Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The TWaT revolution: office on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only

I recently saw a series of photographs depicting a rural home in China. Pride of place in a grimly furnished main room was given to a gargantuan new flat-screen television, while the sole toilet was a hole in the ground in an outside shed. What strange priorities, I thought. On reflection, though, under the same circumstances, I suspect quite a few of us would do the same thing.

In Britain, for a hundred years or so, we never faced such a choice: you could install a decent indoor toilet, but not a Samsung 75in 4K LED TV, because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. So in Britain we almost all installed plumbing before we bought televisions — because that is the order in which they became available.

But people in newly developed parts of the world are faced with a plethora of technologies to choose from all at once. ‘Do you want clean running water or pay TV?’ seems a strange question to us: to millions of people it is a real dilemma.

Remember there are many distorting factors at work here. Acquiring mains drainage or water, unlike satellite television or mobile telephony, requires cooperation with your neighbours. If half of them don’t want it, you aren’t going to get it. By contrast you can go ahead and install a satellite dish unilaterally. When Philip Larkin wrote, ‘I don’t want to take a girl out and spend circa £5 when I can toss myself off in five minutes, free, and have the rest of the evening to myself,’ he was experiencing what economists call ‘the coordination problem’. Masturbation may be inferior to sex, but it does not require the costly and protracted contrivance of simultaneous intent. In the same way, buying a huge TV may be less valuable than installing mains drainage, but it’s something you can do on your own.

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