There was a reason 18th-century rulers were eager for their subjects to grow and eat potatoes: the miraculous tuber offered an alternative source of nutrition to grain, hence reducing bread prices. In the event of a catastrophic harvest, people could survive. To the rulers themselves, however, the biggest benefit was probably what happened when the
Last month in a Swiss hotel, I came across an idea so beautifully simple that I felt it would be immoral of me not to share it. The bed in our room, rather than having one king-sized duvet, was covered by two double-size duvets overlapping in the middle. Eureka! Given that the Swiss are world
If I ran the British government, to promote more heterodox thinking I would employ a small cadre of French people as an alternative sounding board. I know it may seem ridiculous to seek advice from a country which makes tea with lukewarm water and thinks Johnny Hallyday was better than Elvis but, if only by
Some excellent thinking this month from the Italian complexity theorist Luca Dellanna: Two days ago, the EU parliament approved a ban on new fossil fuel cars starting in 2035. While I like the idea of greener cars, I’m not too fond of a fast and complete transition. Let me use the metaphor of the
Even though I fly a lot, I retain the notion that air travel should be treated as a special occasion for which one should dress accordingly. I am writing this from Gatwick, accompanied by one of those canvas bags you get for a fiver at Sainsbury’s Back in the day, if you showed up looking
Much of the magic of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes from the show being plotted but not scripted. The direction of the conversation is agreed in advance, after which the cast – mostly stand-up comedians and hence naturally good at extemporising – improvise the lines on the fly. This makes the show engagingly realistic even in
I recently heard a tip from an older colleague on managing a department. ‘Everyone is primarily interested in one of three things,’ he said. ‘To motivate them, all you need do is discover which one drives them most.’ People want some leeway to apply their imagination, creativity and knowledge What are the three? They are
The recent debate around ‘levelling up’ may be missing something. I would argue that there is another way to consider geographical inequality – and, by this alternative measure, a levelling has been under way for more than 20 years. I’ve spent three decades working in advertising, so it’s unsurprising that I tend to view economic
Recently Chinese 11-year-olds faced the following question in a maths exam. ‘If a ship has 26 sheep and ten goats on board, how old is the ship’s captain?’ Chinese social media lit up with parents furious at their little emperors being asked a question they could not answer. The BBC did find one Weibo user
It is often said that Rishi Sunak has no idea what it is like to survive on a low income but this failing is hardly confined to the über-rich: in reality, few people above median income really know what it’s like to be skint. People may think back to leaner years but, even then, if
In early 2020 my family and I were due to fly home from visiting a friend in Oman when the plane encountered a technical problem. We returned to departures and were rebooked on to a flight the following day. British Airways then sent us to a very decent hotel, where we were given rooms and
An American academic told me that during the 2016 presidential election nobody in academia believed there was the faintest chance Donald Trump would win. Except for the primatologists, that is. It was that silverback gorilla, alpha male thing – and Trump played the role freakishly well. One election tweet showed him enthroned in his private
If you were to ask which single business concept deserves to be more widely known, I would be hard-pressed to find a better answer than the Kano model. Developed in the 1980s by Dr Noriaki Kano at the Tokyo University of Science, it is not only self-evidently true, it also provides a simple framework to
A few years ago I wrote here about the unexpected symbiosis between economy passengers and business travellers on commercial flights. Largely unnoticed by people in either cabin, those buying each class of air ticket are unintentionally helping out their fellow travellers at the other end of the plane. Precisely because the two classes of passenger
I’m rather fond of the many service stations on the M4, since I am convinced they are all named after Jane Austen characters who never made it into the final drafts of the novels. But as an alternative, west of Lord Chieveley and Lady Membury and just east of Sir Leigh Delamere, you can try
In 2015, Holborn Underground station was suffering from serious overcrowding at peak hours, with a bottleneck forming in the space leading to the escalators. So Transport for London tried an experiment. Abandoning the usual ‘stand on the right, walk on the left’ convention, they placed signs on two of the three ascending escalators instructing people
Having returned from a fortnight’s break, I wonder if we get holidays all wrong. In northern Europe, the custom is that you head south to spend time on the beach. But equally, there is such a thing as too damned hot, especially if, like me, you have a healthy dose of Celtic ancestry. To avoid
Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the lawn was slightly prickly, and the experience was painful but not intolerable; until one day, when one of the pricks in his heel was more pronounced than usual. He had been bitten by a snake
The problem with attempts to make everything in life more scientific is that reality hates generalisation. You can try to formulate universal laws, but in any complex system even the smallest contextual difference or hidden asymmetry can be enough to rewrite those laws completely. Economics refers to something called ‘the market’, the laws of which
The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford and someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford. I can barely contain my excitement. I find the very idea of an
