Why Is Thinking Clearly So Difficult? - Tim Harford

Tim Harford is an economist, associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a journalist and an author. Humans need to be able to accurately judge the world around them. With more information than ever, this should be getting easier by the year and yet clear thinking seems to be ever more elusive. Why are we so prone to biases and what are some of the biggest rationality blunders from history? Expect to learn why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got obsessed with photos of fairies, what everyone misunderstands about inflation, the danger indiscriminate doubt and reflexive cynicism, the similarities between magic and misinformation, why smart people get hijacked by ideology and much more... Sponsors: Get a free bag of Colima Sea Salt at http://modernwisdomsalt.com/ (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Tim's website - https://timharford.com/ Buy Tim's book - https://amzn.to/3DNELvw Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #humannature #economics #psychology - 00:00 Intro 02:00 Innovations from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz & Rory Sutherland 11:50 What People Get Wrong About Inflation 17:40 The Laziness of Toxic Cynicism 25:05 How the Pandemic Impacted Trust in Experts 30:08 Negative Consequences of Growing Skepticism 34:39 How Magic Links with Misinformation 39:55 Effectiveness of Using Intuition & Feeling 51:13 Lessons from the Invention of the Bicycle 1:00:31 Introducing Tax Incentives for Having Babies 1:11:44 Where to Find Tim - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 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 really clever if you say, oh, yeah, you can prove anything 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.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Tim Harford, welcome to the show.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Oh, it's great to join you.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say I'm a professional nerd. Does that help? I mean, I trained as an economist, actually also as a philosopher, but that sounds slightly pretentious. So let's just say I trained as an economist. And then after a few other adventures, became a writer in print, books, Financial Times column. So you're obviously writing about economics. And then began a Radio 4, BBC Radio 4 programme about statistics. And so I had to learn pretty quickly about statistics. And over time, it's just got more and more into anything that's interesting in social science, behavioural economics, psychology, economics,

• 1:15Speaker 00

  statistics, data, data visualization. And along all of that, I've become very, very interested in stories, which I explore in my Cautionary Tales podcast and all my books.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:31Speaker 00

  I think the single thread is I'm fascinated by evidence-based ideas. And I just love telling people about those ideas and telling, I'm not, I'm not so much in the self-help. Like, here's how to use these ideas to 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. So yeah, nerd stories.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  Did you read Seth Stephens Davidowitz's Don't Trust Your Gut earlier this year?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I skimmed it. I enjoyed the his first one, which was what everybody lies.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  I got 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 know this stuff. But everybody lies, I thought was really interesting that that kind of

• 2:32Speaker 00

  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, because 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.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  For the people that haven't read Stephen's first book, there's 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 on Facebook, it's things like, my boyfriend is so loving, the best, caring, so on and so forth. 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 yeah, I mean, sometimes Google, we tell Google things that we don't even tell ourselves. You know, we just decide to type something in to check it out and it's maybe

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  something that we don't want to say internally too much. But yeah, I mean, the stated and revealed preferences is something that I've been increasingly fascinated with recently. Have you looked at that much at all?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's like, that's a classic thing in economics and economists, I think, historically have been too. Too uninterested in stated preferences. We 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. And I think behavioral economics has given us a slightly richer lens to think about that. But I mean, that, that fundamental distrust of cheap talk, I think, you know, it's, it's still a useful insight.

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

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

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Great books, great book.

• 4:43Chris Williamson?

  So fantastic. And yeah, I think some of the relatively cheap, but incredibly effective signals there that companies can do, because 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?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  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 because the FT is the best paper in the world. But the Eurostar, basically, it's the usual kind of story, 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'd know is 85, 90 degrees in, in, in Fahrenheit. And, you know, and so on, and so on. And we missed the train, and still nobody knew what was going on. And the, the

• 5:44Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  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, delays are delayed, doesn't make any difference.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it's a 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, 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-

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And, and it being reasonably accurate, because of course some of, some of that is cheap talk, but you're like, oh yeah, that, that, this is basically correct.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 7:30Speaker 00

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

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  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 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, 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 the ways that we can prepare the humans so that their bags are better done in advance? It was an operations logistical problem.

• 8:14Chris Williamson?

  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 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 about the length of time of the wait, although that is an inconvenience. It's about knowing how long the wait is going to be, it's setting the expectation.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Am I going to miss my plane or am I not going to miss my plane? It's fundamentally, the plane is going to take off when it takes off. Like, and if I'm on it, it's not, it doesn't really matter how long I waited for security. And if I'm not on it, that makes all the difference. It's surprising how difficult this is, but Rory's Rory's terrific at noticing these kind of things. But I wonder, can I, can I offer a challenge to something you said, oh, two, three minutes ago, before we started riffing on travel delays? You were talking about skin in the game and how important skin in the game is. And of course, that's true and there's lots of good work written on it. But you can overdo the skin in the game. So one of the Cautionary Tales podcasts, one of the very first ones is called Buried by the Wall Street Crash.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  So for people who don't know the Cautionary Tales podcast, it's basically about half an hour. I tell a story, quite a rich story of something going wrong. We've got actors, we've got music and something goes wrong. And then the social science in what went wrong comes out. And this particular story is about these two great economists, John Maynard Keynes. Everyone's heard of John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, less well known. And both of them making this catastrophic failed forecast and missing the Wall Street crash of 1929, which wiped 89% off the value of shares. It was huge, just devastating. And I don't want to give too many spoilers, but one of the, they ended up in a very different place.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Having made the same mistake, they had totally different fates. And what doomed the guy who was doomed was that he had so much skin in the game. And he had so much that he could not, he was just completely invested. He could no longer think clearly. He was completely backed into a corner. Whereas the guy who did much better was able to basically say, oh yeah, I've lost some money, but it's no big deal. I haven't lost my reputation. I'll be fine. And so yeah, skin in the game is important. It's a good thing, but you can have too much of a good thing.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Overcooking anything at the moment is something that I've been thinking about a lot. So a lot of advice online in the personal development world for a good example would be the classic Jordan Peterson line, if you know, take responsibility and you need to do so. That works in maybe on average, perhaps on average, right now in 2022, most people or more people needs to take responsibility. I have a group of friends who are pathological responsibility takers. They're the sort of people that will take responsibility for something that wasn't even theirs to take responsibility for. And what you see is some really interesting extreme examples that basically you're optimizing to try and get people into somewhere that's like a nice gentle mean in the middle of the bell curve.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  Trying to take people out of the extreme of you have no skin in the game at all. Why would you be invested in this thing? It's cheap signals. But you're also not necessarily optimizing with that advice for the people that are at the top end that have 99.9% of their net worth tied up in crypto, for instance, like how are you ever going to be anti crypto? How are you ever going to be able to have an unbiased opinion of the crypto market at the moment? Another thing, I saw you do a blog post about what people keep getting wrong about inflation. And that's, I mean, inflation must be perhaps a contender for word of the year 2022. So what, what should we understand about inflation? And what do people keep getting wrong about it?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  People think of inflation as prices going up. And, and indeed, it's measured by CPI, Consumer Prices Index, which measures prices going up. And journalists, very good journalists 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 your classical pure textbook inflation is basically everything, the price of everything going up.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  By roughly the same amount, including your wages, so the price of your labour is also going up. So basically, nothing is really getting any more expensive in real terms. Because 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. And here's another form of inflation, which I would say is not really inflation at all, but it's still going to come out in the price indices. And that's 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.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  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. Because 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 does that matter?" Well, it matters because 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,

• 14:10Speaker 00

  "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. And when I wrote that 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 just add one more thing." And the "just one more thing" they wanted to add was two pieces of sort of policy advice that completely contradicted each other.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Because one of them thought central banks should stop raising interest rates, and the other thought that central banks weren't raising interest rates nearly enough. And, you know, and they're really, really smart guys. That's the mess we're in. And that's why, you know, the problem that central banks face, and the problem we're all going to face, is not a straightforward one.

• 15:11Chris Williamson?

  Even the experts don't agree.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  No, and there's a lot of talk about how, there was this famous line in the Brexit referendum in the UK that people have had enough of experts. There's a lot of anti-expert talk. 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 want to listen to the experts, but you don't want to make the mistake of thinking the experts are infallible. And as, as you were saying, you can overcook anything. You can overcook the skepticism of the experts. You can overcook the faith

• 15:56Speaker 00

  of the experts, which is why this whole game of trying to understand the world and think clearly is, is an endless project.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

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

• 16:14Speaker 00

  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 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, yeah, you can prove anything with, with, with statistics. But if you're basically just rejecting everything on the

• 16:58Speaker 00

  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. 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 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. When you think about the, um, think about QAnon. 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.

• 17:39Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting 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 did a conversation with Peter Thiel a little while ago. And he gave this great example of climate skeptics and climate optimists net out at the same position. That the people that say, we're going to be absolutely fine with technology. It's going to come down the pike and everything will be sweet. Just hold on. And the people that say 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. 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.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  And that to me seems to be the primary seductive quality that taking that on has. That, I mean, is that what your position is as well? Would you think that mostly what people are doing is looking cool by being a cynic?

• 18:40Speaker 00

  I think that that's definitely part of it. I think that, uh, smackdowns work on social media. If you're calling somebody an idiot, that works a lot better than saying that somebody's great. So they're more likely to go viral, they're more likely to get purchased. But another thing that's driving this push towards excessive skepticism, this sort of toxic cynicism. It's just that it's, it's generally easier to think of negative arguments than positive arguments. So there's, I discussed some of the evidence for this early on in my book, The Data Detective, or how to make the world that up, um, where psychologists ask people to reason, to produce arguments about a politically contentious issue. I think it was, um, capital punishment at the time.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  It was the, the work was done in the 1990s.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And as you would expect, people find it much easier to, to generate arguments. On their side or against the side that they oppose, that's not a surprise. But the arguments that were easiest to generate were arguments attacking the opposing belief. If you ask people to come up with reasons why the other side is stupid, they can do that. There's so many arguments, they find it incredibly easy to do that, that those arguments just flow really, really freely. 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.

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 20:16Speaker 00

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

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 00

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

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I think that certainly the credentials that you get on Twitter come from dunking, right? Twitter is just a dunk porn fest for the most part. Very rarely do you see, there's something interesting I noticed online. If somebody crosses a line with the type of language that they're using, the insults that they draw, whatever it might be. I haven't seen, 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." 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.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  That's the game of tennis that appears 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...

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  So 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 detractor online just accused them of.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and social media are built through engagement and engagement is driven a lot by emotions, often it's the negative emotions, not always, I mean, cat videos, that's that's positive emotions, but a lot of it is driven by negative emotions. I'm 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's because I'm calm, I just sort of, you know, say reasonable things and, you know, that people might like it, people might follow me, but they don't retweet that stuff. And the few tweets I've had that have gone viral are often something like, oh, it's

• 22:23Speaker 00

  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, 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, that's fine, there's no cost to

• 23:08Speaker 00

  that, no one's going to complain about that. If, on the other hand, you write a blog post, or, you know, a long social media post on Facebook or Medium, whatever, Substack, whatever the the format is, if you write something taking somebody down.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  There are 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 it's an interesting observation that the bias towards positivity or negativity depends on the scale of the media and the type of the media. And actually, it's related to a point I make in Monet's book about how the scale of news, the timescale of news relates to the kind of news stories we pay attention to. So if you're checking the news hour by hour, it's got to be gossip, market moves, stuff blowing up. If you look at the news once a

• 24:08Speaker 00

  year, you can actually pick up totally different sorts of events. And if you were to look at the news once every 10 years, you could actually start to track stuff that really means something important, like the decline in childhood mortality or the increase in global temperatures. Impossible to track these on a daily or weekly basis, but 10 years, 25 years, you can see them.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, do not confuse the noise for the signal, I think. And that's what everybody's doing. Another really terrifying insight that David Perel came up with is that almost all of the content that we consume will have been created in the last 24 hours. You know, there's entire social media platforms that are dedicated to producing and publishing content that expires after 24 hours. It's the only way that you can consume it. And for anyone that knows what the Lindy effect is, they are platforms that are designed to be anti-Lindy. There is literally no way that it gets to stick about. Thinking about the concern that people have over relying

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  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 again.

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether it's a British thing, but I think we're kind of perennially orderly and the respect of authority seems to be a little bit better in the UK. Maybe we don't have that rebel spirit that the US does 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, 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 realising the humanness and just how flawed the people that are given positions

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

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

• 26:23Speaker 00

  I think, I'm not sure that it can. I think one of the interesting things is that we tend to want to take an expert in one field and ask them to opine in other fields. And it can be very difficult, both for us and for the experts, to realise they've strayed outside their area of expertise. So for example, in the pandemic, you might have somebody with really deep expertise in tracking virus variants and understanding mutations and what impact those mutations might have. And then you, then you might say, well, you

• 27:05Speaker 00

  know, should we have another lockdown? Which actually immediately gets you into questions of compliance. Would people accept another lockdown? How would they behave? Epidemiology? How would it spread if there was another lockdown? If, if, and you sort of move from, and it seems like, oh, this is an expert in COVID, therefore I should ask them a question about COVID. But actually, no, they were expert, an expert in viral mutations. And now you're asking them about behavioural science, in fact. But, which is ridiculous. But it doesn't seem ridiculous. And I think even to most experts, it wouldn't seem ridiculous because they do know something. Wouldn't seem ridiculous to ask them to speculate.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I interviewed a British statistician called David Spiegelhalter.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Many times, 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 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, not a clue. Ask me another question. But I think it's because 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.

• 28:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a signal of

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  trustworthiness, I think, and honesty. It's actually something that people could hack. 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 is pushed to one side in place of the opportunity to proliferate, to propagate their ideas about the fact that they could or should be this polymath of solutions.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Well, think about the media ecosystem as well. If you're, say, a radio producer, you want to get an expert on to talk about COVID or anything else, the economy, whatever it is. 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. I mean, of course, you could go super deep into their area of expertise, but, but, you know, like a, well, yeah, I mean,

• 29:37Chris Williamson?

  Good Morning Britain doesn't want that.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  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, not what most consumers of information want either. Give me a broad overview.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  But then, yeah, then you have, you select into the very few people who are actually capable of giving that broad overview or the large number of people who are happy to, you know, go on TV and just bluff it.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  I really like the term toxic cynicism. I think that it's a wonderful way to package up the

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  Current milieu that you really see online, the fact that it is really excessive skepticism applied across everything apart from things that you have a prior that you want it to be true. 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, functionally, an even greater bias toward the things that people want to believe and an even greater cynicism against the things that they don't want to believe.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's reinforced by all of the things we're very familiar with, the echo chamber effect, the political tribalism and so on and so on. Things that I'm sure you've discussed many times on the podcast, but yeah, it doesn't help. It doesn't help at all. I mean, when I, when I think about why, why we get things wrong, why we sort of make mistakes when we're consuming information from social media or media, I mean fundamentally, I think there were, there were three different things happening and we, and we, we've paid 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,

• 31:40Speaker 00

  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. And the second thing that's going wrong is these echo chambers, it's motivated reasoning. I want to reach a particular conclusion. 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.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  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, 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 desperation to believe. Then there's a third thing I think we often miss, 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 so easily

• 32:55Speaker 00

  just read something and you think you read something but actually you read something else or, you know, you didn't stop to think for a moment, is that actually true, could that be true? It's, and it's amazing, and in all three cases, we've got this, we've also got a meta problem, which is a lack of awareness. So the famous Dunning Kruger effect, unskilled and we don't know we're unskilled. But you've also got motivated reasoning and the I'm not biased bias. Because think about it, if you thought you were biased, you wouldn't be biased, right? I mean, obviously you think you're occupying a reasonable position on the spectrum, right? Otherwise, if you thought it was an unreasonable position, you'd move your position.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  And then, of course, the brain's incredibly good at creating these illusions that we really are paying attention, that 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 of course you can't. 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.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  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, right? The fact that if it is, and this is an adaptive quality. In fact, 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 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. There was a story that you had, Apollo Robbins, the world's most famous theatrical pickpocket

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  says, "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?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 and you're not. So Apollo Robbins, his TED Talk is fantastic, it's only nine minutes, 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 pickpocket, but he's just lifting stuff, he'll say, "Oh, have I just checked your pocket, have I got your wallet?" And while he checks 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 the wallet out of his pocket because he's looking at his watch.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  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 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 for information on the media, social media. So a fantastic little study done by, if I remember rightly, David Rand at MIT and Gord Pennycook at Regina University in Canada, where they, what they did was they asked people...

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Some people, they showed them a bunch of headlines, some of which were fake news, and said, would you retweet this or not? And basically, people would retweet a lot of fake news that 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 tweet it. If you're a Democrat and you see 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 if they instead just asked people, can you tell me whether you think this headline is true or not? They were actually very good at figuring out, oh, actually, no, there's no way Trump is going to deport Melania.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  That's not actually going to 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. I don't want to retweet misinformation. I only want to retweet stuff that's true. So you go, well, 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 random Penny Cook asked people,

• 37:38Speaker 00

  showed them a headline and say, and this is done, they did it in the lab, but they also did it in the wild on Twitter. They show people a headline and they say, do you think this headline is true or not? And, you know, people will evaluate it. And then they just watched their behavior for the next 48 hours. And they are less likely to retweet untrue claims because you ask them once to stop and think about it.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  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. And it lasts forty eight 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 because we're not smart enough or because we're biased. But often, we don't, we don't notice that something's true or false because it never occurs to us to spend a second's energy on evaluating the claim. And so we don't.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes. But if you see something which is advantageous to your particular side, you're going to let that one slide, of course you are. You think, well, you know, this 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

• 39:12Speaker 00

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

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  So what we've talked about so far has been logic, rationality, understanding of cognitive biases, motivated reasoning and stuff like that. 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 a rational approach. What role does intuition have, if any, in the modern world and stuff like that? So what are your thoughts there?

• 40:11Speaker 00

  So I've changed my mind over the years. So 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. 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 addiction and discrimination, crime, 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.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't write that book today because I'm much more interested now in the psychology of things, in what's now known as behavioural economics. So taking into account emotions, taking into account our cognitive limitations alongside rational choice. Actually, I think that 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. And if you've got a good ground in behavioural economics and in psychology, you've got a good sense of what it is that's going to stop you from making that optimal decision.

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  What's going to mediate it, what's going to stop you from being that optimal decision maker?

• 41:36Speaker 00

  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 anything like that, I say, look, the first thing you have to do is observe your emotional response. When you're reading a headline, 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 angry? Does it make me feel vindicated? Does it make me feel scared? Whatever it is, what's that emotion?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  And then just, and then go and have another look, look at the claim again. Having observed your own emotion, it's going to look different. And I'm not saying, don't feel emotions, don't feel angry, you know, don't feel happy. It's obviously it's legitimate to have emotions. But you should notice that you're having that emotional reaction before you go back and try to engage your powers of logic. Because they're not friendly to each other. It's best to try and keep them a bit separate. So yeah, understanding emotions is incredibly important.

• 42:49Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, it seems to me to be a common trajectory. Russ Roberts from Econ Talk was on the show a little while ago. And his new book, Wild Problems, is literally all about this. The limits outside of economic theory and why you need to have something else that you could call intuition or good instinct or whatever. And 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 really sort of 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. As the 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.

• 43:34Chris Williamson?

  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, you and Russ as flag waving economist ambassadors for someone integrating a little bit more felt sense holistically seems like a good signal to me.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's very flattering to be compared to Russ. He's got an amazing podcast and he's got a lot of experience. And 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 sceptical about our ability to know anything, to understand any system. It's like it's always more complicated than you think. I have a little bit more faith in our ability to comprehend the world than Russ does. But I think it's a really useful check to say, do you really think you understand this? Do you really think we can fix this now with enough data? Because that's a very tempting path and it's very important to have someone like Russ just whispering in your ear.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Are you sure? Are you sure you really understand?

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

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

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I love it. I love that story. It's one of the cautionary tales and it's quite a famous story, although as with many of the cautionary tales, you might have heard some of the story, but you don't know all the details and the details are so delightful. But it's all about Conan Doyle, 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 is actually taken in 1916, if I remember rightly.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  And he wrote a whole book, The Coming of the Fairies. And he said, well, obviously this could be a hoax and you be the judge, but I think more likely it is an epoch-making discovery.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Spoiler, it was not an epoch-making discovery, it was a hoax. 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 makes two little girls?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  perpetrate such a hoax and at what point did they think, oh, this has all got much bigger than we ever intended. And so both sides of that story are rather beautiful.

• 46:19Chris Williamson?

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

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Well, this is one of the interesting things. This whole thing was was deconstructed much, much later by the British Journal of Photography, which for decades had said, this is ridiculous. We're not going to descend. And in the end, they said, all right, fine, we'll look at this. And the editor of the British Journal of Photography published like a 10, 10 issue expose. It's about 80 pages long in total. It's incredible. And there are, I think there are five photos. There are 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 will never find it. And funnily enough, that links back to that we were talking about stage magic.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  One of the ways in which really good stage magicians will fool people and it helps them to fool other magicians is they'll do the same trick over and over again. You say, people say, oh, 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. So we know one time it's like you've palmed the coin. Another time, it's kind of, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're using a dummy. And so somebody who's trying to get a sense of like, oh, 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 do it in a different way. And they're just more confused than ever. And so this is, this is the problem that that Kern and Oil had. So one of the

• 48:04Speaker 00

  One of the paintings, one of the photographs was actually heavily post-processed by an expert. So it was basically photoshopped, 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, which is not surprising, given one of the girls was actually a little girl, she's seventeen years old and she worked in a photo studio doing double exposures all day. Not really that surprising she could do that. Another one was just, you know, paper cutouts. And they just, you know, just took a photograph of a little girl sitting next to a paper cutout. And, you know, the photo is two dimensional, so you can't tell it's paper cutout.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  So these different methods. And he just went through these extraordinary contortions to convince himself that it must be true. And he wasn't just the creator of Sherlock Holmes, of course, he was that. Two other things. He had intervened in a kind of, in the serial of, you know, the serial podcast, this whole thing. He was involved in the Edwardian equivalent of serial, where there was somebody who'd been convicted of this crime and Conan Doyle was convinced he was innocent. And it assembled this amazing amount of evidence and got him off. And I think probably rightly. So he was, could be completely forensic. The other thing, do you want to guess where Conan Doyle's first ever work was published?

• 49:35Speaker 00

  You'll never guess.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  No idea.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  British Journal of Photography. He was actually an expert photographer. He knew loads about photography. And so that was all just, you have to think, well, how could he be fooled? 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 pulled off trick photography because I know how hard trick photography is. So.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  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 an 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 wanting to believe.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends, Gwyneth Bogal, 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."

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Conan Doyle is an example, and so was Abraham Bradyus, the art critic we were talking about. He saw things in this fake Vermeer that I would never see, that most people would never see, incredibly sophisticated 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. But he was willing to look past all of that because he could see all these subtleties. And yeah, expertise, I'm in favor, but it can be misused like anything else.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

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

• 51:48Speaker 00

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

• 52:28Chris Williamson?

  Debauchery on the back of a bicycle.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  But and there's a wonderful, there's a kind of tabloid news headline of the day, which is about a woman. I think it was Amalia Allen, if I remember her name rightly. And it was front page news because she'd gone bicycling in trousers. And so this headline was, she wore trousers and a divorced lady cycling around in trousers. But the interesting thing was like, everyone was excited about this divorced lady in trousers. No one was worried about the bicycling. So it's incredible freedom. And there was one, one of the leading women's rights campaigners, I'm blanking on her name,

• 53:15Speaker 00

  who was asked, 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 had been the greatest contributor to women's freedom. And she said, the bicycle. So these inventions, whether it's the brick or whether it's paper or whether it's the bicycle, they changed the world by changing us. It's not just they solved a little problem that we had, they slot right into our society. And we just go on as normal, except that one little thing is easier. We've got a better mousetrap. They work because they just, they create new winners and new losers and reshape the way we live.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  And the bicycle is a great example of that.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  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. And inevitably, after a few of the only drinks that were mostly consumed there, the conversation.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  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, and this is something I remember reading about Aristotle. He was going to these 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. He said, because it'll make us think that we're drinking the same amount, but we'll actually drink a little bit less. And that will facilitate, it's going to foster a better conversational environment.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  The same thing, whatever 1500 years later is stop drinking so much during the day. If you want to have a good conversation.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  I would, I would love to see the randomized trial on that, you know, did that work? But yeah, I mean, it's, it's amazing. And there's, there's a related example, which is Henry Pelham, the British Prime Minister. This is 1700s, if I'm correct, if I remember rightly. He changed the tax regime on tea. So tea was taxed at 100% or more. And so loads of smuggling, not much tea actually drunk. And he slashed tax on tea and the, 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.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  So they cut taxes, revenues went up and economist 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.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  That's very cool. I got suggested, complete tangent, I got suggested a book this weekend, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Are you familiar with this?

• 56:50Speaker 00

  No, I immediately want to read it, though.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  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's afoot 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, soldiers, but they've all got very unique, different skillsets. One of them had created the Limpit Mine, he

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  was the inventor of the Limpit Mine, and he was now driving around in an 18-foot-high caravan, complete with four bedrooms and two bathrooms and hot and cold running water in the 1930s. And they got a hold of him and they got a hold of this Scottish guy that had lived under this incredibly 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. And it's like The Avengers, but in the 1930s and gentlemanly.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  And it's just, it's outstanding. So Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, really well-written, super beautiful prose, really easy, super accessible. And I'm in love with it at the moment. It's very good.

• 58:34Speaker 00

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

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  You can justify it however you want for the podcast. There was one of the things that he'd done with the Limpit Mine, this guy, they were struggling to find a way to create a time-release mechanism that would...

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  Dissolve in water or would reduce down in water at an even time. So you could have a different type of powder that could be used, but the compression of the powder was 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 this guy was eating aniseed balls. His daughters dropped some on the floor because he was always shifting them off the bench where they needed to work in his house before they got this office in London. And he realized that the aniseed balls almost always seemed to dissolve in his mouth at the same speed, no matter what he did. So they ended up using aniseed balls as the detonation triggers 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

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  would have changed the length of time that the fuse would have gone for 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. So they went around his hometown, picking up aniseed balls and condoms. Apparently bought all of the aniseed balls and condoms in the local town where he lived and ended up. And they said, the author just decides to add a side note saying it is it is unclear whether or not there was an increase in childbirths nine months later in and around Guildford or wherever it was that this guy was from. But yeah, it's phenomenal. So I'm, I'm pretty confident that you'll enjoy that.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. On the subject of an increase in childbirths and

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  cutting taxes, which we were talking about with tea. There is a fantastic study of something that happened in Australia about 15 years ago, where the the government said, oh, we're going to give you a baby bonus. If you have a baby, 3,000 Australian dollars. That's about 1,500 US dollars, something like that. 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?

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  To get the baby bonus and the Australian, shouldn't you have just announced 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 first of July was more than twice the birth rate on the last day of June. Like, all those people basically just going, just hold on, just hold on. And it's amazing. It's amazing. You eat your birth and indeed your death responds to tax incentives because they found a similar effect with abolishing inheritance tax. So, yeah, people, people respond to incentives. This is, this is the, you're the classic economist in me, rational choice theory. It does actually explain a few things.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  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 and everybody pick a day. When do you think it's going to happen or whatever? But she didn't tell them the actual due date. It's like, this is the month or whatever. This is the period. And her least favorite student, the one that she really hates, chose the correct due date. 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 that she hated.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  She sounds like a really inspirational teacher.

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:03:08Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of taxes and speaking of children, I'd be remiss 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. If we can put to one side the person that actually came up with it or proposed it or okayed it, I thought, when I first heard of that a month ago, I was like, surely this is a win. Surely this has got to 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 going to, the population collapse and all of the different things that we need. What's the view of an economist philosopher?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  So, I mean, the two things I would say upfront is, first of all, do you have any reason to believe that 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 not, it's not clear because you can cut it both ways. The second thing I'd say is, we do already incentivize children in the sense that the income support is paid, there's a child benefit paid. So if you have children, you do get money until they're 18 years old to offset the cost of having them.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  And I guess the third thing though is, if fundamentally, if what you want is more people, 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 freer immigration restrictions. 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 twenties coming,

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  working hard, paying taxes, not really demanding a lot of benefits because, you know, they're young, they're of working age. And it didn't seem to be very popular. But it's not clear to me that that's actually a worse solution than trying to incentivize mothers to have children. Is that?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  I feel like I don't know if I've over engineered the answer to the question or dodged.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  I think it's interesting. It's things that I hadn't considered. Certainly, the immigration point is one that people would point to. I think that it shouldn't be the case that your population growth is at the stage where you need to import other people 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

• 1:06:22Chris Williamson?

  end up being from Ireland or Scotland or some other place. 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. 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. It's an interesting one. I don't know. I think that 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, basically. 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

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  sex, more than 50% of women for the first time in history, childless by 30, that wasn't Reuters, it was the other one 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 unrandomized study were talking about it's very difficult to bring a child into this world because it's pretty expensive.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So just a couple of thoughts then. So one is, I mean,

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  It's a good question, but we're not the right people to answer it. We're basically 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 who have decided to have children and who have decided not to have children. The second point is that Daniel Kahneman, I think he originally got this idea from Kurt Lewin, great psychologist of the early 20th century 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 always thinking about

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  Rather than removing your brakes.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  Hitting the accelerator, but yeah, take your foot off the brake. So yeah, 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 figure out why they're not having children in the first place. And is it a problem? Or are they having children for, are they not having children for completely legitimate reasons? That actually there's no reason you'd want to influence their decision.

• 1:08:48Chris Williamson?

  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 would certainly be able to look at maybe the last 20 years, women that were 50s perhaps. How many children did you want to have and how many did you end up having? I mean, how many different, like fertility issues, availability of husbands, cycling through different partners? Like, oh, there's a million different things that could get in the way. But that would be fascinating to look at how many children a woman would want to have and how many she ends up having.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  And if I remember rightly, so I interviewed for my BBC podcast, more or less, I've interviewed Marina Adchad a few times. She's an economist at British Columbia University and she's written a book called Dollars and Sex, if I remember rightly. And she, if I, I may be misremembering, but the last time we were talking about fertility, fertility rates.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  I think she told me that women are in general having fewer children than they would like. And that that is something that would concern me much more than just looking at a demographic pyramid and saying, oh, I don't like the, I don't like the look of that.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Turned upside down, yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  I would be, I would be much more interested in, well, you know, how do the people who are alive today feel about the decisions that they're making and would, do they want to make different decisions? If only they had the money or if only, you know, some other obstacle was removed.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I think, well, one of the fascinating things is that a woman's desire to have children is going to be culturally mediated. That doesn't stay static throughout time either. Neither do the economic conditions that she's trying to bring the child into the world with, which is going to mediate her choice to do that. Neither do the availability of potential partners for her to be able to create the child with and then raise the child with. So there are a lot of moving parts as we go through this. But young people between the age of 18 and 30 are having three times less sex over the last 10 years. That's gone down specifically for men, 8% to 28%.

• 1:11:14Chris Williamson?

  It's also gone up for women as well, the amount of sexlessness. And this finishes in 2018. I can't, I need someone to do the study between 2018 and 2022. I need to find out, somebody out there, tell me how little sex everybody's having.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  So, so talk, talk to Marina Radshad, see if Marina would be interviewed. She's great. She knows way more about this than I do and, you know, she'd be a really interesting interviewee.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  I shall steal her contact details off you after this. Look, Tim 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?

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

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

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:12:24Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 to middle without parent.