Rory Sutherland

This is an extract from this week's Spectator, available from Thursday. To subscribe, click here. I was waiting on an office forecourt recently puffing on an e-cigarette when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his superior. A few minutes later he reappeared. ‘You can’t use e-cigarettes here either.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you are projecting the image of smoking.’ ‘What, insouciance?’ ‘Go away.’ I did.

‘There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation. But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.’ You may remember reading this from Matthew Parris in last week’s Spectator. When delivering leaflets in Derbyshire, he was infuriated by the difficulty of matching houses to their address.

One inarguably good thing about electronic publishing is that it solves that old quandary about what books to pack for your holiday — you just take a tablet or Kindle and buy books on a whim. The downside, however, is that this old dilemma has been replaced by an entirely new one: what bits of electronic crap need you take on holiday and what should be left at home. One thing you will never see on these pages is a review of headphones. I have owned lots of these over the years, costing between £10 and £150. Unfortunately all of them are completely useless. This is because I am married.

What would happen, I wonder, were we to rescind the smoking ban as Nigel Farage wants? My guess is not much. Most restaurants would keep the existing rules. Some pubs might set aside a room for smokers. Casinos, comedy clubs and jazz clubs might revert to the status quo ante. But would we return to a time where people routinely smoked everywhere? Unlikely. People have had the chance to experience a new version of normal, and in large part they prefer it. You wouldn’t expect me to say this, but I think the legislation has to be considered good precisely because, even if it were abolished, much of the behaviour it created would stick. The same goes for seatbelt legislation.

Gandhi would test his resolve by sleeping between two naked virgins, an avenue not really open to me, as my wife is an Anglican vicar: though Anglicanism imposes almost no constraints on your behaviour or beliefs nowadays, it still frowns on sleeping with naked virgins, especially if they are of the opposite sex. So my equivalent of this exercise is to try to go into certain shops for half an hour and emerge without buying anything. Lakeland is an especially tough challenge here, but the real Matterhorn for me is an airport branch of Dixons.

But why did the food [in England] stay so bad after refrigerated ships, frozen foods and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? … The answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. [Since] your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

Old Glaswegian joke: ‘Put your hat and coat on, lassie, I’m off to the pub.’ ‘That’s nice — are you taking me with you?’ ‘No, I’m just switching the central heating off while I’m oot.’ Late last year we bought a little holiday flat on the Kent coast. After I had furnished it with all the essentials — fibre-optic broadband, a large television, a Nespresso machine and a couple of random chairs — I looked for an excuse to buy some new gadgetry which I hadn’t tried before.

A few years ago I would have quite liked to live in America. I’m not sure now. For one thing, most of the things perfected by Americans (convenience, entertainment, technology, a very small bottle of Tabasco to accompany your breakfast) very soon make their way over here. On the other hand, the things Europeans do well (cathedrals, four weeks’ annual holiday, more than two varieties of cheese, general all-round classiness) don’t travel in the other direction. In fact, once the right-hand-drive version of the Ford Mustang reaches the UK in 2015, it is hard to think of any remaining reason to emigrate at all. Besides, the political scene over there is just too absurd. The US has always been oddly polarised in lots of ways, not only politics.

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.