Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland

What will we be better off without?

Back in the 1960s an old Welsh steel magnate’s son, who in his youth in the 1930s had been immensely rich but had by now fallen far behind, was asked by my father what he thought about the likely result of the general election. “I don’t care who gets in”, he replied, “so long as

Things we’ll really all be better off without

Most journalists have spoken of the financial crisis as evidence of a failure of capitalism. But is it? Or is this kind of reversal in fact necessary if capitalism is to work at all? After all, a free-market economy doesn’t do a perfect job of rewarding success. It may pick better winners than, say, governments,

The Wiki Man | 29 November 2008

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins — the brilliant geneticist Richard Dawkins, that is, not the amateur theologian of the same name. The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable are among the most mind-changing books I have read. I can’t say the same of the atheist stuff. Dawkins seems a much better evangelist

The Wiki Man | 15 November 2008

The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other

The Wiki Man | 1 November 2008

An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently. If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left. With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000. With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left. But if you had purchased $1,000

The Wiki Man | 18 October 2008

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and

The Wiki Man | 4 October 2008

One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a

The Wiki Man | 20 September 2008

I recently saw a photograph of a street vendor’s stall in Argentina. The menu reads simply Orange Juice $5. Jugo de Naranja $4. Here unsuspecting Anglophones are paying a premium of 25 per cent for not knowing Spanish. It’s a practice known to economists as price discrimination — in other words setting a price in

The Wiki Man | 6 September 2008

A friend of mine, a professor at an Ivy League university, specialises in research into transgenic mice, learning how DNA modifications affect intelligence and memory. A few years ago, after some genetic tinkering, he created a batch of mice of quite spectacular dimwittedness. They were useless in the maze, ditzily wandering about with no sense

The Wiki Man | 23 August 2008

In their now famous book Nudge, self-described ‘paternalistic libertarians’ Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein cite this new paint as an example of ‘feedback’ — the notion that people will make better choices when their decisions have rapidly visible results. If you’ve tried typing on an outdated PC, where characters take seconds to appear on screen,

The Wiki Man | 9 August 2008

Toby Young in last week’s Spectator remarked on the peculiar malice, as he saw it, of the online comments posted in response to his articles. He has a point. The people who post comments are not the same reverential folk who form a paper’s traditional print readership. On the other hand, at a time when

A nudge in the right direction

A few months ago I wrote a Spectator article suggesting that the government  spends far too little money and time on advertising and persuasion, despite the (to me, at any rate) obvious observation that changing behaviour using information or even subtle persuasion is always preferable – on both economic and philosophical grounds – to the

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 26 July 2008

I am still waiting for an enterprising research company to publish honest readership figures for British news-papers. Not the boring stuff about what we read at the breakfast table or flourish at our desks, a decision driven by badge value. No, what I want to know is which papers people reach for in private when

The Wiki Man | 12 July 2008

Alongside the vast fuel tank which powers the Space Shuttle into orbit are two spindly tubes known as Solid Rocket Boosters (or SRBs). Their shape is not ideal: their manufacturer, a firm called Thiokol, had intended them to be fatter, but was constrained by the width of a horse’s rear end. It appears that Roman

The Wiki Man | 28 June 2008

Once again it’s the time of year when Spectator readers start loading up their cars with Andrex, Gentleman’s Relish and Marmite in anticipation of the annual drive to France. Do I have any advice to give? Unsurprisingly I do. For the first hour across the Channel, I quite like to listen to Nostalgie FM. This

The Wiki Man | 14 June 2008

A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: ‘When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.’ The great Douglas Adams believed

The Wiki Man | 31 May 2008

‘Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.’ This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. It’s from a parody of the typical reader’s review in The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether some restaurant or other is any

The Wiki Man | 17 May 2008

Those of you who saw his article a few weeks back will be pleased to hear Kelvin MacKenzie took a remarkable second place in his local council elections. Already the climbdown over parking charges has begun: the cost of a day’s parking at Weybridge Station is suddenly not £5 but £4. It’s the same story

The Wiki Man | 3 May 2008

If the climate-change debate has accomplished anything, it has proved people never say sorry. When I was about 12 the families of the people who now wince at every gramme of carbon we burn carried on their cars a yellow sticker reading ‘Nuclear Power — No Thanks’ (on 2CVs the sticker was rumoured to be

The Wiki Man | 19 April 2008

My article last week (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers. What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few