Rory Sutherland

‘Suppose you bought a case of claret a few years ago for £20 a bottle. It now sells at auction for about £75. You have decided to drink a bottle. Which of the following best captures your feeling of the cost to you of drinking the bottle?   1. £0. I already paid for it.

I was talking to a large Silicon Valley video-conferencing firm the other day. ‘Just for interest,’ I asked, ‘what would it cost to provide your service to 65 million people?’ The reason I asked is simple. I don’t understand why it is fine for government to spend £60 billion on a railway or £20 billion

My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges,

To fund the war against Napoleon in 1813, Princess Marianne of Prussia invented an ingenious tax-raising scheme. Wealthy Prussians were called on to hand their jewellery to the state; in exchange they were given iron replacements for the gold items they had donated. Stamped on the iron replicas were the words ‘Gold gab ich für

People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed

In 2012 I finished a meeting in Berlin and headed to Tegel airport. Apparently mine was a historic flight, since the airport was to close that very week. Future flights would soon land at the wondrous new Berlin Brandenburg airport, which would be opening ‘within months’. Seven years later, planes still fly into Tegel. The

I recently came across the Small Robot Company, a British agricultural robotics start-up. Their vision is that with smart, autonomous mini-tractors, the monoculture which has Mondrianised our landscape could be replaced by something more diverse. Farmers could plant multiple crops in the same fields, and practise new forms of rotation. Such an approach would also

A once famous question posed to job-seekers at Microsoft was ‘Why are manhole covers round?’ The question was revealing not because there was a single right answer, but precisely because there wasn’t. It helped elicit whether the applicant was someone happy to supply one plausible answer or someone who looked beyond the obvious. At a

A levels, from the perspective of a ‘choice architect’, are a disaster. While pupils are free to pick and mix freely among the humanities, science is implicitly presented as an all-or-nothing package deal. Any aspiring scientist must study at least three of the big four: mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. People who want to keep

I have a dim memory from 1970 of a primly dressed distant relative visiting in a Baby Austin. This, I later learned, was the anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. I googled her 45 years later and was astonished to find she had spent several years in the 1920s and 1930s living alone among Stone Age tribes in