Rory Sutherland

For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland’s Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway

The standard explanation for why charges for plastic bags reduced waste is economic. People were reluctant to pay 10p for a bag and so brought their own instead. This is partly true. But it would still be highly effective if the charge for a bag were merely 1p. That’s because charging any amount, however trifling,

I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their flats when they moved in together in the 1990s, they found themselves in the happy position of owning a mortgage-free west London house worth more than £1 million. He was originally from Norfolk, and was

Ask any estate agent: most potential house buyers arrive with a detailed list of criteria for their new home, only to end up buying a property which meets almost none of them. The same is true of dating – few of us are married to people chosen on the basis of an initial checklist. Henry

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you

I’ve always thought working in hospitality is like getting a free MBA – but one rooted in the real world rather than theory. So it didn’t surprise me to discover a brilliant business idea in a book about the restaurant trade. In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, star

I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you think of Gary, he is absolutely right about one thing. Economists, by using what are called ‘Single Representative Agent’ models, have taken a dangerous wrong turn. Such simplistic models, which contain the convenient but absurd

A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had noticed a jokey reference to a minibus being driven erratically after the teacher had visited the local pub, and worried that this might be libellous. The school could have

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending

The discourse around ‘flexible working’ has degenerated into a narrow debate over whether people come into the office on three days of the week or four. But this risks distracting us from a more interesting question: do people work better in parallel or in series? When the pandemic hugely accelerated the adoption of video-calling, many

I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on to a busy road – when a thought struck me. ‘There’s no chance anyone would get planning permission for a shop here today.’ Either someone from the council would declare there was no safe vehicular

One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’ People who have learned

Late in the evening six months ago, my wife and I were driving back to our hotel in the dark when we came upon what looked like an abandoned service station. Since it was entirely dark, we assumed it was closed. This was annoying as we needed milk and some other groceries and it was

I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it

The Romans never invented the stirrup. What we call a ‘chest of drawers’ was unknown before the late 17th century – before which time you had to store your valued possessions in a deep coffer or chest. The doorknob did not exist until 1878. The tea bag was invented by accident in the early 20th