Rory Sutherland

The strangest thing happened to me the other day. I went into a branch of PC World and found nothing to buy. I have left PC World empty-handed before, but only through an act of will. Occasionally I would steel myself not to buy anything before I went in, treating the trip as a test of my resolve, rather as Gandhi shared his bed with young women to test his self-control. This time it was different. I simply could not see anything left to want. Usually, we technophiles are obsessed with what’s coming next. Faster, smaller, lighter, thinner.

When Professor Susan Greenfield warned last month of the damaging effects of new technologies on childhood, my first instinct was to dismiss it as another hand-wringing exercise. On one point, though, where she complains of the dangers of instant gratification, she might be right. I’m not even sure the problem is confined to children. One trait I notice in myself as a result of using computers is a growing impatience with the real world. The millions of us who spend hours each day working or playing with technology have become dangerously at home in an environment where everything happens at a pace we choose.

David Young’s Spectator article ‘Health’n’safety everywhere, except in banking’ (14 February) was inspired. He might have added that bankers are occasionally made to pay for their excesses. Unlike regulators. For years the Food Standards Agency warned we should eat no more than three eggs a week. It now emerges that this figure had no evidential basis at all: there is no reason a normal person should not eat two eggs every day. I think we should sue. After all, for 50 million Britons to forgo 11 eggs every week seems a heavy loss of net human happiness. A gain in weight, too, since recent trials in Baton Rouge suggest women who eat two eggs for breakfast consume many fewer calories in the course of each day than those who start with bagels.

Two years ago my father decided to try selling books on the internet. Since he had spent much of my childhood expatiating his theory that computers involved more work than they saved, this was something of a U-turn. But he quickly opened a seller’s account on Amazon where he listed for sale the 1,500 of his books he was least likely to miss before sitting back and waiting for the orders to come in. Rather to the surprise of his sceptical sons, orders did come in — and have kept on coming. Two years on, along with a few neighbours who are eBay sellers, he has turned the village post office into a hub for global commerce, parcels being sent out every week to almost anywhere.

Last month saw the usual spate of newspaper articles ridiculing the circular letters sent with Christmas cards. A series of books by Simon Hoggart now documents the worst of these. Funny as his examples are, he’ll be hard put to beat the instance sent in by a reader of the Daily Telegraph: ‘I suppose the high spot of our year was John’s Nobel Prize.’ Even so, am I alone in being slightly uncomfortable with all this opprobrium? If you care enough to spend 50p sending someone a Christmas card, shouldn’t you expect them to spend a minute or so hearing what’s happened to you in the past year? Is it all that awful to hear that your children passed their exams? Why do we hate this all so much? Largely it’s our national horror of self-promotion.

I’d like to start 2009 with a few words of thanks to everyone who has joined the Spectator readers’ lending team at www.kiva.org/team/spectator. So far we have lent money to over 100 small businesses in the developing world, a figure buoyed by the disproportionate generosity of the Spectator’s Australian readership (including a lady from Cairns in a particularly elegant hat). We still have some way to go before overtaking the largest lending team — 1,700 people from Team Obama, since you ask — but every new joiner helps. And, thanks to the depreciation of the pound, the interest-free loans I made earlier in the year through Kiva (the loans are repaid in US dollars) have turned out to be unexpectedly profitable.

It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography. More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality.

Most journalists have spoken of the financial crisis as evidence of a failure of capitalism. But is it? Or is this kind of reversal in fact necessary if capitalism is to work at all? After all, a free-market economy doesn’t do a perfect job of rewarding success. It may pick better winners than, say, governments, but it is still largely arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else. Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins — the brilliant geneticist Richard Dawkins, that is, not the amateur theologian of the same name. The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable are among the most mind-changing books I have read. I can’t say the same of the atheist stuff. Dawkins seems a much better evangelist than polemicist; more persuasive when exalting Darwin than attacking God. If you want to be a polemicist, it helps to be funny, which Dawkins isn’t (for convincing and witty attacks on non-science nobody beats the late John Diamond). But I also find it annoying that Dawkins picks on such clunking, unoriginal targets. If you want to attack irrationality, in Britain at any rate, why pick on God?

The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other claims to adversity. To me this seems, well, slightly racist. If asked to choose between a) being a black editor of the Harvard Law Review or b) spending five years of my life in a small bamboo cage being tortured by some really angry North Vietnamese, I wouldn’t think long before ticking box a). But being seen as an outsider has always been electorally useful, and more so now than ever.

An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently. If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left. With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000. With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have $214 cash. Even better, if a year ago you had decided to entrust your $1,000 to the needy rather than the greedy, you would have ended up today with $1,000. This market-beating 0 per cent rate of return is available through a website called www.kiva.org.

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and then died. I duly performed a hard reboot (that’s the technical term for ‘switching it off and on again’) only for the same thing to happen again. And again. With hindsight, of course, I should have simply called the government pretending to be a banker and explained that I had bought something that at first looked clever but turned out to be worthless crap.