Life is full of difficult decisions. Who should be hired or fired? What grades should students receive in their exams? Should an accused person awaiting trial be released or held in custody? An increasingly popular alternative is to delegate the decisions to a...
Loyal readers will know my fascination with Keith Jarrett’s unplayable piano. In 1975, the jazz pianist was prevailed upon — against his better judgment — to take the stage in front of a large audience at the Cologne opera house. Thanks to a mix-up, Jarrett was forced...
Correlation is not causation. Behind that cliché lies an important truth. In January this year, for example, the UK had one of the most stringent lockdowns and one of the highest death rates from Covid. New Zealand had no deaths and few restrictions. Yet, no matter...
In rich countries there are plenty of vaccines, but we seem to be running out of people who want them. This is frustrating. The vaccines are a medical miracle — safe, more effective than we dared to hope and produced with unprecedented speed. They are the way out of...
I never planned to fake my data. My project involved interviewing the customers visiting a games shop in central London, then analysing the distance they had travelled. Arriving at the location with a clipboard, I realised that I didn’t have the nerve. I slunk home...
I recently had the doubtful pleasure of self-administering a mail-order Covid test. It was a process that required simultaneously mastering the test itself, packing up the sample, and registering the procedure online. This administrative, logistical and medical...
When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, in 2009, she quipped: “I won’t be the last.” Although she has since been proved right, it was nonetheless astonishingly late in the day for such a landmark. Adding to the...
Travel these days requires an awful lot of paperwork. On a recent trip to Italy, I needed to produce proof of vaccination, proof of three different negative lateral flow tests, proof of the booking of a PCR test, a passenger locator form for the EU and a passenger...
I confess, as a boy, to wearing a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt. Da Vinci was my idea of cool, and the attraction lay not in the Mona Lisa’s smile or his sketches of natural phenomena. It was the helicopter. Nothing could be more awesome than a 15th-century thinker...