For certain kinds of questions, there are answers that are simple, elegant and wrong. Take the most famous example of the genre, the “bat and ball” question: if a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball...
Undercover Economist
My weekly column in the Financial Times on Saturdays, explaining the economic ideas around us every day. This column was inspired by my book and began in 2005.
Policy Lessons from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party
Not long ago, I heard a Tory grandee giving a speech in support of a political rookie. As the occasion demanded, he offered some advice. Life in politics would be hard, he warned, but success was possible: just look at Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster...
Why are some jobs so “greedy”?
Why do women still tend to earn less than men? There is nobody better placed to answer that question than economic historian Claudia Goldin, the winner of the 2023 Nobel memorial prize in economics. Her answer tells us how to fight unfairness, but also how to create...
Why we can’t quit email, even though we hate it
It’s the sheer variety of emails that bewilders. A forwarded review of a fried-chicken shop, suggesting it as a venue for a date. A heartfelt break-up letter, one that could have been written on paper in the 1960s. A note from Joe to his friend Brian suggesting a way...
Netflix and bill – the high price of a subscription lifestyle
One of the modern classics of economics is an article from 2006 with the self-explanatory title “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”, in which researchers Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied the behaviour of nearly 8,000 gym members and found it “difficult to...
Sometimes a random solution is best
Just over a decade ago, Egypt’s Coptic Christians chose their new pope. The names of three favoured candidates were placed in a glass bowl, then a blindfolded boy selected from the trio at random. Religious people can appeal to the idea that the outcome wasn’t truly...
Ubiquitous yet hated – what does the triumph of PowerPoint teach us about Generative AI?
The aesthetic of our age was shaped in Paris in 1992, in the Hotel Regina. The occasion was carefully stage-managed by a team of technicians fussing over a huge colour projector that cost as much as a small house. The big unveiling came when Robert Gaskins, a...
The art of making good misstakes
Do good teams make fewer mistakes? It seems a reasonable hypothesis. But in the early 1990s, when a young researcher looked at evidence from medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals, the numbers told her a completely different story: the teams who displayed the...
Confessions of a work-from-homer
I wouldn’t claim to be a workaholic — the word is ugly and glib. But as I enter my sixth decade, I am finally starting to own up to some bad work habits. Unlike my father, who would head to the office in the morning, come home in the evening and almost never work...