The Wiki Man

Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were — on the contrary, even today we enjoy, in Great Britain at least, a higher standard of life than at any previous period — but because other values seem to have been sacrificed and because they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily, inasmuch as our economic system is not, in fact, enabling us to exploit to the utmost the possibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique, leading us to feel that we might as well have used up the margin in more satisfying ways. If you finished that paragraph and thought ‘Gosh, Sutherland has really nailed the contemporary malaise’, you are probably right. Except for two things.

‘Suppose you bought a case of claret a few years ago for £20 a bottle. It now sells at auction for about £75. You have decided to drink a bottle. Which of the following best captures your feeling of the cost to you of drinking the bottle?   1. £0. I already paid for it. 2. £20 — what I paid for it. 3. £20 plus interest. 4. £75, what I could get if I sold the bottle. 5. -£55. I get to drink a bottle that is worth £75 that I only paid £20 for, so I save money by drinking it.’   This question (with prices in dollars) was given to readers of Liquid Assets, an annual newsletter on wine auction pricing. It was posed by Richard Thaler, later to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

I was talking to a large Silicon Valley video-conferencing firm the other day. ‘Just for interest,’ I asked, ‘what would it cost to provide your service to 65 million people?’ The reason I asked is simple. I don’t understand why it is fine for government to spend £60 billion on a railway or £20 billion on an airport, but not, say, £300 million a year providing the whole country with first-rate video-calling technology. The argument for the UK seems especially compelling. An English-speaking country situated on the Greenwich meridian is likely to gain disproportionate business advantage from the widespread adoption of video--conferencing.

My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges, this way’. But it takes nous to think ‘yes, well and good, but what happens if people see the first sign but miss the second one?’ In all likelihood, they would end up walking 500 yards in the wrong direction, as I nearly did. Signage and wayfinding are mostly designed for people who never make mistakes. Should you misread your gate number at an airport, and end up at gate 92 instead of gate 29, you are doomed.

To fund the war against Napoleon in 1813, Princess Marianne of Prussia invented an ingenious tax-raising scheme. Wealthy Prussians were called on to hand their jewellery to the state; in exchange they were given iron replacements for the gold items they had donated. Stamped on the iron replicas were the words ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen’. The phrase has a double meaning, the iron referring to the iron of the replica, but also to the ‘iron’ your donation had bought as armaments. At Prussian balls thereafter, iron jewellery carried more status than gold. Gold merely proved your family was rich; iron proved you were not only rich but patriotic. Why does no one try such ideas today?

People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed Europeans are irrelevant. Those people will vote Remain in any case. Instead you need to reach the ambivalent, sceptical or mildly hostile. This raises the central question about communication: do you want to feel good about yourself, or do you want to change the minds of others? The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful ends — persuasion or cementing tribal allegiance. Usually you can’t do both.

In 2012 I finished a meeting in Berlin and headed to Tegel airport. Apparently mine was a historic flight, since the airport was to close that very week. Future flights would soon land at the wondrous new Berlin Brandenburg airport, which would be opening ‘within months’. Seven years later, planes still fly into Tegel. The new airport may open in 2020 or 2021; no one knows. So far, the project has cost €9 billion, triple the original estimate. The roof is 100 per cent overweight. All the electrical wiring may need replacing. The escalators were too short, so end not at floor level but on an ersatz plinth. Underneath, empty trains run daily into a six-platform ghost station to stop the tracks from rusting.

I recently came across the Small Robot Company, a British agricultural robotics start-up. Their vision is that with smart, autonomous mini-tractors, the monoculture which has Mondrianised our landscape could be replaced by something more diverse. Farmers could plant multiple crops in the same fields, and practise new forms of rotation. Such an approach would also be sparing in its use of chemicals: rather than spraying fields indiscriminately, the robots would scuttle about like mechanical serfs, treating only areas that need it. Though a great-uncle was a world authority on Welsh Black Mountain sheep (he once gave a long and involved answer to a child’s joke question ‘Why do white sheep eat more than black sheep?

A once famous question posed to job-seekers at Microsoft was ‘Why are manhole covers round?’ The question was revealing not because there was a single right answer, but precisely because there wasn’t. It helped elicit whether the applicant was someone happy to supply one plausible answer or someone who looked beyond the obvious. At a simple level, manhole covers are round because manholes are round. But there are other reasons. A circular manhole cover cannot fall down the hole beneath; a square manhole, if aligned diagonally, could. Round manhole covers can also be moved easily by rolling and replaced in any orientation. They are probably stronger than square ones. And so on. Equally good is the question asked of economics students by Professor Robert Frank at Cornell.

A levels, from the perspective of a ‘choice architect’, are a disaster. While pupils are free to pick and mix freely among the humanities, science is implicitly presented as an all-or-nothing package deal. Any aspiring scientist must study at least three of the big four: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. People who want to keep their options open, or who are reluctant to drop, say, history, are forced at around the age of 15 to make a highly asymmetric choice: either bet the farm on science or abandon it entirely. Faced with this skewed option, too many do the latter. This means many otherwise intelligent people leave university with a rather poor understanding of science — not only of its strengths but its limitations.

I have a dim memory from 1970 of a primly dressed distant relative visiting in a Baby Austin. This, I later learned, was the anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. I googled her 45 years later and was astonished to find she had spent several years in the 1920s and 1930s living alone among Stone Age tribes in New Guinea. Her pet kitten so enchanted the normally fierce Kukukuku that they even built her a temporary house. Aside from her travels, what also surprised me was how close-knit the world of anthropology then was. Just a few hundred people gave rise to debates which are still alive today. Nature vs nurture, for instance. Or IQ testing. Blackwood was a close friend of Hortense Powdermaker, who was later to write a fascinating study of Hollywood called Hollywood, the Dream Factory.

The Romans never invented the stirrup. It took 50 years after the invention of canned food for someone to invent the can opener. And we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. This seems silly. But it is worth understanding each invention in context: often, a concatenation of other events has to occur before an invention can become widely adopted. The stirrup was of no use until the invention of the saddle-tree, which more evenly spread the rider’s weight across the horse’s back. The can opener had to wait for thinner cans: early tins were too hefty to submit to anything less than a chisel. In the case of wheeled luggage, the barrier may have been social acceptance.

I’d like to propose a new scientific institution: the IUT, or Institute of Underrated Technology. Rather than trying to invent yet more bloody things, it will instead be devoted to helping us derive greater value from things we can do already using technology which already exists. Innovation is a two-stage process. First you discover something; then over time people discover how best to use it. Many ideas fall at the second hurdle: the Chinese invented gunpowder but used it only for fireworks; early Mesoamericans invented the wheel, but attached it only to children’s toys. In recent times, the internet seems to have delivered a lot more in entertainment value than in productivity. What we need is not more technology, but better uses for it.

In past years, I have been a critic of HS2. I might now change my mind. One simple tweak might make HS2 worthwhile — while saving the taxpayer most of its £60 billion cost. For this to work, all you need to understand is that 1 x 200 is not the same as 200 x 1. To put it another way, commuting is not commutative. At present, all transport investment is driven by an economic model based on the purported economic value of overall time-savings for passengers. This, as David Metz shows in his excellent book Travel Fast or Smart? is a daft way to plan transport. Never mind that time spent travelling nowadays need be no less productive than time spent stationary: the model is dumb for a bigger reason.

I recently saw a series of photographs depicting a rural home in China. Pride of place in a grimly furnished main room was given to a gargantuan new flat-screen television, while the sole toilet was a hole in the ground in an outside shed. What strange priorities, I thought. On reflection, though, under the same circumstances, I suspect quite a few of us would do the same thing. In Britain, for a hundred years or so, we never faced such a choice: you could install a decent indoor toilet, but not a Samsung 75in 4K LED TV, because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. So in Britain we almost all installed plumbing before we bought televisions — because that is the order in which they became available.

It has become commonplace for news reports to refer to almost any civic unrest, or even unusual patterns of voting, as evidence of ‘resurgent nationalism’ — implicitly suggesting a visceral hatred of foreigners and a desire to set the clock back to the glory days of racial homogeneity and casual homophobia. We should be wary of accepting this media trope: for one thing it may arouse far more fear than is warranted. But apart from the needless fear it generates, it is also slightly dubious to suggest that it is the gilets jaunes or the Five Star Movement or the supporters of Brexit or even Donald Trump who are acting intemperately.

During the second Gulf war, simply out of curiosity, I found myself visiting the website of a giant American mercenary organisation. At the top of its home page I was surprised to see the words ‘online shop’. Thinking I could perhaps order an airstrike, or a fleet of Humvees to collect my daughters from school, I clicked on the link. All that was on offer was a range of brightly coloured beach towels displaying the company’s logo — a giant bear’s pawprint next to the word ‘Blackwater’. Needless to say, I bought two: one in orange and one in pink. In all honesty, I don’t think my wife was entirely thrilled with them that Christmas. So I’d never claim to be one of the world’s great gift-givers.

I have just spent a weekend planning a family trip to Chennai and Hyderabad. Since some of the flights are booked with reward points and some are not, our flights are under three separate booking numbers, each of which requires a separate login. I also had to print out booking confirmations from three different hotels, four boarding cards for the internal flights from Madras to Hyderabad, and a separate docket for my airport parking. That doesn’t include the two hours my wife spent applying for online visas, or the 90 minutes I spent getting approval to use a British credit card on an Indian airline website. Or the time I spent inputting my family’s passport details into another airline website, while also pre-ordering vegetarian meals for my pinko daughter.

In recent years, much scrutiny has been paid to the workings of social media algorithms. Driven by escalating competition for human attention, social media sites became filled with negative or controversial posts, because these attract more protracted engagement than anything else. Since reader attention attracts revenues, any profit-seeking algorithm will learn to highlight divisive content at the expense of more important topics. So a story about Hawaiian pizza might be more lucrative than one about human trafficking, since the idea of pineapple on pizzas polarises opinion more than a story about something universally agreed to be bad. But this problem is not confined to digital media.

Imagine a world where employers judged applicants solely on their dress. Anyone in frayed clothes or scuffed shoes would never get a job. This would be unfair to poorer applicants so, in the name of equality, the government might offer favourable loans up to £1,000 to buy interview clothing. At first glance this would seem a wonderful way to promote fairness. Yet if the number of jobs remained constant, such a policy would have the opposite effect: it would merely ratchet up the level of wasteful, zero-sum competition for what limited chances exist. Soon, anyone not sporting Savile Row tailoring and handmade shoes would be written off. Rather than widening opportunity, it would raise the bar to existing opportunities still higher.