Rory Sutherland

Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labour first appeared in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. The idea was later revived by The Coasters in their early 1960s B-side ‘My Baby Comes to Me’. Well, she go to see the baker when she wants some cake She go to see the butcher when she wants a steak She go to see the doctor when she’s got a cold She go to see the gypsy when she wants her fortune told But when she wants good loving my baby comes to me When she wants good loving my baby comes to me. As Mr McClinton explains, rather than dividing his efforts between the supply of cake and fortune-telling, the baker is better off concentrating on the former.

Despite my opposition to High Speed 2, I am quite a big fan of HS1, the line which runs from St Pancras to Ebbsfleet, Ashford and on to other towns in north and east Kent. I also think HS3 — a proposed line linking the cities of t’Northern Powerhouse — is a good idea. Why the inconsistency? Well, I believe HS1 and HS3 are significant innovations whereas HS2, though it costs far more and covers a much greater distance, is not. In fact I would argue, counterintuitively, that HS2’s greater length is precisely what makes high-speed rail less necessary: the cost of the longer journey means that most people do not make it very often.

In December the controversial satellite TV channel ReallyTV launches its Christmas season with a flagship reality show called From Homs to Hamburg. A dozen refugees, accompanied by their families, will be given a budget of $500 and two-days’ water in a race to cross the German border using any form of transport. The prize for the winning family is a car and a two-bedroom flat in -Billstedt. The show follows the success of the US reality TV show Monterrey to Monterey,in which Mexican families compete to cross the Rio Grande by hiding in shipping -containers. Now, before you recoil in disgust, I should just point out that nothing like this programme will be appearing this Christmas, because I made the whole thing up. ReallyTV does not exist.

A fascinating newcomer on the British high street is the vape shop. These were perfectly described by my friend Paul Craven as ‘like a cross between an Apple Store and an Elizabethan apoth-ecary’. In the splendid All About da Vape in Deal, there is a glass cabinet full of new, hi-tech ‘mods’, ‘tanks’ and ‘coils’, while on rows of shelves behind the counter is a Cambrian explosion of coloured bottles containing e-liquid in many strengths and flavours, hipsterishly labelled Suicide Bunny, Jimmy the Juice Man or Miss Pennyworth’s Elixirs; I recently bought a bottle of something called Unicorn Puke.

A few years ago, in the week before Christmas when supermarket sales are at their highest, staff at one branch of a leading British chain regularly did the rounds of local competitors’ shops buying up their entire stock of Brussels sprouts. It was, in its ethically dubious way, an interesting experiment. You might assume frustrated shoppers would merely buy all the other things on their list and then go somewhere else for their sprouts. They didn’t. As the perpetrators suspected, spending 30 minutes in a shop knowing that you’ll eventually have to make a separate trip to buy sprouts feels like wasted time — so people promptly left to find a shop where they could buy everything in one place.

Afamily member is thinking of moving and asked for commuting advice. Well, first add 25 per cent to any journey time estimate containing the phrase ‘door to door’. When commuters cite journey time to work, the journey they have in mind is one which happens with the frequency of a solar eclipse: when every traffic light is miraculously green and the train draws in just as you reach the platform. Generally the words ‘door to door’ can be replaced by ‘in a parallel universe’ without altering the meaning of the surrounding sentence. I also advised asking the estate agent what is the second-best way to get to work. No one ever thinks of asking this, but it is vital.

You won’t read much about Sir Francis Galton nowadays because, while it’s inarguable that the man was a giant in scores of scientific fields (many of which he invented), it is hard to deny that he was a teensy-weensy bit racist. That he wrote a letter to the Times in 1873 entitled ‘Africa for the Chinese’ is probably as much as you need to know. At the moment, I can’t find my copy of his 1869 book Hereditary Genius; possibly, along with the rest of my vast library on eugenics, it’s at Der Roryhof, my holiday home perched high on a crag overlooking the Bavarian Alps. But I remembered it when my company updated its email interface last week so ‘Reply all’ was now the default mode of reply.

I had a water meter installed in my flat a few months ago. I looked at it just now and it said ‘13’. I didn’t know what ‘13’ meant, so I went online to check. Apparently, in a few months, four of us have used 13 cubic metres of water, or 13,000 litres. The £40 I’ll pay for this seems rather a bargain: £40 is highly preferable to carrying 13,000 litres up two flights of stairs. But in any case I needn’t worry about overpaying, because there’s an organisation called Ofwat which keeps an eye on Southern Water to check that they don’t charge me £1 too much for my 13 cubic metres. Then there’s my electricity bill; that seems fairly good value too.

The greatest mistake made by conservatism was its overly close relationship with neo-classical economics. This was a marriage of convenience: finding themselves Johnny-no-mates in the academic world, the conservative establishment hastily bunked up with the only group of social scientists who were prepared to talk to them. This cohabitation was not only unhealthy but boring. Economics is obsessed with a very narrow definition of efficiency, beyond which it can see no other virtues. It hence turns political rhetoric into a slightly Aspergic narrative about efficiency and growth — as though Churchill had urged us to fight the second world war ‘to regain access to key export markets’.

What follows is a proposal for reducing the BBC licence fee and improving the corporation’s output while saving the British newspaper industry. All that’s involved is a basic understanding of pricing psychology combined with a digital currency for micropayments. Under my proposals, half the licence fee would fund the BBC’s Reithian purpose; the other £60 could be paid direct to the BBC as now or, if you chose, paid to you as a digital currency (6,000 Beebcoins). People could buy additional Beebcoins, which could be spent on BBC or competitor content — including content from newspapers. Notionally the BBC would lose out; in practice they would gain revenue, as they could now sell premium services.

The appallingly bad photograph below was taken on my mobile phone about 15 years ago. It shows the menu layout from the Lisbon restaurant Chapito. I have never seen any other restaurant adopt such an ingenious format. You are given five set menus to choose from (white, yellow, orange, red and green) with a suggested wine for each. But you are perfectly free to substitute any dish from any other menu, or omit a course if you want. It is a brilliant example of what is sometimes called ‘choice architecture’. This format makes it easier to choose what to eat. But it also helps you make a better choice.

Seven years ago I wrote here about a site called Kiva.org. I had met the co-founder of this charity when she came to Oxford in 2007 and was intrigued by her idea. Jennifer Jackley had been inspired to start the site by Muhammad Yunus’s work on microlending — the practice of issuing small loans to people in the developing world who would other-wise have no access to credit. At Kiva.org, rather than giving money, you lend it. You choose people and businesses, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, and advance them a fraction of the amount they want to borrow, typically $25. The loan is then paid back to you monthly, usually over a year. You can withdraw it or, more commonly, lend it to someone else. It is a kind of circulatory charity.

I spent the last few days in Deal and Folkestone with Professor Richard Thaler at Nudgestock, Ogilvy’s seaside festival of Behavioural Science. On my way home I decided to stop off at M&S to buy some runny scotch eggs and a pie, accompanied by some unwanted green things to make my basket look middle-class. Finding a long queue at the main checkout, I grudgingly took my goods to the self-checkout machines. (For the uninitiated, Richard Thaler is the co-author of Nudge, and more recently the author of Misbehaving.

I am scraping the edges of my memory here, but I am fairly sure that opinion polls in my childhood (for the elections of 1970, 1974 and 1979) quoted four percentages: Conservative, Labour, Liberal and ‘Undecided’. Nowadays no figure is quoted for ‘Don’t knows’, and party support is contrived to add up to 100 per cent. Undecided respondents are variously treated according to each polling company’s methodology: a few ignore them completely; others apply a supplementary question such as ‘Which way would you vote if voting were compulsory?’ Their answer to this may be statistically downweighted, but it will still be added to the total for one party or another, rather than being listed under ‘Don’t know’.

Readers of a certain age may remember choosing a cassette player in the 1980s. In theory the process was simple: we would have read reviews of competing devices in audiophile publications and then bought whichever device scored best in terms of sound quality, reliability and value for money. Except we didn’t do this, did we? We went into Comet, looked at three or four examples we considered most attractive, and then pressed the ‘eject’ button on each of them. Invariably we bought the cassette player with the most elegant eject action. If it gracefully whirred open with a sweet damping movement, that was a clincher. Any device in which the cassette holder lunged open with a ‘clack’ was rejected as manifestly rubbish.

I don’t like to make business predictions, but — barring some apocalypse — I suspect there will be plenty of estate agents around in 2065, and occupying prominent high-street shopfronts just as they do now. This may seem an absurd prediction: after all, almost no one now uses an estate agent to find a house: we go to property websites instead. And, since we all assume the purpose of an estate agent is to find buyers for a house, a role usurped by Rightmove and Primelocation, we think the remaining days of the estate agency are few. However, perhaps the principal role of an estate agent is not to find us a house so much as to be a scapegoat if the house we buy proves to be terrible.

Whenever I hear the phrase ‘hard-working families’ a little voice in my head asks ‘what about the lazier, chilled-out families? Shouldn’t we think about them too?’ If Cameron simply abandoned this Stakhanovite fetish and announced Britain’s move to a four-day working week, he could win the election outright. It may take decades, but the work week is due for a rethink. It is hopelessly restrictive. Given the attacks on zero-hours contracts, you may be astonished to hear that over 80 per cent of employees on such contracts actually like them. I suspect many are people — carers, parents, students, the semi-retired — who can only work if they can work flexible hours. Surprisingly people are often more productive when they work fewer hours.

In the late 1980s, the parks service in the United States were concerned about the deterioration of the stonework on the Lincoln Memorial. So they asked the maintenance staff why the stone was decaying. The crew explained that they used high-power sprays every fortnight to clean the masonry. The water penetrated cracks and joins, weakening the stone. But they needed to spray to get rid of the large volume of bird droppings. So they erected bird nets. These scarcely worked, and were unpopular with tourists, so the parks service called in the maintenance workers again and asked, ‘Why are there so many birds?’ ‘The birds come to feed on the spiders,’ they said. ‘And the spiders are there to eat the midges.’ After dark, midges covered the memorial.

Driving from Dover on the M20 a year ago I missed the turning for the M25. A month later I did it again. Then again. ‘You bloody idiot — you missed the turning,’ I said to myself each time. Eventually, after I had missed the turning five times in ten journeys, I wondered if it was really all my fault. So I logged on to Google Street View and retraced the stretch of the M20 leading up to the junction. That’s when I found the image below. Perhaps it doesn’t look odd to you. It took me a while to spot why it is a contender for the world’s worst road sign. By the time you can read the information it contains, you can no longer act on it. Some idiot has painted a row of chevrons in the road for the previous 500 yards (which it is illegal to cross).

Few people know this, but hidden within the FedEx logo, between the E and the x, there is a small white arrow, pointing to the right. I feel slightly guilty sharing this with you, since from now until your death you will find it impossible not to notice this device. It is something which once glimpsed cannot be unseen. Perception can be irreversible: when you first see that famous blue/black or white/gold dress it may be fairly arbitrary whether you see it one way or the other, but you cannot unlearn your first impression. The brain resolves the ambiguity by making a snap assumption about the light in which it was photographed; yet once your brain has made this unconscious ‘hunch’, you cannot reverse the judgment. Once you go blue/black you never go back.