Rory Sutherland

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was recently shown an AI analysis of long-term trends in the public’s attitude to government. The AI had been designed to look at changing attitudes to brands, but its creator had been curious to see what it revealed if the brand in question was The State. It was remarkably insightful. ‘New behavioural data reveals

I once stood in a queue behind a Scotsman checking out of a hotel in Germany. After he had finished scrutinising his bill in agonising detail, he demanded that it be reprinted, this time removing the €1 discretionary charge which had been added in support of the local homeless. More recently some friends of my

As those of you familiar with this column will know, I am always eager to distinguish between an option and an obligation. For instance, a dinner party is usually more enjoyable than an indoor drinks party. Yet in one respect a drinks party wins out: the moment you accept an invitation to a dinner party,

A few years ago my employer, the advertising agency Ogilvy, introduced a recruitment scheme called ‘The Pipe’. It was a ‘non-graduate’ recruitment scheme, the name a pun on the smoking implement of choice of the company’s founder, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy himself was kicked out of Oxford in 1931, so this seemed doubly appropriate. The idea

One possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts in property, housebuilding, planning and local government and then ask them for proposals to put an end to the appallingly slow rate of construction and development. Another possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts who

A femtosecond, derived from the Danish word femte meaning ‘fifteen’, is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to 10-15 or 1⁄1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second; in other words one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. A femtosecond is to a second as a second is to approximately

The path to electoral success at the next election is straightforward. Just follow what I call the Channel 5 strategy. Channel 5 is a rare success story in the world of free-to-air broadcasting, a feat attained by following a simple playbook: making programmes the public likes to watch, but which people working in television are

One of Dominic Cummings’s many insights in the run-up to the Brexit referendum was that ‘most people were both more right-wing and more left-wing than politicians ever realise’. Political obsessives naturally frame all questions – indeed shape their own identities – along a left-right spectrum, and so assume everyone else sees the world in similarly