The Wiki Man

A 14-year-old at an American school recently caused a stir when he claimed that the US government could save over $400 million annually on the cost of printer ink if the default printer font were switched from Times New Roman to Garamond. Major effects can often be achieved by relatively trivial improvements. One of the things I have always hated about the European passport (apart from the word ‘European’, obviously) is the fact that the pages and the cover are all the same size. How much shorter would all immigration queues be were the photograph page just an eighth of an inch narrower than other pages, so the damned thing flipped open at the right place? But these little incremental improvements are not really the stuff from which really interesting innovations arise.

If you are reading this article online, perhaps you could go to the comments section and let us know what single slightly unusual item you have bought which has brought you the most reliable and lasting happiness. Perverse answers are welcome, of course, but I am not so interested in suggestions such as ‘a Thai bride’ or ‘a brewery’ or ‘“The Concert” by Johannes Vermeer’. What I am hoping for is a list of slightly unusual domestic or practical items which you might have bought on a whim or as a slight extravagance but which subsequently you found surprisingly delightful or life-changing to the point of boring your friends about them.

Google ‘the bread market’ and you get 135,000 hits, mostly from specialist food industry websites. Google ‘the property market’, however, and you get over 180 million. ‘The financial markets’ nets you 282 million. Seen like this, it’s unsurprising that capitalism has a reputational problem. The likelihood that the word ‘market’ is attached to any area of commercial activity is in direct proportion to the degree to which that category is seriously messed up. The idea that all ‘markets’ are effectively the same is perhaps one of the stupidest economic errors of the past 50 years. For a start, asset markets are not like other markets.

During the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecution made much of the fact that Simpson had a record of violence towards his wife. In response, Simpson’s legal team argued that, of all women subjected to spousal abuse, only one in 2,500 was subsequently killed by the abusive husband. It was hence implied that, since the ratio of abusers to killers was so high, any evidence about the accused’s prior violent behaviour was insignificant. This sounds plausible. However, there is another way to consider the statistics.

I am convinced that when I took my driving test in 1983 I was asked by the examiner, ‘What lane of a three-lane motorway should you use when driving at a speed of 70 mph?’ And I am equally sure that the ‘correct’ answer to this question at that time, as given by the early 1980s version of the Highway Code, was ‘the middle one’. My memory is that the three lanes of a motorway back then were designated 1) the slow lane, 2) the fast lane and 3) the overtaking lane. Whenever I mention this, however, no one else remembers anything of the kind. Rather predictably, about one in three people then takes the bait and embarks on a long rant about people ‘hogging the middle lane.

This column nearly didn’t appear. Another 24 hours and I would have trumped the late Jeffrey Bernard with the single sentence ‘Rory Sutherland is in prison.’ Having just spent a day in jail or police cells in Qatar for using an electronic cigarette on a plane, I thought I would just write one piece of technological advice for any Spectator readers who might find themselves in a similar situation. Sit down today, take out your mobile phone, and memorise four or five important phone numbers. Better still, delete those few important numbers from your phone so you are forced to dial them from memory. Because when you’ve been arrested and your mobile phone is dead at 3 a.m., it is not the time to be wondering ‘Now was that 07786 or 07886?

I wouldn’t worry much about the future of the British economy. Because I have a simple plan to make the UK the world’s leading exporter of mobile phones. They will be manufactured by a new consortium including Alfred Dunhill, Cordings and Bowers & Wilkins. The idea came to me when I was watching coverage of the new scandal in France, where a government security officer was photographed at 8 a.m. delivering a bag of croissants to Hollande’s love nest. My first reaction was disgust — I mean, how bad must things be in a country when even the president can’t get a cooked breakfast?

I enjoy reading reviews of kitchen gadgetry. Clever new kitchen products are often under-appreciated. Many rituals around food preparation are intended to signal personal effort, rather than to produce edible food with a minimum of fuss. There is hence a tendency towards bogus authenticity among amateur cooks which causes them to eschew labour-saving devices in favour of doing everything in a faux-Victorian fashion. Professional chefs, who must produce food in quantity every day, do not suffer this delusion: one Michelin-starred chef, when asked to name his favourite item of kitchen equipment, replied ‘the microwave’. Two new devices I particularly recommend are the air-fryer and the soupmaker. Both are commonplace in parts of Asia but were until recently unknown in Britain.

Until the late 1960s, the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson ran something called a ‘copy test’. It was a series of questions designed to uncover people with the kind of perverse imaginative talent necessary to work in their creative department. One question, for instance, was ‘Describe, using no more than 50 words, a piece of toast to a Martian.’ Hundreds of people would write lyrical or technical descriptions in English. One person famously secured a job by writing ‘Floop, floop! Gribble ptáng chiz’nit greep floopiwop.

It was about a week ago, at 8 p.m., when our blackout happened. In the 1980s people would have headed for the bedroom or out to loot the local off-licence. In 2013, however, our first reaction was to check the battery health of our mobile phones. This relationship between sex, crime and consumer electronics may be important. The recorded fall in sexual activity among those aged 16 to 44 in the recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was widely attributed to the ‘growth in social media’ and to our new habit of taking smartphones and tablets to bed. Plausible as this sounds, I don’t think the survey proves any such causation. It might be an effect of multi-channel television.

I am still waiting for someone to refute my argument that it would be possible to reduce the journey time between London and Manchester or Birmingham for many rail passengers by between 20 and 40 minutes — and to improve effective capacity — at about 0.001 per cent of the cost of HS2. This would be done simply using software, not hardware. Last Thursday I travelled to Manchester to give a talk in the afternoon. The journeys up and back were flawless. But they did take 40 minutes longer than necessary — in both directions. Why? A month before, once I knew that I had to travel to Manchester, I did what every sane person would do. I booked an ‘Advance’ ticket there and back on specified trains.

Someone in New York told me this story. I admit that I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. But a little online research seems to confirm that it is true. It concerns a group of people who had bought early versions of the Tesla Model S, a $90,000 high-performance electric car much loved by Silicon Valley’s rich set. The earlier versions of these cars behaved slightly differently from a standard petrol vehicle. In particular there was no ‘creep’. For the benefit of European readers irrationally wedded to the stick shift, I should explain that ‘creep’ is a feature of almost all cars with automatic transmission.

‘Sorry, I’d love to go the pub this evening, but I have to go out. It’s my wife’s wedding anniversary.’ This Freudian slip was uttered by one of my colleagues a few years ago. It sprang into mind when I was casually browsing reviews of restaurants and hotels on TripAdvisor. I always head for the negative reviews first. Not for what they tell you about the venue, but for what they unintendedly reveal about the reviewer. Sarcastic quotation marks and periphrasis are always a bit of a give-away: ‘...there was a floating rubber object in the toilet bowl!!! After complaining at reception we were given another room and a full refund. Staff were very apologetic about the incident.

From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back. You can fly from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, -London Gatwick, London Luton, -London Stansted and London City — even to the optimistically named -London Southend. Glasgow offers a similar choice. I have often used these flights. I live about 25 minutes’ drive from Gatwick, so when I go to Edinburgh my -favourite plan is to take a morning train up and then fly or take the sleeper back. Since Manchester is bigger than Edinburgh, I had naively assumed that I would be able to do something similar for an upcoming trip there. I decided to fly from Gatwick and take the train back. ‘You can’t. There aren’t any flights from Gatwick to Manchester any more.

I am surprised no more attention has been given to Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion in The Spectator two weeks ago that a mansion tax should be levied on those buyers who pay no other UK tax. Why has it taken so long for anyone to raise this idea? Where tax paid against income should be set against tax paid on property? Let’s consider this question in psychological terms. Assume that you are eager to buy a particular house but someone else decides he wants to live there too. He is twice as rich as you are and so comfortably outbids you. Whatever the other person’s moral worth, you know two things. He has become rich under roughly the same system as you. And he has, in the process, paid more tax than you. Now consider another scenario.

I’m off to Balcombe this weekend. In fact I might even carry a placard and paint my face with a clever pun, like ‘F*** off!’ or ‘Go f*** yourself.’ Because it’s time to add my voice in opposition to a greedy industry which threatens your ground-water, exudes greenhouse gases, leaches chemicals into the earth, destroys the beauty of the landscape and imperils our native fauna and flora wherever its grasping hand is felt. This extractive activity fills the air with noxious smells and clogs the roads with slow-moving vehicles; its safety record is appalling, with a high rate of work-related injuries and famously low worker pay.

Usually it is annoying when you have to board an aeroplane via a shuttle bus rather than an airbridge. The exception is when the plane is a 747. That’s because, with the single exception of Lincoln Cathedral, the Boeing 747-400 is the most beautiful thing ever conceived by the mind of man. Any chance to see one at close quarters is a delight. But aside from the engineering, the most beautiful thing about a long-haul airliner is the economic wizardry which keeps it flying. On board are a variety of seats from the sybaritic to the spartan for which people have paid wildly varying amounts of money, even though each seat will reach the same destination in the same length of time. You may find this class division offensive.