The Wiki Man: My other car is an iPad

A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham

A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham. In the interests of balance, I should point out that our decision-making involving cars may be little better than with rail.

Professor Paul Dolan at the LSE has extensively catalogued this ‘attention bias’, a distorting effect whereby the factors influencing, say, our choice of car may have little to do with the consequences of owning that car for the next five years.