Bookmarks (14)

Here’s the problem with forecasts: some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, and by the time we find out which is which, it’s too late. This leads to what we might call the forecasting paradox: the test of a useful forecast is not whether it turns out to be accurate, but […]

What if the total sum of wealth in the world was immediately and simultaneously redistributed equally among the six billion adult people in the world? — Bezz UBS’s Global Wealth Report puts global wealth at around $450tn, which would mean each adult would get about $75,000. On the day that your proposal goes into effect, […]

Robert F Kennedy Jr is a man best known for his years of tireless work undermining public confidence in vaccines, and repeating long-debunked claims about their health risks. The likelihood that he will take charge of all US healthcare policy is a bracing prospect. Until an arsonist is put in charge of a fire department, […]

Bill Clinton’s election strategist James Carville wanted his 1992 presidential campaign to focus on three simple messages. But one of them has transcended its original context: “It’s the economy, stupid.” What then to make of the decisive swing towards Donald Trump against a backdrop of low unemployment, falling inflation and economic growth rates most of […]

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 what might a better path look like? It sometimes pays to look for […]

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 Nobel Prizes have occasionally […]

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 book, Finite and Infinite Games, is not really about games. […]

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 all relevant randomised controlled trials.” The idea of “organising a critical summary” reeks […]

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. The best man who manages to embarrass the bride and outrage her […]

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 Piletti. As he read his audition lines, protesting […]

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 whistles! A heart-rate monitor. A step counter. Sleep monitoring. […]

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.  Bellos is offering a very particular kind of puzzle: […]

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 20 times over, perhaps more. Our ability to travel, build, calculate, […]

From time to time, my editor will suggest that I write a column about how to be more productive. It’s a sure way to trigger imposter syndrome because, whether or not I appear productive from the outside, I certainly don’t feel productive on the inside. In fairness to myself, and to anyone who worries that they […]