Rory Sutherland

It was a few months ago, and I had just arrived in Philadelphia. My friend picked me up at the airport — one of those charming, civilised things people do when they live in a city that’s a sensible size. As I climbed into the car I furtively pulled an e-cigarette out of my pocket. Furtively, because my friend has never smoked, and is better qualified than most to criticise my nicotine use — what with his having been awarded the highest first in biochemistry in his year at Cambridge and being a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and all. I muttered some apologetic comment: ‘E-cigarettes… nicotine but without the carcinogens or something… about on a par with caffeine… not too bad a drug… .’ ‘Are you kidding?

An interesting furore erupted this month following an order from the new chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, that employees accustomed to working from home would henceforth have to turn up at the office. The edict, unexceptional in many industries, scandalised many tech workers, for whom the freedom to work anywhere is an article of faith. You can see why. Since the chief use of information technology is to free us from the constraints of place and time, what is the point of all this wizardry if people must still spend hours commuting to jobs they could do at home? At the risk of sounding Marxist, I do think it is time for technology to benefit labour as well as capital.

One of Britain’s exam boards was attacked last year for a question in a GCSE religious studies examination: ‘Explain briefly why some people are prejudiced against Jews.’ Is this really a theological question? Or does it belong in biology? Or psychology? Or economics? The Canadian evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate devotes a few pages to the issue of prejudice, including not only anti-Semitism but also hostility towards trading groups and intermediaries everywhere: from Chinese shopkeepers in Malaysia to Armenians, the Gujaratis and Chettiars in India and Korean store-owners in the United States. Pinker partly attributes this to what economists call ‘the physical fallacy’.

If you ever need confirmation that necessity is the mother of invention, you can do worse than watch one of the rash of property programmes on Channel 4. A typical example of this genre was the recent ‘We Are A Boring Retired Couple Who By The Happy Accident of Being Born in 1950 And Having Bought A Five-Bedroom House in 1978 Now Have A Tax-Free Capital Gain Of £600,000 With Which To Buy A Place In France Where We’ll Live On Our Public Sector Pensions At Your Expense (Season 9, Episode 8).’ Programmes of this type are mostly dismal. The pair are shown various pricey properties only to raise fatuous objections: ‘I didn’t like the kitchen, I thought it was just too blue.’ But there is a remarkable outlier amongst all this drivel.

Supposedly the coffee chain Starbucks will sell you a smaller, 8oz cappuccino even though this size and its price is never published on their menu boards — you just have to ask for a ‘short’. Handy to know. In any case, I never liked using the word ‘grande’. Two syllables seems pretentious; using one makes you sound like a music-hall Yorkshireman. The cultish West Coast burger chain In-N-Out has created a minor art form from this kind of secret menu. In-N-Out’s official menu is tiny, but an extensive samizdat menu has circulated among aficionados for years solely by word of mouth, like the poetry of Homer.

I recently met a friend at the RAC Club in Pall Mall. Leafing through their brochures, I noticed there was an entrance fee of £2,900 and an annual renewal fee of £1,265. Gosh, I thought, that’s expensive. Except it is and it isn’t. It is expensive when you compare it with other clubs. On the other hand, if you compare it to the cost of owning a second property, it’s a bargain. The council tax on a London weekend flat will be far more than £1,265 a year. And, however nice your flat, it is unlikely to have five full-sized -billiard tables, several squash courts, a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, three dining rooms, a library and a staff of twenty. If you stay overnight at the RAC club, you pay perhaps 25 per cent of the cost of an equivalent hotel.

It is safe to say that readers of Condé Nast Traveller and the Sunday Times Travel Supplement will never be troubled by a review of the Holiday Inn Reading M4 Junction 10. Its name will never appear beside Le Sirenuse or the Gritti Palace in lists of the world’s most opulent hotels. The aroma of the bougainvillea does not waft across the underground car-park, not can you sit on your balcony sipping a glass of Frangelico as you watch straw-hatted gondolieri ply their centuries-old trade along the Grand Canal. Instead you get a view of a business park outside Reading. And yet the HIM4J10 (as we aficionados call it) is really a very good hotel. A few of the staff are Indian, which means you can get a really good Chicken Jalfrezi until 11 p.m.

At her school interview, my daughter was asked to name the most important technology of the modern age. I’m proud to say she answered ‘sewerage’. Some historians now claim the washing machine was, in economic terms, a far more revolutionary innovation than the internet or the mobile phone: it was this which enabled women to enter the workforce. Yet in the past 30 years, aside from the microwave, progress in home appliances seems slow. Dyson’s washing machine went nowhere. In some ways this kind of innovation is difficult: few people replace their washing machine every two years as they do their mobile phones.

An evil wizard has captured 15 dwarves of rare mathematical genius. He informs them that, the following day, he will make them stand in a circle and then from behind will place a hat, randomly either black or white, on each of their heads. He will then go to the dwarves in turn and ask each to state the colour of his hat. While each dwarf can see the colour of the others’ hats, he can see nothing of his own. If a dwarf answers correctly he can go free, otherwise he will be incarcerated for life. No signalling is allowed between the dwarves — they cannot meaningfully pause before answering, for instance — but they do have a night in a communal cell in which to agree the optimum strategy. How many dwarves can be certain of going free if the best strategy is -adopted?

It’s a cheap joke, but it cheers me up. When Starbucks started that habit of asking your name and writing it on your cup, I began giving my name as ‘Chantelle’, ‘Monique’, ‘Desirée’ or ‘Pixie’. Then, when I’d collected four or five of these empty cups, I would leave them all lying around in the car to stop my wife getting too complacent. In the same way, I always use a false name when I book an executive car. It amuses me to see a black Mercedes S-Class parked somewhere prominent with a big white card in the passenger window with ‘Monbiot’ written on it.

If the all-party Parliamentary Housing Sub-Committee were to embark on a week-long fact-finding tour of Barbados, it would create a tabloid scandal. Yet it might be a good idea all the same. For among the palm trees they will find remnants of a fascinating housing experiment which began almost 200 years ago, yet which affords a useful lesson for housing policy today. In 1838, when slavery was abolished on the island, plantation owners suddenly found themselves obliged to pay wages to their workers. In an effort to recoup this cost, they churlishly began charging those workers rent for houses they had previously occupied for free. Rents in some cases were so high that emancipated slaves were scarcely better off than before.

Pojoaque, near Santa Fe, New Mexico This is a magical part of the world — and it’s easy to see why D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Douglas Adams were tempted to hang around for a while. When James Delingpole finally gets his act together and leads 10,000 Spectator subscribers into the desert to form a libertarian commune, northern New Mexico should be the first place he tries. He’ll have the blessing of a former two-term governor here, triathlete and Everest mountaineer Gary Johnson, now the Libertarian party’s presidential candidate. As Republican governor, Johnson spent part of his second term campaigning for the decriminalisation of marijuana: when asked of his past drug use, ‘Did you inhale?’, Johnson replied, ‘I barely exhaled.