Alchemy

by Rory Sutherland

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  *After water.

  *I drink rather a lot of the stuff myself.

  *A deer, a female deer.

  *The ‘perhaps’ is needed for purity, as not all deer are does – some are stags.

  *Indeed Ibn Khaldun, the father of sociology, perhaps saw it in the fourteenth century.

  *As an experiment, I tried this once – about three months later, I was offered some sex. So the economic approach, if it works at all, works rather slowly.

  *Stuart Rose, former executive chairman of Marks & Spencer.

  *Whatever else you may think of Bill Clinton, his track record clearly indicates that he is an instinctive political genius.

  *A bizarre international junket where, for some reason, the world’s most intelligent people collectively decide that it is a good idea to spend part of January halfway up a mountain.

  *Hillary could not convincingly have made such a threat, because everyone would have known it was hollow. Trump is crazy enough to go through with it.

  *Bakelite, penicillin, the microwave, X-rays, radar, radio were all discovered ‘backwards’.

  *The dissident Austrian School of economists wisely believed this.

  *I know. Who would have thought it?

  *For example, we probably love sugar too much: in the ancestral environment there was no refined sugar, and the only food with a comparable glycemic load was honey.

  *My friend, the evolutionary biologist Nichola Raihani, recently had her child’s bicycle helmet stolen. She was immediately struck by the strength of her outrage, which was far more extreme than if her own bicycle helmet had been stolen.

  *Spain’s peaceful and robust transition to democracy after Franco might have been impossible without the decisive role played by an arbitrary and symbolic head of state.

  *Alcoholics Anonymous is, remember, modelled on explicitly religious principles.

  *Take that, Dawkins!

  *The gin brand Hendrick’s engaged in a very clever bit of non-sense, when they suggested that their product be served not with lemon but with cucumber, which gained immediate salience. Being British, I failed to notice the genius of this move, which was that it also positioned the drink as sophisticatedly British in the United States; Americans find cucumber sandwiches a British peculiarity. To a Brit, of course, a cucumber is not seen as being particularly British – it is just something we make sandwiches with.

  *It has often been proposed that he was autistic. I am reluctant to use this diagnosis too widely, but it is perhaps true that he was overburdened with the use of reason. He once declined the chance to meet his young nieces, saying, ‘If I don’t like them, I will not enjoy the experience, and if I do like them then I will be sad to see them leave.’ Perfectly reasonable, I suppose, but weird as hell! Kant was also a weirdo.

  *Notice that ordinary people are never allowed to pronounce on complex problems. When do you ever hear an immigration officer interviewed about immigration, or a street cop interviewed about crime? These people patently know far more about these issues than economists or sociologists, and yet we instead seek wisdom from people with models and theories rather than actual experience.

  *For instance, will wealthy Germans help poorer Germans? Yup. Will they help Syrians? Yes, albeit reluctantly. Poor Greeks, however? No chance.

  *In Western countries at any rate, Asia seems to be different in this, to some degree.

  *Including me, weirdly.

  *The technical term is ‘cognitive dissonance’.

  *Even the super-rich love a bargain. In fact supermarket own-brand products tend to be bought more by wealthier people than by poorer people.

  *Pernod, of course, only tastes really good in France. And Guinness tastes better in Ireland. But that’s not because Guinness is better in Ireland, but because Ireland is a better backdrop for drinking Guinness. Apparently rosé wine tastes much better if you are by the sea.

  *In understanding the folly of seeking universal laws for human behaviour, I have been greatly enlightened by the anthropologist Oliver Scott Curry and the recent book Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The attempt by philosophers to impose context-free moral obligations on people seems to fall foul of our evolved nature.

  *One of the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham.

  *Before The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Commonly described as a work of moral philosophy, it is also a fabulous primer on behavioural science and consumer psychology. See Chapter 3.10.

  *And it’s usually a he, isn’t it?

  *Why do you think Management Consultancies are so successful?

  *And please don’t get me started on bottled water!

  *Typically the size at which they start employing market research companies.

  *Although a Swiss genius called Robert Maillart did build bridges based on subjective judgement. Maillart’s bridges would all rank among the 100 most beautiful bridges in the world. Google them and judge for yourself. Maillart was not really an engineer – he was an artist in concrete.

  *We have loads of practice, since we have more roundabouts than any other country bar France. Indeed we invented the roundabout, but since this post-dated the War of Independence by 150 years or so, we failed to get the United States to show much interest. Other British possessions were more fortunate: the Swahili for ‘roundabout’ is ‘keepi lefti’ – since Kenyan roundabouts were usually marked by a sign exhorting drivers to ‘Keep Left’.

  *The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea, remember!

  *Except for the one that begins with a P.

  *The system is so finely tuned that the clocks on board these satellites must be calibrated to run 38 microseconds a day slower than Earth time, to correct for the effects of general and special relativity.

  *In a less politically correct age, we might have described it as ‘a bit German’.

  *Motorways are high on optimality but low on optionality: if you are stuck on a back road you can turn off and try a different route, whereas on a fast road you are trapped. A GPS understands none of this, but a human instinctively does. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile (2012) is a masterclass in understanding these second-order considerations. For instance, having someone drop 120 pebbles on your head, one every minute for two hours, would be irritating; having someone drop a rock on your head once is fatal: 1 x 120 does not always equal 120 x 1. More about this later.

  *‘Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.’ Basically seventeenth-century French for ‘Sometimes it pays to ignore your GPS.’

  *Such as, ‘I bought you these flowers in the desperate hope that you would sleep with me.’ Or, ‘I am very eager to study History of Art at your venerable Oxford college so that I can impress the recruitment panel at JP Morgan.’

  *I can find no evidence that Ogilvy did say this – he started his career in market research, and was a great promoter of it. But I nonetheless think he would have reluctantly agreed with it.

  *It is not clear that his self-awareness was much help to his reproductive prospects: I seem to remember he was single. Perhaps his motivation was too obvious to the girls he met?

  *Even people working in advertising, to be honest.

  *Just as, in evolutionary terms, it may pay us to be over-optimistic, rather than objective about our prospects. In psychology, intriguingly, the only people found not to suffer from overconfidence-bias are people with severe depression.

  *New York, perhaps.

  *Tellingly, perhaps, most of their money is made selling not food, but alcohol.

  *I am talking about the London Underground and commuter trains here. The question ‘Why do people mind standing for a four-hour journey?’ would be childish!

  *Such padded rests do exist at t
he end of London Underground carriages, and people sitting on them never seem unhappy.

  *Interestingly a British company has just launched a backpack with all the zips facing inwards towards your back, precisely to solve this fear.

  *‘A choice, not a compromise’ was at one time Ogilvy’s slogan for the Ford Fiesta. Advertising lines – ‘reassuringly expensive’ for Stella Artois, say, often unintentionally offer useful insights into psycho-logic.

  *If this seems ridiculous in retrospect, remember that Silicon Valley may frequently be doing this same thing today: destroying variety and pleasure in pursuit of a logical end that would be psychologically disastrous.

  *If you attend a meeting with the UK Government, no biscuits are provided. It saves something like £50m a year. The hidden cost is that every meeting takes on a slightly unpleasant timbre by violating the most basic principles of hospitality. I don’t even like biscuits, but it still pisses me off. Chatting in the absence of biscuits feels less like a cooperative meeting and more like being interrogated by a Serbian militia. Under any Sutherland regime, scones will be mandatory.

  *Wisconsin, I’m afraid to say, has to carry the can for both the cheese and the beer.

  *A US craft brewery has recently opened in Germany.

  *Zigazig ah! (Joke comprehensible to Spice Girls fans only).

  *There is quite a lot of behavioural evidence to support our assertion. For instance, accurate, real-time departure boards at train stations, which do not make your journey any faster, add a great deal to passenger satisfaction – it seems we would rather wait eight minutes for a train knowing it will arrive in eight minutes, than spend four minutes waiting for a train in a state of anxious uncertainty.

  *If you are interested in understanding more about the depressive effect of feeling a lack of control over an aversive stimulus, or the negative psychological effects of bad design, investigate the work of Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things, 1988) and the ‘learned helplessness’ experiments of Martin Seligman and Steven Maier (1967).

  *It also seems dumb from a psychological point of view not to measure delays as a percentage of the flight duration. A 30-minute delay on a one-hour flight is a far greater annoyance than a one-hour delay on a nine-hour flight.

  *Or the ones who want an excuse to cancel their bloody meeting in Frankfurt.

  *I will explain how later in this book.

  *Thirty nautical miles at the equator.

  *We owe it to Dava Sobel and her bestselling book Longitude (1995) that the name of John Harrison is now widely known.

  *They had hence proved not only that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, but also that snobbery is not an exclusively British vice.

  *Semmelweis was even more cruelly treated than Harrison: he died in a lunatic asylum, perhaps having been beaten by the guards, insisting to his last breath that his theory was right. Which it was.

  *Or ‘denormalisation’.

  *This is known as a ‘Baptists and Bootleggers’ coalition, where moralists and money-makers join forces to resist some proposed relaxation of a law. Bootleggers, for obvious financial reasons, were heavily opposed to the removal of Prohibition in the United States.

  *In Britain, credit is owed to Public Health England and ASH, an anti-smoking campaign group; in the US, a former Surgeon-General was a great advocate of the invention. I even played a small part myself, by persuading the UK Government’s Behavioural Insights Team to resist a knee-jerk urge to ban them.

  *Frankly, I was surprised by how low the figures were. I would have expected at least 5 per cent of non-smokers to give e-cigs a try. What’s going on?

  *However, this works only if you have spent a lot of your life drinking real G&Ts. Among heavy drinkers, the brain doesn’t wait for the booze to kick in – it shortcuts straight to the expected level of drunkenness.

  *Respectively a kind of supercharged jet engine and a form of high-speed land travel through tunnels from which all air, and hence air-resistance, has been removed.

  *Before we get too excited by the economic prospects of the driverless car, it is worth considering what this technology might offer to terrorists, for instance. A driverless car is effectively a cruise missile on wheels.

  *Goldfinger. In the film, Bond tracks Auric Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce to his Alpine lair using an animated map installed in his Aston Martin.

  *I’m largely with Thomas – I don’t do much DIY, but I would acknowledge that my principal interest in cooking is not primarily the preparation of food: it’s an excuse to buy kitchen gadgetry.

  *Or, if you’re married, how about before one of those rare moments in middle age when there is the faint possibility of sexual congress?

  *I suspect people floss their teeth for the same reasons we love to put cotton buds in our ears – it just feels so damn good. I’m also a religious user of alcohol-based hand sanitisers, but if I am to be entirely honest with myself, I use them not to avoid infection, but for the delicious feeling you get when an alcohol-based gel evaporates on your hands.

  *In fact there are two ways you can produce striped toothpaste, but as this is not a book about laminar flow, I won’t go into the details here.

  *My thanks to Wing Commander Keith Dear for supplying two examples: fear of revenants and the accidental contribution this made to public health is described in Helga Nowotny’s The Cunning of Uncertainty (2016).

  *And no doubt in many battles before.

  *In some ways, we need markets simply because prices are the only reliable means of getting consumers to tell the truth about what they want.

  *We all know people, I suspect, who though highly intelligent are insufferably inflexible in their approach to life.

  *Seriously good mathematicians are, as you would expect, much rarer than merely capable ones.

  *Co-authored with Murray Gell-Mann, who I can safely say is quite a good physicist, too, what with him getting a Nobel Prize and discovering quarks and all that. ‘Evaluating Gambles Using Dynamics’, Chaos (February 2016).

  *Presumably, the people who thought like economists all died out.

  *This explains why Amazon Prime needs to exist. Without it, Amazon cannot have regular customers.

  *Me, dammit!

  *A recent lottery winner?

  *This is why conmen tend to base themselves in cities, on racecourses and in other places that offer a reliable supply of gullible victims.

  *Certainly we Brits might feel smug about it since, by moving into physical retailing, Amazon seems to have discovered that Argos had it right all along: a physical presence still counts.

  *I call it ‘Sutherland’s Law of Bad Maths’.

  *As you may do before Christmas.

  *Requiring you to drive to an industrial estate in Dartford on Christmas Eve, thus wiping out any putative time savings.

  *As you may have guessed, it’s an obsession of mine.

  *I do not use a season ticket, but I would find both these arrangements perfectly equitable – just as I would expect someone who regularly eats at a restaurant to be offered a better table.

  *Perhaps someone who’d had a proper job, someone from a poorer background and someone with a science degree.

  *I know this from personal experience. Years after I was first hired, someone involved in the selection process revealed that I would never have been offered a job had they been recruiting one person at a time, but because they had four vacancies they decided ‘to take a punt on the weirdo’, or words to that effect.