One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily casting about for some dark force to which to attach the blame. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, nameless Russians, an uneducated populus, social media, whatever. One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of
I have just returned from Canada, which seems to share Britain’s new-found obsession with veganism. There, chains such as Burger King and KFC are offering plant-based alternatives to meat-based meals. Five years ago could anyone have predicted this? True, vegetarianism has been growing for many years, but did anyone foresee its most extreme variant rapidly
Whenever I use the security lane at an airport, I enjoy watching people retrieving their bags and metallic items when they emerge from the X-ray machine. You can quickly divide the population into two: a small minority of ‘logistically aware’ systems-thinkers and the logistically challenged majority. To anyone with a grasp of systems thinking, it
I recently learned from a doctor friend that salt isn’t necessarily bad for you. Yes, there is a minority whose blood pressure isdriven haywire by eating the stuff, but most people can consume it without much risk. The reason we are formally advised to avoid salt is that lowering salt consumption improves public health on
It’s difficult to go into the office nowadays, since most of my colleagues are so distraught by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit that they rarely speak. The finance department have painted European flags on their faces for solace, and spend the day staring blankly out of the window sobbing over a tear-stained picture of
In 1891, a 29-year-old man moved from Philadelphia to Chicago intending to start a business. With $32 to his name, he began by selling scouring soap. Hoping to boost sales, he gave away small packets of baking powder with every purchase. Soon he found that the baking powder was more popular than his soap, so
In last week’s Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer replied to a couple with a baby who had sought his advice on accepting a low offer for their cramped London flat to buy a house in commuterland. Their fear was that, if Brexit led to a property crash, they could face negative equity. Should they call the
Recently I suggested a new approach to commuter-train overcrowding. It simply involved reformulating the problem by accepting that not all overcrowding is equally bad: 100 people forced to stand 10 per cent of the time do not experience anything like the same irritation as ten people who have to stand 100 per cent of the
Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were — on the contrary, even today we enjoy, in Great Britain at least, a higher standard of life than at any previous period — but because other values seem to have been sacrificed and because they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily, inasmuch
‘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
The Romans never invented the stirrup. It took 50 years after the invention of canned food for someone to invent the can opener. And we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. This seems silly. But it is worth understanding each invention in context: often, a concatenation of other events
