Four hundred years ago, in a Stockholm shipyard, work began on Vasa, the pride of the Swedish navy. King Gustavus Adolphus was at war, and gave orders to his shipwrights to build something impressive. In accordance with the king’s instructions, Vasa was ambitiously...
How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way. In February...
He didn’t go to sample the Dolcetto d’Alba, I’m fairly sure of that. John Lombe’s mission was industrial espionage. He travelled to Piedmont with the goal of learning the Piedmontese art of spinning silk into strong yarn. Nobody was likely to teach him — that would...
Keeping warm is sometimes expensive, but even a caveman can cope with the technical challenge: pull on an extra bearskin and throw another log on to the fire. Keeping cool is a trickier business. The eccentric Roman emperor Elagabalus sent his slaves into the...
For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the wrong solution to the wrong problem. One of Labour’s key policy goals was to...
For an academic researcher who first trained as a philosopher, then as a psychologist, Robyn Dawes was a practical fellow. He would tell a story from his time working in a psychiatric ward in the late 1950s. “There was a client who had this delusion, and the delusion...
We heard a lot about “greedflation” in the post-pandemic years, when prices were increasing at a rate of 8 or 9 per cent a year. We hear a lot less about the subject now, when inflation rates are almost normal. In fact, a Google Trends search for “greedflation” shows...
What is the value of high-quality, trustworthy official statistics? Given the number of things that statistical agencies measure, we might expect that they have attempted to put a number on this too. In fact, they have often been rather coy. A UN report, “Promoting,...
Marathon day. An early train into London, then an unfamiliar journey across a race-disrupted city from Paddington to Blackheath, all in good time for the start of the race. I was nervous, of course, but was cheered by the sight of another bib-wearing runner — more...