Rory Sutherland | The Spectator columnists & writers

The case for ‘premium economy’ train carriages

A few years ago I wrote here about the unexpected symbiosis between economy passengers and business travellers on commercial flights. Largely unnoticed by people in either cabin, those buying each class of air ticket are unintentionally helping out their fellow travellers at the other end of the plane. Precisely because the two classes of passenger have wildly different priorities (the people at the front are sensitive to time, productivity and comfort; the people at the back are more sensitive to price), it benefits both groups to share the same aircraft. Why? Well, put simply, leisure passengers do not much care whether a flight to Miami operates daily, weekly or even fortnightly, since they are most likely going away for one or two weeks.

The genius of bottomless brunch

I’m rather fond of the many service stations on the M4, since I am convinced they are all named after Jane Austen characters who never made it into the final drafts of the novels. But as an alternative, west of Lord Chieveley and Lady Membury and just east of Sir Leigh Delamere, you can try the Three Trees Farm Shop & Café just south of Junction 15. There is a bank of four car chargers outside, which is what drew me there. The farm shop is wonderful, with charming staff, and stocked with the kind of high-margin artisanal goods you can buy as presents for the people you are visiting or, better still, for yourself. Moreover, aside from the omission of kedgeree and omelette Arnold Bennett, the café menu pretty much matched my entry for a fantasy league in café menus, should such a thing ever exist.

Why we pick the wrong holiday destinations

Having returned from a fortnight’s break, I wonder if we get holidays all wrong. In northern Europe, the custom is that you head south to spend time on the beach. But equally, there is such a thing as too damned hot, especially if, like me, you have a healthy dose of Celtic ancestry. To avoid this, you need to study what is called the ‘wet-bulb temperature’. This is a measure of temperature which accounts for the cooling effect of evaporation. At 100 per cent relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the dry-bulb temperature shown on weather forecasts. At lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower, owing to evaporative cooling, a mechanism all humans other than Prince Andrew depend on to reduce their body temperature.

The mathematical formula that proves London is over

Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the lawn was slightly prickly, and the experience was painful but not intolerable; until one day, when one of the pricks in his heel was more pronounced than usual. He had been bitten by a snake and, again this being Australia, the snake was highly venomous. Doctors saved his leg and he made a complete recovery. But there was one lasting side-effect: he now found walking across his lawn agonising. In terms of the stimulus to his feet, nothing had changed. What had changed was how his brain processed the stimulus. What was once a mildly aversive discomfort was amplified by a learned fear into something much more painful.

What Bob Dylan can teach us about economics

The problem with attempts to make everything in life more scientific is that reality hates generalisation. You can try to formulate universal laws, but in any complex system even the smallest contextual difference or hidden asymmetry can be enough to rewrite those laws completely. Economics refers to something called ‘the market’, the laws of which supposedly govern all economic activity. In reality, anyone exposed to commerce soon realises that different markets follow wildly different rules. With airline seats, it is widely observed that ‘scarcity bias’ drives sales – hence the message ‘only three seats left at this price’. But this does not work for vegetables. It’s very difficult to sell the last tomato in a tray because customers infer that since no one else wanted it, it must be a bit manky.

The Edition

Prima donna: is Giorgia Meloni the most dangerous woman in Europe?

43 min listen

The Edition

Prima donna: is Giorgia Meloni the most dangerous woman in Europe?

43 min listen

The case for theft-tanks

The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford and someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford. I can barely contain my excitement. I find the very idea of an undergraduate degree in politics alarming. It is often seen in business that people who complete an MBA straight after university turn out to be spectacularly useless employees, and it’s possible that this unhappy pattern recurs in politics. The reason is simple: there is an order effect at work. It’s one thing to theorise on the basis of practice; quite another to practise on the basis of theory.

The hidden benefit of an electric car

Hello, and welcome to episode one of What’s in My Frunk?, the first in an occasional Spectator series of news and advice for the electronic motorist. In this edition we’ll be discussing one of the unexpected benefits of owning an electric car. The space under the bonnet vacated by the engine often provides a small but usable secondary storage area. This is the ‘frunk’, a portmanteau word combining ‘front’ and the American word ‘trunk’. Now that even Land Rover Defenders have carpeted boots, your frunk is great for transporting anything wet or dirty – wellingtons, charging cables, takeaways or body parts from your last hit. My Mustang Mach-E even has a drainage hole at the bottom so you can rinse away any traces of mud, curry or DNA.

The unhappy truth about holidays

In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of everyone in advertising was to work hard for many years, ultimately winning enough accounts and awards to retire to a French farmhouse where they could wake to the smell of fresh bread and black coffee, before driving a rusted 2CV to the local market. ‘A simpler alternative,’ Webster explained, ‘was simply to be born a French peasant, in which case you could cut out the middle bit altogether.’ Retirement plans are prone to what the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman calls ‘affective forecasting’. We think we know what will make us happy. In reality, experiments show humans are very bad at predicting the effect that life changes will have on their levels of happiness, which return to a baseline remarkably fast.

Buying a brand-new car is the ultimate good deed

The Department for Transport recently ended a £1,500 subsidy towards the price of new, lower-priced electric cars one year earlier than planned. To their credit, there are better ways to promote electric-car use – for instance by encouraging the installation of public charging stations. As it is, the spread of rapid-charging stations in the UK is bizarrely uneven. Some parts of the country are well served, but there are unexpected black spots. Oddly, trendy places where people talk endlessly about sustainability – such as Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton – are hopeless for rapid charging points, while less fanciful places like Thurrock, Milton Keynes and Newport are awash with them. If you find yourself in Oxford or Cambridge and want to rapid-charge your electric car, you need to head out of town to a Lidl or McDonald’s (Golden Arches 1, Dreaming Spires 0).

Working from home could have been the reset we needed

‘It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.’ All true, I’m sure. But what you’re describing here isn’t an office: it’s a pub. The same goes for ‘team-bonding’. Placing a lot of people in an open-plan office doesn’t really form a close-knit team – which may explain why very little military training takes place behind desks. No, if you want to form a highly collaborative team, just book your subordinates on a Eurostar junket to Paris, then forget to confirm their return tickets. Trust me, not only will they be newly united in a shared disdain for your organisational skills, but the four hours they’re forced to spend together in Five Guys at the Gare du Nord will forge bonds otherwise found only in the SAS or Navy Seals.

Why sat navs are a conversation killer

When my daughters learned to drive, I suggested they take their tests in automatics as driving manual cars would soon be redundant. I worry about this. Not because I think I was wrong, but because I fear that gear-changing is yet another of those once commonplace skills which may soon be lost to technology for ever, like double-declutching or the ability to memorise more than three phone numbers. As evidence of this depletion of tacit expertise, consider how the satnav has eroded map-reading skills in anyone under 40 – something which might explain why the Russian army sticks to main roads even when driving tanks. Since nobody uses printed maps any more, it has left people spectacularly ignorant of relative geography.

The Edition

Inside Taiwan’s plan to thwart Beijing

37 min listen

The Edition

Inside Taiwan’s plan to thwart Beijing

37 min listen

My solution to unfair traffic fines

My driveway now lies in the middle of an ‘Average Speed Check Zone’. It’s a wonderful arrangement – for me – since the slower traffic makes it easier to pull into the road. Yet I am still free to drive through the village like Fangio since average speed check cameras do not record your speed, only time taken between two points. Since I rarely drive past my house without stopping, it barely affects me at all. It’s symptomatic of a wider problem. To what extent can we truly rely on technology to replace human judgment in the administration and enforcement of rules? The legalisation of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) in private car parks has created a predatory breed of car-park operator, who rely more on fining unwitting offenders than on charging for legitimate parking.

My plan to cut congestions on our roads

Much of the current antipathy towards the car derives from the excessive influence Londoners exert over national debates. London is an outlier in being one of the very few places where you can avoid owning a car, and where cycling or public transport is faster than driving. Indeed a car is less useful in the middle of London than anywhere else: you can’t drive to work, you can’t park at the shops and, if you set out from inner London, after 30 minutes of fraught driving you will merely end up in a worse part of London. This is not true in other cities, where 30 minutes’ drive will take you from the centre to attractive countryside and fast roads. Using a car in London is also hateful. Not only do you have to contend with the peculiarly solipsistic driving style of Londoners, who lack the reciprocal altruism practised by normal motorists, but you need to take a co-driver with you, rather like the World Rally Championship.

How to watch YouTube on your TV – and why you should

According to Pliny the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus was the first man to shave daily. The origin of the name Boeing is Welsh. The family emigrated to the US from Germany, where they were called Böing, but this was a Germanisation of the Welsh patronymic ab Owen. In Pembrokeshire there is a Church of St Elvis. Helen Viola Jackson, the last recipient of a US Civil War widow’s pension, died in 2020. At the time of the Napoleonic wars, France was the fourth most populous country in the world, behind only China, India and Japan, with double the population of the UK. The origin of the word ‘zydeco’ – to describe the Cajun musical genre – is uncertain. One theory is it was formed from ‘zarico’, derived from the French les haricots ne sont pas salés.

Should the young pay less tax than the old?

In evolutionary terms, it is obvious why we get more conservative with age. Two strong forces, acting in the same direction, lead us not to bet on rank outsiders when we’re nearing the last race of the day. First, older people have more experience to draw on when making decisions: if you already know what you like, the need to experiment is much less. But that’s not all. The elderly also have far less time remaining to benefit from experimentation. If you happen on a new cuisine, band, social circle or holiday destination in your twenties, you have many decades to profit from the discovery. Someone in their sixties might have one or two. In artificial intelligence this is known as the explore-exploit trade-off. Early in the game it pays to invest time in exploring and evaluating your options; later, as the time left for new findings shrinks, it makes sense to devote more energy to exploiting what you have already learned.

The link between motorway service stations and shortages of PPE

I spend quite a lot of time attacking what I call ‘motorway service station’ path design. More attentive readers of The Spectator may remember this from 2019: ‘You are tooling down a motorway at 75mph and decide to stop for a break… Once off the slip road you face a barrage of signs: Food Court/Fuel/Lorries/Caravans/Coaches/Travelodge/Costa Drive-Thru, each pointing to a different fork. If your attention briefly wavers and you miss one of these bifurcations, you will find yourself hopelessly trapped in the lorry park with no means of return. This is probably what happened to Lord Lucan.’ For any parking option in a motorway service station, there is only one correct path to your destination. Make one mistake and you’re doomed.

How to post a parcel without leaving your house

Here’s a useful tip. Go to the Royal Mail website and you can ask your postman to collect letters or parcels from your home at a cost of 60p per item. You pay for postage online, print a label and book a collection for the following day. Granted, it’s an extravagant way to merely avoid a walk to the postbox, but for special delivery items or parcels it’s a godsend. If you don’t have a printer at home, you can even get your postie to bring a label. Given that Royal Mail was founded in 1516, I’m not quite sure why it took 500 years to come up with this particular wheeze, but better late than never. In the US, where they have mailboxes rather than slots in the door, postmen have always collected mail. That’s why many American mailboxes have a little flag on them – you raise it to signal when you have post to be collected.

Why restaurant food at home beats eating out

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’ That’s Niels Bohr. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Like physics and art, many other fields require that you embrace contradictions — because you can’t avoid them. Take innovation. Yes, a great deal of progress is combinatory: two or more technologies are combined to accomplish some hitherto impossible task. But, as the Soviet-era scientist Genrich Altshuller noticed, much innovation follows the opposite path, separating things which were previously combined. The productivity gains from factory electrification only appeared decades after the electric motor was invented when people learned to break manufacturing down into independent stages, each powered by small motors, rather than running everything off one big power source, as was the practice with steam.

The myth of the typical Brexit voter

In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey Mabbott’s] specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj, to Mrs Gandhi… was rooted in Alcestis’s second husband’s mild fondness for curries.’ It’s high time this phrase was revived, because piss pyramids are everywhere. We assumed more data would help humanity settle its differences: in reality it often exacerbates them. With ever more data, it becomes far easier, even without conscious intent, to find evidence to support your preconceptions.

Is it really such a shock that some people drink at work?

Thirteen years ago we shared an office building with a large international bank. A common lift connected both businesses to the underground car park. Here I once overheard one of the bank employees describing our offices: ‘And you know what else they have up there…’ He spoke in the kind of wide-eyed, aghast tone you might have expected if he were about to reveal an opium den or a branch of Stringfellows: ‘They’ve got a bar.’ This was true. In the evenings after work, while the bankers downstairs were soberly hard at work destroying the world economy, there were people only yards above them shamelessly chatting over a beer. Some people drink at work. It’s a fact. And the presence of alcohol in a workplace does not necessarily denote a party.

Are electric cars a Columbus’s egg?

The explosion in remote and flexible working accelerated by the pandemic slightly supports my assertion that the most important limits to future innovation may be psychological and behavioural, not technological. I am among a number of people who believe that the newly widespread use of video-conferencing is of great economic significance. A few economists and commentators agree, but all of us suffer mild social embarrassment whenever we make our case: it feels faintly absurd to evangelise a technology which is more than 20 years old, rather than pontificating about the ‘metaverse’ or some other fashionable guff. Yet history bears us out. Because, bizarre as it may seem in retrospect, most technologies — especially network technologies — are relatively old at the point when they fully realise their economic or social significance.

Everyone should be sick in the street once

I learned a great deal at university, about half of it from a man called Raymond Foulk. Ray was not Professor Foulk or even Dr Foulk: Ray was a near contemporary — he was in the year below me — but a mature student, then aged about 44. Shortly before he arrived at the beginning of my second year to read architecture, the college investigated his past life and sought to exile him to first-year accommodation far outside the college walls to prevent him corrupting the youth. There was nothing remotely illegal or nefarious about his past — but he had created and run the three Isle of Wight Festivals with his brother, and the college authorities had somehow become convinced they were admitting a second Howard Marks. This was ironic since, although Ray might have indulged in the odd toke de politesse, he was generally far more abstemious and responsible than the rest of us.

Why you shouldn’t always ‘follow the science’

Fairly early in the pandemic it was widely accepted in scientific circles that the likelihood of outdoor transmission of Covid at low-density events — say garden parties or beer gardens — was relatively low. It might therefore have seemed logical to allow such gatherings to take place sooner than we did. From a practical point of view, however, it could have been a terrible move. As is so often the case, a straightforward scientific finding does not always translate into practical legislation. Like the saying goes: ‘In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.’ In reality, policy-makers cannot simply follow the science: there is always something else at work. Here two confounding factors are human behaviour and weather.

The key to happiness? Getting behind the wheel

A friend of mine recently visited a company in Europe which plans to manufacture human-carrying, pilotless drones. These would be capable of carrying a single passenger above the traffic at speeds of around 70 miles an hour. ‘What kind of onboard information would be conveyed to the passenger?’ he asked. Will they be told their airspeed, altitude or location… that kind of thing?’ ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ he was told. ‘There is no need. The entire journey is pre-programmed, and there is no need for the passenger to know what is going on, since they are powerless to intervene.’ Now imagine this for a moment. It’s pitch dark, you have no idea where you are other than that it is a few thousand feet in the air, and the pitch of the engines drops unexpectedly.

How men’s wardrobes prove constraints can be good for us

One thing that surprised every-one during lockdown was how many people derived unexpected pleasure from living under imposed restrictions. Can people become happier when temporarily prevented from doing things they would normally do? Almost certainly. Sometimes such circumstances force us to try something new which we subsequently prefer; at other times we enjoy having an external excuse not to do things we don’t want to do at all. There is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry gleefully realises that his mother’s death provides him with a reason to cancel all his upcoming engagements. All of us, I suspect, recognise this: we have moments where we are grateful to be mildly ill, since it pleasantly reduces the pace of life in a way which would be impossible were we feeling fine.

The problem with online property searches

In 1966, the legendary adman David Ogilvy set out to buy a home in France. He boarded a transatlantic liner to meet a French estate agent who had a perfect house waiting for him in Paris, but while still in mid-ocean he heard he had been gazumped. There were presumably other houses on sale in Paris at the time, but it seems the agent did not show David any of them. Instead he suggested they board a train to Poitiers, 200 miles away, to an area David later described as ‘the South Dakota of France’. On the banks of the Vienne stood a decaying 13th-century château with around 30 bedrooms and a network of dungeons. David bought that instead. He lived there from the mid-1970s until his death in 1999. Restoring the building and gardens was one of the great joys of his life.

The case for dodging cracks in the pavement

It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the Covid virus had emerged in 1921. Or 1821. Or 1521. There would have been no vaccine, for one thing. Treatment would mostly have been worse. In the 17th century we would have blamed the entire thing on Catholics. But in a few respects, bizarrely, we might have done better. For instance, miasma theory, although technically wrong, might have protected us better against airborne transmission than the early scientific consensus that the disease was spread via droplets on surfaces. A believer in miasma theory might have practised mask wearing (ideally with a large beak), indoor ventilation and outdoor gathering more assiduously than we did. You can see the benign influence of this theory in the design of many large-windowed, lofty Victorian buildings, and in the heroic success of 19th-century sewage projects.

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