The democratic world is stuck in a self-destructive, self-reinforcing loop: unforced policy errors lead to desperate gambles both by politicians and voters, leading to yet more unforced policy errors. I think it’s safe to say that there is room for improvement. But...
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, for work that “makes you laugh, then makes you think”, came and went this year, with a clutch of worthy winners. I must report, more in sorrow than in anger, that no Ig Nobel Prize in economics was awarded. This is a great shame. The Ig...
There are at least two kinds of games, the religious scholar James Carse explained: “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Carse’s aphoristic 1986...
In 1979, Archie Cochrane published an essay chastising (not for the first time) his fellow doctors. “It is surely a great criticism of our profession,” he wrote, “that we have not organised a critical summary, by speciality or subspeciality, adapted periodically, of...
There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management consultant whose every word competes with a jargon-filled tangle of meaningless diagrams and bullet points....
When Ernest Borgnine auditioned for the title role of Marty, he knew this could be his big break. Typecast as a bit-part thug, Borgnine was nearly 40, losing his hair and putting on weight. Marty offered him the chance to play a movie lead: lovelorn butcher Marty...
We have a tendency to sleepwalk into adopting new technologies, and my new fitness-tracking watch is no exception. Ever the late adopter, I bought an entry-level model with a single aim: helping me pace myself on my Saturday morning Parkrun. But oh, the bells and the...
A first impression suggests that there is nothing to be gained from reading Alex Bellos’s new book of puzzles, Think Twice (Puzzle me Twice in the US), except an hour or so of pleasant diversion. But as the book makes clear, first impressions can be misleading. ...
Mozart and Haydn were composing string quartets a quarter of a millennium ago, when the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Since then, the scale of the world economy has increased at least a hundredfold and material living standards in western Europe have grown...