Rory Sutherland

There exist in the annals of salesmanship certain ideas that are both highly immoral and wickedly clever. Before P. T. Barnum attached his name to circuses, he ran Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan. From 1841 until its destruction by fire in 1865, this received more than 38 million visitors, each paying 25c. The entry fee

This piece first appeared in this week’s Spectator magazine.  Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter crisis’. Naturally, this outcome was treated as a scandal in the press, and there were predictable calls for Jeremy Hunt to resign. But the fact that

Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter crisis’. Naturally, this outcome was treated as a scandal in the press, and there were predictable calls for Jeremy Hunt to resign. But the fact that non-urgent operations are postponed is not by definition bad.

One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of Richard Thaler’s memoir Misbehaving. He describes what happens when the University of Chicago economics faculty moves to a new location. The economists simply have to agree among themselves who will occupy each office in the

About 30 years ago, BT introduced a telephone handset with enormous keys. It was intended for people with serious visual impairment. Unexpectedly, it became their bestselling phone. There is a reason for this. The millions of people who wear spectacles or contact lenses typically remove them at night, making the normal tiny keys impossible to

At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos for giving this Christmas. The Philips AirFryer, from £70-ish. Spectator readers may remember a craze for cooking things via a French method called sous-vide. Using this senseless technology, you could cook soggy food for days

One dietary fad that never made sense to me was the campaign against the consumption of eggs. Now call me an old Darwinist, but here we are having spent a few million years evolving into a bald monkey with prehensile thumbs, perfectly optimised as an egg-stealing machine, and yet the digestion of an omelette somehow

One dietary fad that never made sense to me was the campaign against the consumption of eggs. Now call me an old Darwinist, but here we are having spent a few million years evolving into a bald monkey with prehensile thumbs, perfectly optimised as an egg-stealing machine, and yet the digestion of an omelette somehow

It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight 173, for aviation experts to pay attention to something called Crew Resource Management. This is a set of procedures first conceived by Nasa with the aim of minimising human error in flight. UA173 — where

I hate to tell you this, but every time you watch television you are being duped. In fact there are only three accurate things you will ever see on television. These are the colours red, green and blue. Each pixel on a screen can transmit three colours only. If blue alone is illuminated, the screen

I love anything open late at night. Never mind ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’; even mundane activities like filling up with petrol become enjoyably Edward Hopperish after midnight. Often the places are so quiet you wonder why they bother opening at all. But it is a strange psychological fact that opening a

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch

I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for the past ten years, I’ll repeat it. Goods are not like people. Goods only move wherever they are needed. They don’t come laden with an attachment to a homeland or a social network. Your Bosch

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within a company — the freedom to ask: ‘What if we’re wrong?’ A business culture that can attract and accommodate people with complementary talents benefits everybody. So even if you don’t believe Damore’s theories (in which

Imagine for a moment a parallel universe in which shops had mostly not yet been invented, and that all commerce took place online. This may seem like a fantastical notion, but it more or less describes rural America 100 years ago. In 1919 the catalogues produced by Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward were,

Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of sources, and use statistical modelling to prove… um, whatever bullshit conclusion you hoped to prove in the first place. For all the excitement of the information age, we must remember that self-serving delusions like nothing

Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise uninhabitable, such as Nelson’s Column or the Royal Opera House. There are perhaps only 2,500 Grade I listed buildings in England in which you can feasibly live: these include Buckingham Palace and the Sutherland gaff.

Although it is commonly assumed that faster-than-sound passenger travel died with Concorde, this isn’t quite true: it overlooks the Caledonian Sleeper. With a few whiskies inside you, this is as close as you can get to teleportation. Yes, according to the timetable it takes about eight-and-a-half hours between Perth and London, but as you are