Notable

First published in Waterstones Book Quarterly

Life often seems to defy logic. When a prostitute agrees to unprotected sex, or a teenage criminal embarks on a burglary, or a heavy drinker downs another whiskey, we seem to be a million miles from rational behaviour. None of it makes any sense – or does it?
Using some remarkably clever techniques and imaginative perspectives, a bold new breed of economists is busily demonstrating that life makes more sense than anyone would have thought. Using every clue that comes to hand, from a laboratory brain scan to the hidden patterns in old maps, they are discovering that there is a surprisingly rational basis to the seemingly irrational world around us. Read the rest of this entry »

Feature story, FT Magazine, 26 January 2008

In 1737, John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire, stunned London’s scientific establishment by presenting an idiosyncratic solution to the most important and notorious technological problem of the 18th century. He was hoping to win a then-fabulous prize of £20,000 (about £5m today) for anyone who could devise a way for a ship’s navigator to determine its longitude and therefore its position at sea. Harrison’s approach was to build a clock that would keep Greenwich time faithfully; by comparing local time (measured using the position of the sun) with the time in London, the navigator would know how far east or west the ship had sailed. The theory was sound, but given the rolling of ships and changing temperature and humidity, the leading scientists of the day – including Sir Isaac Newton – reckoned that a sufficiently accurate clock would be impossible to build. Harrison proved otherwise.

The longitude prize, sponsored by the British government, was not unique. Prizes were also offered in France for a functional water turbine, and for a method of preserving food for Napoleon’s armies. The latter prize quickly inspired the tin can, more of a blessing than food snobs might acknowledge.

But such prizes then fell out of fashion. For commercial innovations, we now rely on patents to encourage and protect innovators. Basic research is funded not by prizes but by grants.

And yet two centuries after tinned fish hit the market, the way we look for solutions has come full circle. Governments, private foundations and even corporations are rediscovering the value of offering prizes for good ideas. Rather than paying for scientific and engineering effort as they have done for the past 200 years, idea-hungry patrons are returning to the 18th century, and paying for results. Read the rest of this entry »

The Times (London) has published two nice extracts from the Logic of Life, plus me reading from the book. Read the rest of this entry »

As a columnist (which is fancy for “journalist in jammies”), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world? Read the rest of this entry »

Slate is publishing two excerpts from “The Logic of Life“. Here’s the second one:

Perhaps a more positive way to express the trend is that women’s entry into high-powered careers has given them the option to get divorced if the marriage isn’t working out; and the recognition that that option is important is one of the factors encouraging women’s entry into high-powered careers.
That may sound a little abstract, but economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discovered a chilling example of the way that the increased availability of divorce empowered women.

Read the rest of this entry »

Slate is publishing two excerpts from “The Logic of Life“. Here’s the first one:

Ever since John von Neumann’s game theory promised to help us understand love and marriage, economists have been interested in how people choose their partners and how relationships work.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I enter the porter’s lodge at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, I fleetingly reflect that I may be about to receive an intimidating tutorial from the college principal, Andrew Dilnot. It is not that the economist has a stern reputation, but today’s circumstances are unusual. He recently stepped down from presenting More or Less, a BBC Radio 4 series about numbers in the news. I have been recruited as the new presenter, and am ready to be patronised – or worse.

I needn’t have worried: as he strides into the lodge in a pale brown linen suit and blue tie, Dilnot’s smile is genuine enough, and as we walk together through north Oxford’s leafy residential streets, he is more eager to identify shared acquaintances in the world of economics than to lecture me on the art of radio presenting. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a new piece up at Forbes:

…the most reasonable judgment is that flying fresh food around the planet carries an environmental cost of no more than a few cents per meal. That sounds astonishing, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. Those Chilean grapes aren’t flying first class: They’re packed tight to save money, which incidentally saves on pollution. The most wasteful part of the journey is when you and I hop in our cars and drive to the shops and back with a bag of potato chips in the trunk of the car.

You can read the whole thing here; the Forbes piece also contains links to the research.

I’m a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don’t seem to go for the stuff. I’d never thought too much about that until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: my female colleagues don’t go to coffee shops because they’re shabbily treated when they get there. Read the rest of this entry »

FT Comment, 27 October
An economist once dubbed “champion of choice” by The Guardian newspaper would like your employer to organise an exercise hour for you and your colleagues. Professor Julian Le Grand was once a social policy adviser who had the ear of Tony Blair.

Now he has everybody in Britain sitting up (sorry) and taking notice. Even though Prof Le Grand intends to offer an opt-out to anyone who doesn’t much care for the idea of doing a bench-press with the boss as spotter, that doesn’t make the idea appealing. Read the rest of this entry »