Marginalia

Following in the footsteps of Larry Brilliant

I sat down for a chat with Larry Brilliant on Wednesday at the Skoll World Forum and interviewed him about the threat of global pandemics, something I’m hoping to write a column about. But, Larry being such a remarkable character, I also wanted to ask his advice on behalf of anyone who wants to make the world a better place. Some thoughts:

It starts with ordinary people. Ordinary people do extraordinary things, and then we lionise them. We make heroes out of them. And that’s a problem, because it makes other ordinary people look at these heroes and think that they can’t achieve the same things. But that path is open to everybody. Anybody at any time.

There’s more, and you can read the full interview at How To Make a Difference.

Inside the mind of Hans Rosling

We all love Hans Rosling, the world’s most famous data guru. Yesterday, at the Skoll World Forum, I interviewed him for More or Less on the BBC World Service, and loyal listeners and podcast subscribers will get to hear what we talked about in a week or two.

But before the tape started rolling I had a more intimate conversation with Hans about how he began his remarkable career, and what his influences and inspirations were. Here’s a taste; Hans was a 24 year old medical student, with top grades in Sweden, taking a study year in Bangalore:

“I saw the lecturer put up a slide for discussion, I thought, ‘that’s kidney cancer, I’ll keep quiet and let the Indian students talk before I explain’. In six minutes, they had exhausted all my knowledge. In those moments I realised the Indian students were better than me. I had always been in the top quarter. In Bangalore, I was bottom quarter. And that was when I realised how racist we all were, how we thought we were better because we had been born in a richer country, with better institutions.”

You can read the full interview over at How To Make A Difference.

Is it okay to lie in the service of a greater truth?

I’m just catching up with this quite remarkable episode of one of my favourite shows, This American Life.

Quick background. The “monologist” Mike Daisey has been achieving plaudits for a remarkable, tense, elegantly-written and powerfully-delivered theatre show in which he visits a Foxconn iPhone factory in Shenzhen, meets the illegal unions, the crippled workers, the under-age girls, etc. etc. “Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?”, he asks at one point.
This American Life recorded Daisey’s monologue and broadcast it. It became the most popular ever episode of a deservedly popular show. This American Life fact-checked the background, but they didn’t fact-check Mike Daisey’s traveller’s tale itself – partly, they say, because Mike Daisey deliberately put them off the scent.
And alas, This American Life are now reporting that important parts of Daisey’s story are entirely fictional.

And so TAL have now retracted the entire episode and have a fascinating discussion of what went wrong. I thoroughly recommend listening to the program (I’ve not even finished listening myself but I want to get the word out).
Daisey’s defence, as discussed in the New York Times, is to my mind unacceptable – basically that he was true in his own fashion; he’s a theatre guy, not a journalist, so he can invent and exaggerate.
I am reminded about what a friend at The Economist told me after Johann Hari’s exploits: it’s absolutely fine to make stuff up – and when you do so as a foreign correspondent, it’s also really easy to do – but when you do it needs to be filed under “fiction”, not “nonfiction”.

One thing that always bothered me about the Daisey episode was the way Daisey glossed over what a terrible life people had in China in the 1950s and 1970s. He mentions Shenzhen used to be a lovely sleepy fishing village, and implies – although never comes right out and says it – that things were great before Deng Xiaoping let the bad old corporations into China. (In fact China suffered the worst man-made famine in human history, and the cultural revolution.)
I felt that these were the actions of a man wanted to put his own very strong slant on the truth. Naively it did not occur to me that Mr Daisey might depart from the truth entirely. In his own words, he says that “Stories should be subordinate to truth.”

This has left me feeling a still greater respect for This American Life for confessing their mistakes so straightforwardly, and viewing Daisey as something of a tragic figure – a man who has misused great talents. Maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

Update: Tim Worstall disagrees with Mike Daisey on most things but he’s backing him on this issue.

My favourite quotes about failure

In celebration of the publication of Adapt in paperback in the UK, I’ve put together my favourite quotes about failure and adaptation. Enjoy!

Adapt reviewed in “Nature”

I promise I’m not going to publish every review of Adapt on this RSS feed but the review in Nature is beyond an author’s wildest dreams:

Harford’s case histories are well chosen and artfully told, making the book a delight to read. But its value is greater than that. Strand by strand, it weaves the stories into a philosophical web that is neat, fascinating and brilliant. Like the best popular science, it advances the subject as well as conveying it, drawing intriguing conclusions about how to run companies, armies and research labs… It would be hard to improve Harford’s outstanding book.

Gosh. Full review here for Nature subscribers. I’m off to open something fizzy…

Adapt in the New York Times

Adapt was published yesterday in the United States, and an unexpected side-effect was that for the first time, I got to be interviewed by a Pulitzer Prize winner, David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Q. You briefly tell a story about the chef Jamie Oliver. He persuaded schools in one part of London to change their lunch menus to reduce fat, sugar and salt and to increase the number of fruits and vegetables. When two economists studied the children later, they found less illness and somewhat better school performance. That’s incredible. How much confidence should we have that the change in the menus caused the health and academic changes?
Mr. Harford: What really grabbed my attention about this incident was not, “Healthy meals help kids concentrate in school” – it was, “Wow, it takes a campaign by a TV chef to find out something like this.”
The research was carefully done by serious economists, but we could have more confidence in their findings if the project to improve school meals had been designed as an experiment. It wasn’t; it was designed for a TV show. After it started, Tony Blair, the British prime minister at the time, was falling over himself to endorse it. Yet it was a simple idea that Blair’s government could have tested out years before.
One of the main ideas of the book is that the world is full of interesting ideas that might help solve some of our big problems, but nobody really knows which of these ideas will work and which will fail. So policy makers, corporate leaders and social campaigners need to be much more open to all sorts of formal and informal experiments. Jamie Oliver created an accidental experiment. It would be nice if we spent a bit more energy doing this deliberately.

The full interview is here.

What’s new in the second edition of The Undercover Economist?

When I was first writing “The Undercover Economist” – mostly in 2002, although the first edition emerged in the US in 2005 – I would never have dreamed that almost a decade later I would be able to publish a new edition. I have a great deal of good luck and about a million readers to thank for that, and I am counting my blessings.

Since I wrote the book, the world has changed and so have I. But has the new edition?

I have tried to preserve as much as possible of the original book rather than surrendering to hindsight bias, but I have tried to update as many of the statistics and examples as possible as seamlessly as I can. (Occasionally I have used footnotes to highlight changes between the first edition and the second – especially if the changes have either proved me right, or made me look silly.)

A more substantial change has been to replace chapter six – which was originally about the dot-com bubble – with a new chapter about the banking crisis that began in 2007. The dot-com bubble, alas, now seems fairly benign in comparison with the banking crisis, and it felt impossible to publish a second edition without trying to make sense of it all.

The second edition will be published in the UK in April. Little Brown are the publishers, and it should be available around the world except North America. I’m currently discussing a second edition for the US and Canada.

The biggest confusion in British politics

Johann Hari has an article on “the biggest lie in British politics“. I tweeted that he could have done a better job of clearing up confusion between the debt and the deficit, and then received a few requests for elaboration. So here goes.

Johann’s argument is that the government is frightening us with tales of incredibly high debt, whereas in fact the debt is not high. And furthermore, that accumulating debt is a good idea right now because that will stimulate the economy. (I think he states the cases for stimulus with a certainty that the evidence doesn’t support, but I won’t say he’s wrong. He may be right.)

I certainly agree that UK government debt isn’t especially high. I may have missed something, but most of the government claims I’ve seen focus not on cutting debt but on cutting the deficit. Certainly nobody is envisaging cutting the debt any time soon.

What’s the difference? The deficit is the amount of new debt accumulated in a year, or alternatively, the amount by which government spending exceeds taxes.  Johann didn’t mention the deficit in his piece. If he had I am sure he would have said that while UK government debt isn’t high, the deficit is high – extraordinarily high. So Johann is getting what he wants: a massive fiscal stimulus by a government spending far more than it takes in in taxes.

The government’s position is that the deficit is so high that it must be cut back quickly. Markets may not be worried by absolute levels of debt, which are low to middling, but will worry if it seems that the government is utterly incapable of controlling spending. Although the deficit (and stimulus) will continue for a while, it’s going to be phased out. In a few years there will be no deficit and no stimulus, and debt will no longer be increasing.  I certainly hope the recession will be long over by then.  I’m making no promises.

A sensible alternative view is that while the deficit (and stimulus) cannot continue indefinitely it can continue for a while, and that cuts should come later. A separate alternative view is that that if the deficit has to be reduced it should be reduced by higher taxes and tighter enforcement, not by spending cuts. I suspect Johann would support both. Fine.

Facebooked

I have finally succumbed and created a Facebook page. If the technology works out, it should contain selected tweets plus the articles published on this site – and more to the point, suggestions and contributions from everyone else.

If you’d like to take a look, the page is: http://www.facebook.com/timharford1

Dear Economist: an announcement

All good things must come to an end, and this is the last “Dear Economist” to be published in FT Magazine, after a more-than-decent run of over seven years. That’s the bad news.

However, there’s also good news.

First, I’ll now be writing “Outside Edge” roughly once a month. Here’s today’s offering on robo-trading. Here’s one from a couple of weeks back on match-fixing in cricket.

Second, “Dear Economist” shall not die. I shall be taking my place alongside Will Self in Men’s Health. (Neither Will nor I will be displaying a washboard stomach.) The column will be published every month with a couple of letters, and we’ll see how it goes. The first appearance will probably be in the January edition, and after a decent interval I shall post the columns on timharford.com. (There’s an RSS feed at http://timharford.com/feed/ and you can always keep up to date on Twitter.)

Third, I’ll be writing more features in the new-look FT Magazine. It’s out next week, and my first feature will be coming soon.