34:31

       ... and therefore be able to put our ideas forward in a way which would create the kind of outcome that it is that we want because we're socially so complex.

7. 34:39 – 39:55

   How Magic Links with Misinformation

   1. CWChris Williamson34:39

      There was a, a story that you had, Apollo Robbins, the world's most famous theatrical pickpocket says-

   2. THTim Harford34:45

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson34:45

      ... "The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things you look at every day that you're blinded to." What was the similarity between magic and misinformation?

   4. THTim Harford34:56

      Yeah. It... Well, it is partly this fact of believing firmly, you've got this incredibly powerful belief that you are noticing things, that you are paying attention, a- and you're not. So Apollo Robbins, his TED Talk is fantastic, it's only nine minutes, um, I won't spoil it, you should just watch it, it's an absolute masterclass in storytelling as well as, you know, he's an amazing pi- pickpocket. But he's just lifting stuff, he, he'll say, "Oh, have I... Just, just checked your pocket. Have I got your wallet?" And, and while he checks the, the pocket, he takes his watch, and then he says, "Oh, now you've noticed I've got your watch." And then he suddenly reaches for his watch and then Apollo Robbins takes, takes the wallet out of his pocket 'cause he's looking at his watch. And you think, "Oh, I can pay attention to my wallet and my watch at the same time." Like you think, you know, "I am... My, my senses are monitoring them both," but they're not. You've just got this illusion that they are, and that's what the pickpocket exploits. And the same thing is true, um, for information, uh, on the, on the media, social media. So a fantastic little study done by, if I remember rightly, David Rand at MIT and Gord Pennycook at, uh, Regina University in, in Canada, where they, what they did was they, um, asked people, uh, some people they showed them a bunch of headlines, some of which were fake news, and said, uh, "You know, would you retweet this or not?" And basically people would retweet a lot of fake news that was, was on their side. So like if you're a Trump supporter and there's some fake news about Biden being an idiot, you'll, you'll tweet it. If you're a Democrat and you see s- some fake news that says Trump's done something ridiculous...... you know, you'll retweet that. So, that's not surprising. What's surprising about this study is, um, they end, when, if they instead just ask people, "Can you tell me whether you think this headline is true or not?" They were actually very good at figuring out, "Oh, that, actually, no, there's no way Trump is going to deport Melania. That's not actually gonna happen. It's a delicious headline. I'd like to retweet it, but it's obviously not true." So, if you ask people instead of, "Will you retweet it?" "Is it true?" they can figure out the difference between truth and falsehood. If you say, if you ask them, "Well, do you think it's important to retweet only stuff that's true?" People will say, "Yeah, it is important that I only re-... I don't want to retweet misinformation. I only want to retweet stuff that's true." So, you go, "Well this is, this is weird. People retweet fake news. People can spot fake news. People say it's wrong to retweet fake news, and I wouldn't do it. So, what's going on?" And the answer is, they're just not paying attention. And so the final kicker to this study is when Rand and Pennycook asked people, showed them a headline and say, and this is done, they did it in a lab, but they also did it in the wild on Twitter. They show people a headline and they say, um, "Do you think this headline is true or not?" And, you know, people will, will evaluate it. And then they just watch their behavior for the next 48 hours, and they are less likely to retweet untrue claims. Because you asked them once to stop and think about it, and having stopped and think about it, you're just in a different frame of mind. It's like, "Oh, I should probably think about whether stuff's true or not." (laughs) And it lasts 48 hours. It's incredible, and that just shows, you know, we're just not, we're not paying attention. We think we would naturally evaluate the truth of every claim we see on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, that we just do it, and if we get it wrong, it's 'cause we're not smart enough or 'cause we're, we're biased. But often, we don't i- we don't notice that something's true or false 'cause it never occurs to us to spend a second's energy on evaluating the claim, and so we don't.

   5. CWChris Williamson38:42

      I wonder whether revealed and stated preferences clash up against each other a little bit here. I think a lot of people when asked, "Do you think that you should be retweeting things which are only proven to be true or obvious satire?"

   6. THTim Harford38:54

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson38:54

      Yes. But if you see something which is advantageous to your particular side, you're gonna let that one slide. Of course you are. You think-

   8. THTim Harford39:03

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson39:03

      ... "Well, uh, you know, this, uh, may not be true. I don't need to check too much, but it's pretty, pretty fortunate for whatever my point of view is." And-

   10. THTim Harford39:12

       I, I mean, I mean, I agree, but that's why it's so important to have done the experiment where they tested the impact of just asking people to evaluate one statement for truth, and then were able to observe in the wild, you know, on social media, that it changed people's behavior.

   11. CWChris Williamson39:30

       Mm-hmm.

   12. THTim Harford39:30

       So, yeah, I'm sure people exaggerate how important it is to them only to retweet the truth. But you can, by, by just asking them to think about it for a second, just for a second, you can change their behavior, uh, over the course of, of the next couple of days.

   13. CWChris Williamson39:46

       So, what we've talked about so far has been logic, rationality, understanding of cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, and stuff like that.

8. 39:55 – 51:13

   Effectiveness of Using Intuition & Feeling

   1. CWChris Williamson39:55

      You also say that economists should get more in touch with their feelings, and I'm very interested in the limits of the usefulness of, uh, a rational approach. Uh, what, w- what role does intuition have, if any, in the modern world, and stuff like that? So, what are your thoughts there?

   2. THTim Harford40:12

      So, I've changed my mind over, over the years. So, a- as a, as an economist, as a young economist, I was taught rational choice theory, and, you know, this is a good way to understand people's decision-making. And, of course, people aren't always rational all the time, but it's a great way of, it's a great starting point. Uh, and in fact, I wrote a whole book called The Logic of Life, which is all about the different ways in which rational choice theory could be used to understand things like, uh, a- addiction, and, um, discrimination, crime, uh, all kinds of things that don't seem to have any logic. They're just, they're just, you know, human weakness or they're evil things. And some of them are evil things, but they're evil things with a logic behind them. Um, I wouldn't have w- I wouldn't write that book today, because I'm much more interested now in the psychology of things, in wh- what's, you know, now known as behavioral economics, so taking into account emotions, taking into account our cognitive limitations alongside rational choice. Actually, I think the two together are quite powerful, because if you've got a good grounding in rational choice theory, you have a good sense of what the optimal decision is, at least under certain conditions. You need enough information, enough data. Um, and if you've got a good grounding in, in behavioral economics and in psychology, you got a good sense of what it is that's going to stop you from making that optimal decision.

   3. CWChris Williamson41:32

      Uh, what's gonna mediate it? What's gonna stop you from being that optimal decision-maker?

   4. THTim Harford41:36

      Yeah. And, I mean, this is why... And it comes into not just decision-making, but also the way we process information. So, this is why the, the opening of my latest book, instead of teaching you some statistical trick or talking about correlation or, or anything like that, I say, "Look, the first thing you have to do is observe your emotional response when you're reading a headline, when you're reading an article, looking at something on, on social media. Before you start calculating or evaluating or looking for sources or any of that, first of all, just say, 'How does that make me feel? Am I, am I angry? Does it make me feel vindicated? Does it make me feel scared? Whatever it is, what's that emotion?' And then just, and then go and have another look. Look at the claim again. Having observed your own emotion, it's, it's going to look different." And I'm not saying, "Don't feel emotions. Don't feel angry," you know? It's, uh, "Don't, don't feel happy." It's l- obviously it's legitimate to have emotions. But, uh, y- you know, you should notice that you're having that emotional reaction before you go back...... and, and try to engage your powers of logic, 'cause they're, they're not, they're not friendly to each other. It's best to try and keep them a bit, a bit separate. So yeah, understanding emotion is incredibly important.

   5. CWChris Williamson42:50

      I wonder, it, it seems to me to be a, a common trajectory. Russ Roberts from EconTalk was on the show a little while ago and his new book Wild Problems is, is literally all about this. It's the, uh, limits outside of, uh, economic theory and why you need to have something else that-

   6. THTim Harford43:05

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson43:05

      ... you could call intuition or good instinct or whatever. And, uh, there's, I, I find it fascinating to look at people that have spent a long time in a particular industry and where they get to as the trajectory starts to, to really sort of, um, accumulate a ton of experience. And it seems like everyone's zeroing in on this. You know, it's the same way as looking at your grandparents for how to live a good life, is that grandparents, towards the end of it, they're, you know, not really chasing the status so much anymore, they're not playing with keeping up with the Joneses, they're not picking fights with people for no apparent reason. They're just settling into something that's a little bit more simple. And I think that, yeah, uh, you and Russ as, um, flag-waving economist ambassadors for someone integrating a little bit more felt sense holistically seems like a, a good signal to me.

   8. THTim Harford43:54

      Yeah. Well, it's very flattering to be compared to Russ. He's got an amazing podcast and he's, he's got a lot of experience. And his, I mean, he's coming at it from a slightly different angle to me, but I think it's a very, it's a very important angle, which is, he's, he's just super skeptical about our ability to know anything, to understand any system. It's like it's always more complicated than you think. Um, I have a l- a little bit more faith in our ability to comprehend the world than Russ does, uh, but I think it's a re- it's a really useful check to say, "Do, do you really think you understand this? Do you really think we've, we can fix this now with, with enough data?" Um, 'cause it's, that's a very tempting path, and it's very important to have someone like Russ just whispering in your ear, "Are you sure? Are you sure you really understand?"

   9. CWChris Williamson44:43

      What was that story about Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairies?

   10. THTim Harford44:48

       Oh, I, I love it. I love that story. It's, um, it's- it's one of the cautionary tales, and it, it's a, it's quite a famous story, although, uh, as with many of the cautionary tales, you've hear- you might have heard some of the story, but you don't, you don't know all the details, and the details are so delightful. But it's all about Conan Doyle, uh, the, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most famous men in the British Empire, hearing that two little girls from Yorkshire, near Bradford, have taken photographs of fairies at the bottom of the garden. And he heard about this, I think, in 1920. The first photograph was actually taken in 1916, if I remember rightly. Um, and he wrote a whole book, uh, The Coming of the Fairies. And he said, "Well obviously, this could be a hoax, um, and you be the judge, but I think more likely it is an epoch-making discovery." (laughs) You know, spoiler, it was not an epoch-making discovery, it was a hoax. But I was just so fascinated by, both by how Doyle convinced himself of this thing that is transparently ludicrous, but also what the girls were thinking. What, how, what makes two little girls perpetrate such a hoax? And at what point did they think, "Uh-oh, this has all got much bigger than we ever intended"? And so both sides of that story are, are rather beautiful.

   11. CWChris Williamson46:19

       It's something to see a author that created a character (laughs) who is supposed to pay attention to the little things and be aware of his cognitive biases fall prey to two little girls. How, how did they make the photo?

   12. THTim Harford46:33

       L- well this is one of the interesting things, uh, that this whole thing was, was deconstructed much, much later by the British Journal of Photography, which for decades had said, "This is ridiculous. (laughs) We're not gonna descend..." And in the end they said, "All right, fine, we'll look at this." And they, the editor of the British Journal of Photography published like a 10, 10, uh, issue expose. It's about 80 pages long in total. It's incredible. And there are, I think there were five photos that were four different methods of fakery, and that's one of the things that did confuse people. Because if you're looking for, like, what is the one thing they did to make these photos, there is no one thing. You w- you will never find it. Um, and, and funnily enough, that links back to the, we were talking about stage magic. One, one of the ways in which really good stage magicians will fool people and they've, and it helps them to fool other magicians, is they'll do the same trick over and over again. You say, people say, "Well, you should never perform the same trick twice," but they do. They'll perform the same trick over and over again, but each time there's a different method to achieve the same effect. Uh, so we know one time it's like you've palmed the coin. Another time it's kind of, you're, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're using a, a dummy, you're... And so somebody who's trying to get a sense of like, "Well, how are they doing that? Oh, I think he might have done that." And then they'll watch the next time you do it and you, you do it in a different way, and they're just more confused than ever. And so this is, this is the, the problem that, that Conan Doyle had. So one of the, one of the paintings wa- one of the photographs was actually heavily post-processed by an expert, so it was basically Photoshopped. Um, you know, he physically painted over the negative. And that was supposed to be to enhance it for display at a lecture. Another one was a double exposure, um, which is not surprising given one of the girls was actually a, a little girl. She's 17 years old and she wok- she worked in a photo studio doing double exposures all day. Not really that surprising she could do that. Another one was just, um, uh, you know, paper cutouts and they've just, you know, just took a photograph of a little girl sitting next to a paper cutout, and, you know, the photo's two-dimensional so you...... you can't tell it's a paper cutout. Um, so these different methods. And he just went through these extraordinary contortions to convince himself that it, that it must be true. And he, he wasn't just the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, he was that. Two other things. He had intervened, um, in a, in a kind of, in the serial of, you know, The Serial podcast, you know, th- this whole thing. He was involved in that, uh, the Edwardian equivalent of Serial where there was somebody who'd been con- uh, convicted of this crime and Conan Doyle was convinced he was innocent, and he assembled this amazing amount of evidence and got him off, and I think probably rightly. Um, so he was, could, could be completely forensic. The other thing, do you wanna guess where Conan Doyle's first ever work was published?

   13. CWChris Williamson49:34

       No idea.

   14. THTim Harford49:35

       You'll never guess.

   15. CWChris Williamson49:35

       No idea.

   16. THTim Harford49:36

       British Journal of Photography. He was actually an expert photographer. He knew loads about photography. And so that was all just ... You, to think, "Well, how could he be fooled?" And it, and it was just, "Oh, well, I know so much about photography. I know how hard photography is. These little girls can't possibly have, have pulled off trick photography because I know how hard trick photography is." So something we see over and over again is expertise is an advantage if you're thinking clearly and you're not emotional, but once you're emotionally engaged, expertise can be a, you know, active disadvantage. It can actively drag you down because you create more reasons, even if they're spurious reasons, to believe whatever it is you're, you're wanting to believe.

   17. CWChris Williamson50:20

       One of my friends, Gwenda Bogle, has this fantastic insight where he says, "When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion and to very cleverly become stupid."

   18. THTim Harford50:37

       Conan Doyle is an example, and so was Abraham Bredius, the art critic we were talking about. He, he saw things in this fake Vermeer that m- that I would never see, that most people would never see. Incredibly sophisticated re- reasons to believe that it was genuine. And there was one big reason to think it wasn't genuine, which is it didn't look anything like anything Vermeer had ever painted. (laughs) Um, but he was willing to look past all of that because he could see all these subtleties and, um, yeah, expertise, I'm in favor, but, uh, it can be misused like anything else.

9. 51:13 – 1:00:31

   Lessons from the Invention of the Bicycle

   1. THTim Harford51:13

   2. CWChris Williamson51:13

      Tell me about what you learned to do with the invention of the bicycle, because one of my friends, George Mack, sent me a study years ago that explained the efficiency, the movement efficiency of different animals in the animal kingdom, and it's some particular number, whatever it is, energy versus distance or something like that, and then he adds in, they add in a human on a bicycle.

   3. THTim Harford51:37

      Yeah. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson51:37

      And a human on a bicycle is, like, a factor of 10 better than the, the best moving albatross or whatever, marlin, or whatever it is. So w- what did you learn about the bicycle?

   5. THTim Harford51:48

      What did I learn about the bicycle? I mean, there's so many different things. So I studied the bicycle for another book of mine called Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, which also is a, a podcast series, and I just explored different inventions. And one of the delights of the bicycle, uh, was just the way that it reshaped society. Now, when, when, when people were ready ... The bike was quite a long time in gestation, uh, but when people were ready, it just turned everything on its head. Uh, so it was, it was a real force for the emancipation of women, um, who could cycle around without a chaperone. Uh, and there were various campaigners who said, "Oh, you know, this is going to lead to fornication and prostitution and so on."

   6. CWChris Williamson52:28

      Debauchery on a, on the back of a bicycle.

   7. THTim Harford52:30

      Yeah, all kind of ... But, um, uh, and there's, and there's a, there's a wonderful ... There's a, um, a kind of tabloid news headline of the day which, which is about, um, a woman, I think it was Amalia Allen if I remember her name rightly, and it was front page news because she'd gone cy- gone bicycling in trousers. And so this headline was, "She wore trousers," and, uh, "Divorced lady cycling around in trousers." But the, the interesting thing was, like, everyone was excited about this divorced lady in trousers. No one was worried about the bicycling. So there was incredible, uh, freedom. And there was one, um, one of the leading, uh, women's rights campaigners, and I'm, I'm blanking on her name, who was asked ... who, who was basically campaigning for universal suffrage and so on throughout the 19th century and I think died in about 1920, and she was asked what, what had been the greatest contributor to women's freedom, and, and she said the bicycle. Uh, so it, these, these inventions, whether it's the brick or whether it's paper or whether it's the bicycle, they, they change the world by changing us. It's not just they solve a little problem that we had, they slot right into our society and, uh, and we just go on as normal except that one little thing is easier, we've got a better mousetrap. They, they work because they just, they create new winners and new losers and reshape the way we live, and the bicycle is a, is a great example of that.

   8. CWChris Williamson54:02

      I remember learning about when caffeine was first introduced, when coffee shops first came about, because up until that point, during the middle of the day, if a gentleman and his friends wanted to go and discuss some serious philosophical or political ideas, the only place that they could go would be the tap house or the pub.

   9. THTim Harford54:19

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson54:19

       And inevitably, after a few of the only drinks that were mostly consumed there, the conversation degenerated somewhat. Whereas as soon as the introduction of caffeine happened, that actually permitted people to go out during the day and maybe even not only have it degrade, but improve over time as they drank a little bit more caffeine and they were a little bit more alert and, and they were, uh ... And this is something I remember reading about Aristotle. He was going to these, uh, discussions at a-... influential friend's house dinners on an evening time, and he put forward a suggestion that they replace all of the cups and the glasses on the tables with smaller ones.

   11. THTim Harford54:59

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson54:59

       And he said, "Because it will make us think that we're drinking the same amount, but we'll actually drink a little bit less, and that will, uh, facilitate, it's going to foster a, a better conversational environment." And the same thing, whatever, 1,500 years later is stop drinking so much during the day if you want to have a good conve- good conversation.

   13. THTim Harford55:16

       I would, I would love to see the randomized trial on that, you know, d- did that work. Um, but yeah, it, I mean, it's, it's amazing and, and th- there's, um, there's a related example which is Henry Pelham, the British Prime Minister, uh, this is w- 1700s if I, if I'm correct, if I remember rightly. He changed the tax regime on tea. So tea was taxed at 100% or more, uh, and so loads of smuggling, not much tea actually drunk, and he slashed tax on tea and th- put the smugglers out of business. People consumed a lot more tea, tax revenues from tea went up. This is what the current British government is trying to do, but it turns out it's not as easy as Henry Pelham made it look. Um, so they cut taxes, revenues went up, and, um, an e- economist, uh, Francesca Antman found that she could track this massive spike in the consumption of tea because there'd been this big policy change, and she could actually track it through to the mortality figures. She got all the births and deaths, and was able to see the decline in the mortality rate because people were boiling their water, because that's what you need to do for tea, and then they didn't have germ theory, they didn't know it was making the water safer, but it was. And you could see it in the death figures.

   14. CWChris Williamson56:39

       That's very cool. I got suggested ... Complete tangent, I got suggested a book this weekend, uh, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. You familiar with this?

   15. THTim Harford56:50

       No. I immediately want to read it though.

   16. CWChris Williamson56:52

       I am going to be harping on about this for quite a while. So in 1939, before Germany invades Poland, there's murmurings that a war is afoot-

   17. THTim Harford57:04

       (laughs)

   18. CWChris Williamson57:04

       ... and the British government decides that they need to start up a secret clandestine guerrilla arm, and they need to come up with very innovative ways to disrupt the potential oncoming Nazi offensive and occupation. So they start to find inventors, criminals, uh, soldiers, but they've all got very unique different skill sets. One of them had created, uh, a, the limpet mine. It was the inventor of the limpet mine. And he was now driving around in a 18-foot high caravan complete with four bedrooms and two bathrooms and hot and cold running water in the 1930s. Uh, and, and they got ahold of him, and they got ahold of this Scottish guy that had lived, uh, uh, under this incredibly sort of austere environment and was just the most reckless guy, and he would go out and womanize on an evening time and then come in during the day. And he created the first pamphlet of guerrilla warfare ever. And it was edible in case they were captured by the enemy, and he timed himself to see how long it would take to eat it, and he said that, "With a good-sized glass of water, a gentleman could consume the entire pamphlet in less than two minutes."

   19. THTim Harford58:12

       (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson58:12

       And just, it's, uh, an end- it's like a, a, The Avengers but sort of in the 1930s and gentlemanly. And, and it's just, it's outstanding. So, uh, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, really well-written, super beautiful prose, really easy, super accessible, and, uh, I'm, uh, uh in love with it at the moment.

   21. THTim Harford58:33

       Oh.

   22. CWChris Williamson58:33

       It's very good.

   23. THTim Harford58:33

       I do- I love it. I shou- I have to read it and, and investigate cautionary tales. I a- always finding whenever I read anything these days, I'm like just I'm, I'm just here for when something goes terribly wrong and I can start learning lessons. That's, that's d- so that's the cautionary tales, uh, cautionary tales mission in life.

   24. CWChris Williamson58:49

       You can justify it however you want for the podcast.

   25. THTim Harford58:52

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson58:52

       There was a, one of the things that he'd done with the limpet mine, this guy, they were struggling (laughs) to find a way to create a time release mechanism that would dissolve in water or would, uh, reduce down in water at an even time.

   27. THTim Harford59:09

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CWChris Williamson59:09

       So you could have a different type of powder that could be used, but the compression of the powder was, th- there, there was varieties in that. Too much compression, it would never go off. Too little compression and it might kill the diver that's supposed to set it. And, uh, this guy was eating, uh, aniseed balls. Um, his daughters dropped some on the floor because he was always shifting them off the, the bench where they needed to work in his house before they got this office in, in London. Uh, and he realized that the aniseed balls almost always seemed to dissolve in his mouth at the same speed, no matter what he did. Uh, so they ended up using aniseed balls as the detonation triggers-

   29. THTim Harford59:42

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson59:42

       ... for these things. But then they realized that they needed to keep them dry because if they got slightly wet during transportation or whatever that they didn't, th- it would have changed the length of time that the fuse would have gone forward as soon as it gets in water. So he then realized that a condom was the exact size and shape to be able to protect this thing. So this is before you could Amazon anything.
10. 1:00:31 – 1:11:44

    Introducing Tax Incentives for Having Babies

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:31

    2. THTim Harford1:00:31

       And I, I, I love it. I love it. On the subject of increase in childbirths and, uh, cutting taxes, s- which we were talking about with tea, there is a fantastic study, uh, of something that happened in Australia about 15 years ago where the, the government said, "Oh, we're gonna give you a..."... baby bonus if you have a baby, 3,000 Australian dollars, um, that's about 1,500 US dollars, something like that. Um, so, like, it's worth having. And they announced it with six weeks' notice, so they announced it in mid-May and it was going to come into effect at the end of June, beginning of July. And people said, "Is that not a bit reckless? I mean, are people not going to try and time their babies e- to get the, the, the baby bonus? And the Australia, shouldn't you just announce it with immediate effect?" And the Australian government were like, "Oh, no, no, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. No one will do that." And the birth rate on the 1st of July was more than twice the birth rate on the last day of June. (laughs) Like, all those people basically just going, "Just hold on."

    3. CWChris Williamson1:01:39

       Yep.

    4. THTim Harford1:01:39

       "Just hold on." Uh, and it's amazing. It's amazing. You eat your, your birth and indeed your death response to tax incentives because they found a similar effect with abolishing inheritance tax. Um, so yeah. People, people respond to incentives. This is, this is the y- cla- the classic economist in me, rational choice theory, it does actually explain a few things.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:02:00

       My friend's wife is a schoolteacher, and in her class last year, she had a sweepstakes where all of the kids... She was pregnant. Sweepstakes up on the board, "This is the month that the new baby is supposed to be born in. Everybody pick a day. When do you think it's gonna happen," or whatever. Uh, (laughs) but she didn't tell them the actual due date. It's like, "This is the month," or whatever, "This is the period." Uh, and her least favorite student, the one that she really hates, chose the correct due date.

    6. THTim Harford1:02:28

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:02:28

       Uh, and sure enough, she was getting closer to the time that she's supposed to give birth, and her waters broke on the evening of that day, and she held on to not give birth to the baby until the next day to spite this child-

    8. THTim Harford1:02:42

       (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson1:02:43

       ... that she hated. (laughs) It's-

    10. THTim Harford1:02:44

        She sounds like a, a really inspirational teacher.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:02:47

        I, I really, I thought that, that conversation was phenomenal. It was absolutely great.

    12. THTim Harford1:02:51

        There's, there are many lessons there. Although, I would have said, could you not just have the baby and then lie about the birthday?

    13. CWChris Williamson1:02:58

        Perhaps, yeah. Yeah, which would be more, more surreptitious. But there's a degree of manipulation and honesty going on here which is sort of beau- it's a beautiful dance. Um-

    14. THTim Harford1:03:06

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:03:08

        ... speaking of taxes and speaking of children, I'd be remissed if I didn't ask you, what do you think about incentivizing British mothers with tax deductions to have children? I think it was originally a Hungarian policy. Uh, if we can put to one side the person that actually came up with it or proposed it or okayed it-

    16. THTim Harford1:03:27

        Mm.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:03:27

        ... I thought when I first heard of that a month ago, I was like, "Th- surely this is a win. Surely this is gonna be a win for mothers that want to decide to have children. It's going to open up their financial freedom, it's going to give them more time at home, it's going to maximize, we're gonna, the population collapse and all of the different things that we need." What's the view of an economist philosopher?

    18. THTim Harford1:03:49

        Uh, so, w- uh, I mean, the two things I would say up front is, is first of all, do you have any reason to believe that, um, society wants more or fewer children than individual mothers would choose by themselves? You know, is there some reason to believe that they're, they're not taking into account, you know, some social cost or social benefit? It's, it's not, it's not clear because you can cut it both ways. Um, the second thing I'd say is, we do already incentivize children in the sense that the income support is paid with the child benefit paid. So, if you have children, you, we do get money until they're 18 years old, uh, to offset the cost of having them. Um, guess the third thing though is if, fundamentally if what you want is more people, um, you could also be more welcoming to immigrants. So, you could do both. And I find it interesting that the people advocating the baby bonuses are generally not advocating, uh, freer, um, immigration restrictions. Uh, and I would have thought that actually when you look at it logically, but those things are probably pushing in the same direction. Certainly something we've had in, in the UK from open borders with the EU was lots of quite young people coming. By young, I mean like people in their 20s coming, um, working hard, paying taxes, not really demanding a lot of benefits because, you know, they're young, they're of working age. Um, and, uh, didn't seem to be very popular. Uh, but it's not clear to me that that's actually a worse solution than trying to incentivize, um, mothers to have children. Does that... I feel like I've, I can't, I don't know if I've overengineered the answer to the question or, or dodged it.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:05:41

        No, I think, well, it's interesting. It's, it's things that I hadn't considered. Certainly the immigration point is one that people would point to. I think that it, it shouldn't be the case that your population growth is at the stage where you need to import other people-

    20. THTim Harford1:05:58

        Mm-hmm.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:05:58

        ... in order to be able to supplement it. It feels like immigration should be a bonus on top rather than something that... Because if you continue the clock forward based on the current trends, you would end up with a very non-British born British population, although you would have second generation and third generation and whatever, whatever, whatever. And everybody is a hodgepodge of everything. I'm sure that if I looked at my genetic tree that I would end up being from Ireland or Scotland or some other place. Um, I, I, I understand the concern that some people have about diluting down British culture by importing too many people that aren't necessarily immediately a part of that. Integration would be great. Um, being from the northeast of the UK, it's pretty diverse, at least in the schools and the areas that I was at, it was. Um, it's an interesting one. I, I, I don't know. I, I think that the, the really cool question around...... is the reason that women aren't having more children because they don't think that they can afford it?

    22. THTim Harford1:06:57

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:06:57

        Basically. Um, I see in the comments on a lot of videos that I've done to do with the mating crisis, dating challenges, young people not having sex, uh, more than 50% of women for the first time in history childless by 30. That wasn't right, as it was the other one, uh, that did that study, 22 to 45-year-old women unmarried and childless for the first time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some of the comments from an N of one completely un-randomized study, uh, were talking about, uh, "It's very difficult to bring a child into this world because it's pretty expensive." Um-

    24. THTim Harford1:07:30

        Mm-hmm. Yeah, so just a couple of thoughts then. So one is, I mean, it's, it's a good question, but we're not the right people to answer it. Uh, we're basically two, two blokes. I don't know if you've got children. I've got three children, but I think my wife probably knows more about the decisions to have these children than I do. You know, we should probably ask more women, uh, who have decided to have children and who have decided not to have children. Um, the second point is that, um, Daniel Kahneman, I think he originally got this idea from Kurt Lewin, great s- um, psychologist of the early 20th century and, and mid 20th century. Daniel Kahneman says we often think of the ... If you imagine the analogy with a car, we want to get the car to move faster and we're, we're always thinking about-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:08:16

        Rather than removing the brakes.

    26. THTim Harford1:08:18

        ... h- you know, hitting, hitting the accelerator, but yeah, take your foot off the brake. So yeah, the f- I th- I think your instinct is absolutely right. Before you say, "We should pay women more money to have children," we should look around and go and, and figure out why they're not having children in the first place. And is it, and is it a problem or are they having children for... Uh, are they not having children for completely legitimate reasons that actually there's n- n- you have no reason you'd want to-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:08:46

        That would be-

    28. THTim Harford1:08:47

        ... to influence their decision?

    29. CWChris Williamson1:08:48

        ... that would be a great study for someone to do, to look at, for a woman, for women, big chunk of women, nice big sample, how many children would you want to have? How many children do you think you'll have? Or perhaps even if you were to take a ... It would be difficult to do it for right now, but you'd certainly be able to look at maybe the last 20 years, women that were 50s perhaps.

    30. THTim Harford1:09:10

        Mm-hmm.
11. 1:11:44 – 1:12:26

    Where to Find Tim

    1. CWChris Williamson1:11:44

       Harford, ladies and gentlemen. Tim, very much appreciate you, very much appreciate your work. Where should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do online?

    2. THTim Harford1:11:51

       So, uh, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford is the podcast or on, uh, the BBC, BBC More or Less. Uh, and my website is timharford.com. You read all the articles. You can find the Twitter links, all that good stuff.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:12:06

       Thanks, Tim. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:12:26