Rory Sutherland

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time. Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are reading this now. I am obsessed with this nonsense. I recently spent half an hour ‘upgrading the firmware’ on my lavatory.

The discourse around ‘flexible working’ has degenerated into a narrow debate over whether people come into the office on three days of the week or four. But this risks distracting us from a more interesting question: do people work better in parallel or in series? When the pandemic hugely accelerated the adoption of video-calling, many people took to comparing the quality of meetings carried out via video with those conducted face to face. In general, they divide into two camps: those who believe that there is no substitute for meeting in person, and those who concede there are some disadvantages to meeting on a screen, but suggest these are far outweighed by the time and cost savings. This is a perfectly natural comparison to make.

I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on to a busy road – when a thought struck me. ‘There’s no chance anyone would get planning permission for a shop here today.’ Either someone from the council would declare there was no safe vehicular access, or else neighbours would complain about the noise. Failing that, someone else would find that the marshland behind the site was the breeding ground for some rare but disgusting toad, or complain that a sweet shop could not open within a parsec of a primary school. You know something has gone wrong when Crawley has a Facebook group called ‘Justice for Taco Bell’ Then it occurred to me that the same would also apply to the row of Victorian houses opposite.

One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’ People who have learned to play a game by one set of rules are bitterly affronted when the rules change Because we must consort with strangers for several hours, planes and airports amplify the normal human sensitivity to status. And so the media furore created by British Airways in revising the status thresholds for its loyalty programme is valuable fodder for students of psychology.

Late in the evening six months ago, my wife and I were driving back to our hotel in the dark when we came upon what looked like an abandoned service station. Since it was entirely dark, we assumed it was closed. This was annoying as we needed milk and some other groceries and it was getting late. I was also confused. I had stopped there often before, and remembered shopping at the very same service station on Christmas Day a few years ago. How likely was it, I wondered, that a place which opened on Christmas Day would close at 8 p.m.? So, disregarding the abundant evidence that it was shut I took the off-ramp anyway and drove through the lorry park to see if there was any chance of finding some cheesy comestibles.

I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it at a sizeable profit. The idea of gynogenic climate change holds that the planet is warming up, but that it is women who are to blame Following this model, I wondered if it might be a useful thought-experiment to contrive political theories which are annoying to people on both the left and the right.

The Romans never invented the stirrup. What we call a ‘chest of drawers’ was unknown before the late 17th century – before which time you had to store your valued possessions in a deep coffer or chest. The doorknob did not exist until 1878. The tea bag was invented by accident in the early 20th century when a New York tea merchant sent out samples of tea in small silk bags. Travelling into an office to spend a day performing work which could easily be done at home suddenly seems as absurd as buying a CD The evolutionary process by which new ideas are conceived and adopted seems linear and inevitable when viewed in retrospect. Delve into history, however, and you will find it is insanely uneven and haphazard.

There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building and some of which don’t. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people living in£1 million homes who are skint Today we are going to focus on the fifth problem. Too many people are living in houses which are too big for them. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people living in £1 million homes who are otherwise skint. I know someone who lives on a long road of four-bedroom houses where they are the only household of more than two. This is daft.

The legendary music producer Rick Rubin once asked me why I had never moved to the United States. The answer, I think, comes down to an important trade-off: quantity of earnings vs quality of consumption. Historically, once you had a job, there was a limit to the lifestyle choices you could make Whereas the United States is certainly a better place to earn and accumulate money, Europe is, on balance, still a better place to spend it. (Which may explain why Rick asked me that question at his summer home in Italy.) This imbalance partly arises from a fundamental asymmetry in the transmission of ideas.

As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then enter one of the Inns of Court as a trainee barrister, before embarking on a period of pupillage. If all goes well, you may be called to the bar. Play your cards right and you might take silk, and then as you reach your fifties, with a following wind, you may be invited to become a judge. Ten years later, with a few widely admired judgments under your belt, you may reasonably claim to be a ‘top judge’. If I am to endure the peculiarly dysfunctional queue at Gail’s, I want choice. Where is the cornbread? The alternative is to become a minor local magistrate and get caught in flagrante with a farm animal.

In electing this government, we seem to have picked the worst of both worlds: higher taxation combined with austerity in the public finances. The one bonus I had hoped to see from a left-wing regime was a healthily indulgent approach to spending. Instead we get a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is a former Bank of England economist. Voting Labour and getting a neo-liberal Chancellor is like going on a Club 18-30 holiday and bringing your parents along. It defeats the purpose of the exercise.

If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one of those people who can enjoy crowds. As superpowers go, I acknowledge this isn’t all that rare, given the bizarre popularity of events such as Glastonbury, or the widespread compulsion to buy Oasis tickets. But what qualifies it as a superpower for me is that I cannot imagine myself enjoying being in a crowd any more than I can envisage having the power of telekinesis or levitation. I don’t really understand why people pay huge amounts of money to watch live sporting events when you can watch them on television for free. I’d choose staying at home stabbing my hand with a fork over joining a demonstration Is this a genetic thing?

First Fred West, now Lucy Letby. At this rate, it won’t be long before Herefordshire has produced more serial killers than it has miles of dual carriageway. You might assume growing up in one of England’s loveliest counties would make people placid, but then you haven’t spent half your life stuck behind a caravan on the A465. They may not all kill people, but Herefordshire people overtake like psychopaths. It only takes one dodgy assumption to reach a conclusion that is diametrically wrong But I’m going to park my Monmouthshire prejudice here and suggest that something about the Lucy Letby conviction seems off to me. I’m not going to talk about the medical aspects, because I’m not qualified to comment.

Every time I write about electric cars, there is an explosion of hostile comments online in which readers angrily denounce electric vehicles and the people who drive them. Much of this animus rests on a plausible yet mistaken assumption – that EV owners are all passionate environmentalists, sanctimoniously swanning around in their zero--emission vehicles while disdaining the ghastly, planet-killing masses burning dinosaur juice. Let me disabuse you of this. That stereotype was perhaps partly fair when applied to the Toyota Prius – although even then I suspect it concerned only a minority of owners.

In the late 1980s, a story entered advertising folklore. A group from an ad agency had boarded an evening train from Newcastle to travel home from a client meeting. On boarding, they learned that the buffet was out of action, and they were hungry. Happily, one of them was carrying in his briefcase a wondrous new brick-sized device called a mobile phone. After a series of rebuffed calls, he managed to find a lone Indian restaurant in Peterborough willing to deliver to their train when it stopped en route to London; there our hero duly handed a wedge of cash through the carriage window before taking delivery of the food.

After 250 years of American independence, a nation home to many of the smartest and most talented people in the world may have to choose as its leader one of two people, each of whom is in many ways worse than His late Majesty George III, the man whose role the entire system was designed to replace. It is dangerous to assume that the more people who are involved in a decision, the better the outcome will be The absurdity emerges from the nature of the system – which, like many such systems, works very well right up to the point where it suddenly doesn’t. Faced with an unexpected combination of events, even good systems can produce an outcome far sillier than any sane individual would choose when acting alone.