Rory Sutherland

In 1991, 67 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their own home. In 2016, that figure had fallen to 38 per cent. The average house price in the UK is eight times the average wage, this ratio having doubled since 1998. Half of first-time buyers in Britain are now dependent on the Bank of Mum and Dad, rising to two-thirds in London and the south-east. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of people living in the private rented sector has doubled. There are one million more 18- to 34-year-olds living with their parents than there were in 2002. Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s (expressed in 2016 prices) the average price of residential land rose from £150,000 per hectare to £1.3 million. By 2007 it was £5 million.

There is a famous chart which shows the time it took for various technologies to be adopted by 50 million people. From its introduction, the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users. For radio, it was 38; for television, 13; for the world wide web, merely four. Online services are faster still. Facebook reached the 50 million mark in two years, YouTube in ten months, Twitter in nine months. Pokémon Go reached the same watermark in 19 days — as did Pornhub. (For the benefit of the uninitiated, Pokémon Go was a 2016 augmented reality game where you used your phone to catch animated monsters; Pornhub is a helpful website which kindly reminds men to set their laptops to ‘mute’ after their wives have gone to bed, to avoid waking them.

I’d hoped to spend this week writing about my new Geberit Japanese-style toilet, but since the grout is not yet dry, all you filthy toilet-gaijin will have to wait until the new year for my review. So I thought I’d write instead some reviews of my favourite gadgets of the year. But since our real reasons for buying gadgetry have nothing to do with the hastily contrived post-rationalisations created in the prefrontal cortex, in the interests of impartiality, I have asked my inner chimp to provide an honest second opinion on each.   1) Smart energy meter (free). Prefrontal cortex verdict: ‘Blah blah blah energy reduction, green industrial revolution, global warming, polar bears.’ Inner chimp: ‘Sod the bears —they’re terrifying.

One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily casting about for some dark force to which to attach the blame. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, nameless Russians, an uneducated populus, social media, whatever. One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of the rise of populism might be the journalists themselves, and the extent to which the once noble aim of impartiality has led to something ridiculous — where almost everyone in authority is treated as a liar. For the past three decades, Britain has had centrist governments led by mainstream politicians. And in that period, did we find that journalists devoted much airtime and column inches to reporting this as a good thing? We did not.

I have just returned from Canada, which seems to share Britain’s new-found obsession with veganism. There, chains such as Burger King and KFC are offering plant-based alternatives to meat-based meals. Five years ago could anyone have predicted this? True, vegetarianism has been growing for many years, but did anyone foresee its most extreme variant rapidly ‘crossing the chasm’ to go from an oddball niche to a standard lifestyle choice? The ‘chasm’ is that mysterious and often impermeable barrier all technologies and behaviours must traverse if they are to make the critical leap from being a weird minority interest to an unquestioningly accepted option.

Whenever I use the security lane at an airport, I enjoy watching people retrieving their bags and metallic items when they emerge from the X-ray machine. You can quickly divide the population into two: a small minority of ‘logistically aware’ systems-thinkers and the logistically challenged majority. To anyone with a grasp of systems thinking, it is obvious that the throughput of a security line is reduced when only a few people can retrieve their belongings at once. People who self-importantly collect their stuff as soon as it exits the scanner are slowing the queue by 70 per cent or more.

I recently learned from a doctor friend that salt isn’t necessarily bad for you. Yes, there is a minority whose blood pressure isdriven haywire by eating the stuff, but most people can consume it without much risk. The reason we are formally advised to avoid salt is that lowering salt consumption improves public health on average: salt reduction is helpful to the few who are affected, while being generally harmless for everyone else. This makes sense at first. Except it leads to a problem. Because if you demonise every food that is harmful only to a minority, you risk recommending so many dietary restrictions that life becomes intolerable. A better answer may lie in personalised medicine: ‘In your case, I’d concentrate on avoiding three things first.

In 1891, a 29-year-old man moved from Philadelphia to Chicago intending to start a business. With $32 to his name, he began by selling scouring soap. Hoping to boost sales, he gave away small packets of baking powder with every purchase. Soon he found that the baking powder was more popular than his soap, so he quit the soap market and started selling baking powder instead. But now he needed something to give away with his baking powder. Eventually, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he took to giving his customers two free packs of chewing gum with each tin of baking powder. And then the same damned thing happened again. He found that the free gum was more popular than the baking powder.

In last week’s Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer replied to a couple with a baby who had sought his advice on accepting a low offer for their cramped London flat to buy a house in commuterland. Their fear was that, if Brexit led to a property crash, they could face negative equity. Should they call the whole thing off? Emphatically not, said Martin. ‘Buying a family home is a long-term choice, rarely regretted, in which fluctuating value matters far less than whether you love the house.’ He’s right, I’m sure. But I’d like to add a further thought experiment which may reaffirm their decision. I recently heard of a different property dilemma: two married London teachers in their early fifties owned a small house now worth just under £1 million.