Rory Sutherland

It was early December 1973 and I remember my grandmother asking, ‘What would you most like for Christmas?’ I knew in an instant: ‘One day, perhaps, it would be good if the weekly rates of my basic state pension were to increase by the greatest of three candidate measures, namely (a) the year-on-year growth in the average weekly earnings index; (b) the year-on-year change in the consumer prices index for the month of September; or (c) a fixed nominal floor of 2.5 per cent – with the determination being a simple maximum function rather than an average, and the resulting uplift taking effect from the first Monday of the following tax year in April. Or, failing that, an Etch A Sketch.

I’ve ridden in Waymo driverless taxis in both Miami and Austin and it is, as you would expect, a slightly surreal experience. When an empty vehicle turns up, displays your glowing initials on the roof, then invites you to unlock the doors via your phone, you feel as if you’re in a science-fiction film. Once you drive off, it feels doubly weird. Yet what’s most surprising is how quickly it ceases to feel strange. After three minutes, you pay scarcely more attention to the progress of the vehicle than you would when riding in a car driven by any competent human driver. A colleague of mine who has used Waymo on faster roads tells me you experience another burst of unease when the car first hits 50mph, but this, too, rapidly dissipates.

My father once attended a dinner for 12 where an intense argument arose over splitting the bill. After 15 minutes, a happy compromise emerged, at which point one diner, someone an order of magnitude richer than everyone else at the table, piped up with: ‘But I didn’t have any wine.’ This is the perfect example of a valid consideration being introduced at completely the wrong point in the process. Bear this in mind, because I think there is an optimistic and relatively benign way to look at Britain’s bureaucratic sclerosis without hanging every public-sector employee from their own lanyard.

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse. You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.

As a more philosophical alternative to ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps’, you occasionally see workplace posters which read: ‘Price. Speed. Quality. Pick any two.’ Unless you work on public infrastructure in the UK, of course, where the sign presumably ends: ‘Why not consult some lawyers and avoid all three?’ In 1922 Trumpington, in South Cambridge, briefly had its own railway station. This was built to bring visitors to the Royal Agricultural Society’s show, which ran for five days, after which the station was demolished. Nearly a century later, it was sensibly decided that South Cambridge deserved a new, more permanent station. It took six years of planning before building work started. The station opened last month at a total cost of £228 million.

When people ask me what my politics are, I have to explain that I support a dwindling faction you might call the Terry-Thomas wing of the Conservative party. This faction dominated the party in the 1980s – the kind of spivvy garagiste who, no sooner was your back turned, would knock down a row of medieval cottages to open a Hyundai dealership. There were probably a few too many of them in the 1980s. Today we need them back. Shakespeare depicts this archetype very well, possibly because (as a Brummie entrepreneur) he was one himself. He understood that you need a few chancers and opportunists around to make things happen. Where are they now? What could be better for Britain than to divert money from Scottish nationalism and spend it on the private sector instead?

I would have enjoyed mathematics more at school if I’d known what the real value was. The benefit of studying maths isn’t numeracy at all: it’s creativity – a kind of benign neuro-diversity. A new set of eyes through which to see the world, and the priceless lesson that the best way to solve a problem is to redefine it. Many of the most interesting people I’ve met have been mathematicians. Nassim Taleb taught me a whole new way to look at statistical variance. And, in a chance meeting with Stephen Wolfram, I heard something which at first surprised me, but which has needled me ever since. When I joined the advertising industry in the 1980s, it was like the Galapagos Islands.

Our esteemed editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. ‘The people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.’ His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: ‘I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.’ If the candidate hasn’t been to university, add five points. If they’ve done a proper working-class job, add ten There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: ‘Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely.

Films nowadays often come with warning of ‘smoking’, ‘partial nudity’, ‘drug use’ or something called ‘language’ (presumably to prevent alarming people un-aware of the invention of the talkies). Yet language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as ‘sticky-backed plastic’, a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programmes.

Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my promoting an idea called a ‘Paceometer’ (pictured). Rather than presenting speed in, say, miles per hour (distance/time), it presents speed the other way round, in minutes per ten miles (time/distance). Created by the cognitive scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel, the Paceometer shows something which is mathematically trivial but completely non-intuitive. Quite simply, the faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still. Accelerate from 20-30mph and you save ten minutes on a ten-mile journey. Accelerate from 70-80mph and you save just over a minute.

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: ‘In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.’ In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why.

Last Monday, I delivered a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s second-best book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The year 1776 was a momentous one for many reasons. It saw the installation of James Watt’s first steam engine, the recognition of Captain Cook by the Royal Society for his work in preventing scurvy, and his departure on his final and ultimately fatal voyage. It witnessed the publication of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

If you ever want to drive online commenters insane, all you need do is write an article headlined ‘Why it’s often right to drive in the middle lane of the motorway’. Many people insist that there is a clear-cut rule. These motoring Prussians claim that, unless overtaking a slower vehicle, you must drive in the left-hand lane at all times. But if you think about it, this rule only works if some people break it. The modern organisation is in thrall to a tight fitness function that leaves little room for inventiveness In reality, if everyone followed this keep-left rule assiduously, then at busy times traffic in the left-most lane would become excessively dense, forcing everyone to slow down, causing frequent braking and uneven use of the road.

Even though Christmas is over, I’ve been thinking about the season just gone. There is a tradition of complaining about its commercialisation, portraying Christmas as a grotesque manifestation of consumer excess. But it’s strange to use our seasonal extravagance to attack consumer culture. That’s almost diametrically wrong. What Christmas really shows is that consumer capitalism is doing a cracking job: it’s the rest of the economy that’s a mess. Consider food. The median family today, even if they’d spent December shopping at Fortnum & Mason and Daylesford Organic, would have spent a lower proportion of their income on food than an equivalent family would spend just to survive in the 1970s. Most consumer durables have similarly plummeted in price.