Modern Wisdom - #548 - Tim Harford - Why Is Thinking Clearly So Difficult?

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

Tim Harford is an economist, associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a journalist and an author. Humans need to be able to accurately judge the world around them. With more information than ever, this should be getting easier by the year and yet clear thinking seems to be ever more elusive. Why are we so prone to biases and what are some of the biggest rationality blunders from history? Expect to learn why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got obsessed with photos of fairies, what everyone misunderstands about inflation, the danger indiscriminate doubt and reflexive cynicism, the similarities between magic and misinformation, why smart people get hijacked by ideology and much more... Sponsors: Get a free bag of Colima Sea Salt at http://modernwisdomsalt.com/ (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Tim's website - https://timharford.com/  Buy Tim's book - https://amzn.to/3DNELvw  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tim Haafard, his an economist, associate member of Nuffield College Oxford, an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a journalist, and an author. Humans need to be able to accurately judge the world around them. With more information than ever, this should be getting easier, by the year, and yet clear thinking seems to become increasingly elusive. Why are we so prone to biases, and what are some of the biggest rationality blunders from history? Expect to learn why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got obsessed with photos of fairies, what

everyone misunderstands about inflation, the danger, indiscriminate doubt and reflexive cynicism have, the similarities between magic and misinformation, why smart people get hijacked by ideology, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Halford. Tim Hartley, welcome to the show. It's great to join you. What would you say your area of expertise is seems like a relatively diverse background? Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say I'm a professional nerd. Does that help? I mean, I trained as an economist, actually also as a philosopher, but that sounds slightly pretentious. So let's just

say I trained as an economist. And then after a few other adventures, we came a writer in print, books, financial times column. So you obviously writing about economics. And then began a radio for BBC Radio for program about statistics. And so I had to learn pretty quickly about statistics. And over time, it's just got more and more

into anything that's interesting in social science, behavioral economics, psychology, economics, statistics, data, data visualization and along all of that I've become very very interested in stories which I explore in my cautionary tales podcast and and all my books. What's the single thread that's tying all of that together? I think that the single thread is I'm fascinated by evidence-based ideas. And I just love telling people about those ideas and tell it, I'm not so much in the self-help. Like here's how to use these ideas

to make a million dollars or whatever. I'm like, I have to tell you this story about this time that this thing happened and what this teaches us about, whatever, game theory, loss of version, whatever it is. So yeah, nerd stories. Did you read Seth Stevens' Davidowitz's, uh, Don't Trust Your Gut, earlier this year? I skimmed it. I enjoyed the, his first one, which was on Everybody Lives. Yes. I got more out of Everybody Lives.

I think possibly because he was coming at questions that I've been thinking about for a very, very long time in Don't Trust Your Gut. So I was like, oh, this is great, but I know this stuff. But Everybody Lives, I thought, was interesting, that kind of insight that what people type into Facebook and what people type into Google are different and what people type into Google tells you what they really want to know and what people type into Facebook, because it was Facebook at the time, tells you about the way they try to present themselves to the world and that just from that very simple

insight I think would so much came out for the people that haven't read Stephen's first book there's a great example where he looks at the most common my boyfriend is sentences and he compares what it is on Facebook and what it is on Google and on Facebook It's things like my boyfriend is still loving the best, caring, so on and so forth. My boyfriend is on Google is my boyfriend is not having sex with me. My boyfriend is having an affair. How can I tell? My boyfriend is falling out of love with me. And yeah, I mean, sometimes Google, we tell Google things that we don't even tell ourselves. You know, we just decided to type something in to check it out.

And it's maybe something that we don't want to say internally too much. But yeah, I mean, the stated and revealed preferences is something that I've been increasingly fascinated with recently. Have you looked at that much at all? Well, I mean, that's a classic thing in economics. And economists, I think, historically have been too uninterested in stated preferences. We've basically said, well, we don't take people seriously at all. We only look at what they do. So people can say they want something, but it doesn't matter. Look at what they actually do do and that is the real guide to their preferences. I think behavioral economics has given us a slightly richer lens to think about that. But I mean that that fundamental distrust of cheap talk, I think it's still a useful insight.

Having skin in the game I think is generally a good heuristic for everybody to assess what's going on with. I know that you're a fan of Rory Sutherland as well. And his most recent book when he was talking about transport for humans and some of the challenges. Great books, great books. So fantastic. Yeah. And yeah, I think some of the relatively cheap but incredibly effective signals there that companies can do, because it's not just interactions between humans, right? It's interactions between brands,

between experiences. What was that thing? You wrote a blog post about being delayed on the channel tunnel? Yeah, it was on the year of the start. So it was a financial times column, but all my FT columns after a month get put on my website TimHalford.com. So, you know, as long as you're willing to wait, you can read them. You don't have to subscribe, although you should subscribe because the FT is the best paper in the world. But the Eurostar, basically, it's the usual kind of story, our massive cues, and no one would tell us what was going on, and we were all standing around and everyone's super stressed and it's 30 degree heat which I've known is 85, 90 degrees in in Fahrenheit and you know and so on and so on and we missed the train and

still nobody knew what was going on and the point that I made is actually wrote that column in an hour on the train. While the train was still stationary, but the point was it was air conditioned, I was sitting down, I had power, I had space, and I knew that I knew we'd get to London eventually. And so it's one thing to have a delay, but the conditions of the delay,

I mean, the train company only measures the delay, like they get punished by regulators if there's a delay of more than three hours, etc., etc. But for the passenger, there's all the difference in the world between I'm sitting in comfort with power and I can work and I know what's going on, versus I'm standing, I'm stressed, I have no idea, no one's telling me anything, but to the train company, the laser delay does make any difference. Yeah, I think it's the difference between being stuck in the departure lounge with no idea of when the plane's going to arrive or whether you're going to take off.

If you're on the tarmac with no idea of when you're going to take off or on the tarmac with that countdown, it's the same reason. The reason that Uber was revolutionary wasn't because, oh, you can call a cab from anywhere and it's a single app that works pretty much across the entire world, but it was the countdown. It was knowing exactly how long it's going to be until your taxi arrives. I had some... And it being reasonably accurate, because of course,

somewhat some of that is cheap talk, but you're like, oh yeah, this is basically correct. Sam Tatum, who is the head of Ogilvy's Behavioral Science Unit, I think was on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he was one of the guys that contributed to the Heathrow complaint reduction thing for security. Did you ever look at Rory's stuff that he did with that? No, I'm not familiar with it. I can imagine the kind of thing, but

tell me all. So you've got anybody that's been to Heathrow knows, especially if you're going internally, especially terminal five, you just get backed up. There's huge volumes of people flying in from all over the place to then go internationally, or perhaps the reverse coming internationally to then go domestically. And they were getting tons of complaints and they needed to fix it. And classically, like engineers do, they looked at it like an engineering problem. Okay, so how can we fit more of the scanners

within this particular time? Can we train the staff in a different way so that they can speed people up or the ways that we can prepare the humans so that their bags are better done in advance. It was an operations logistical problem. And before they decided to invest probably hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to fix this problem, Rory and his guys said, let's just try a behavioral change, a psychological trick before we do that.

And the same way that they do a Disney World, they put 50 minute weight from here, 40 minute weight from here, 30 minute weight from here, just signs all the way along and complaints just went through the floor because it's not necessarily about the length of time of the weight, although that is an inconvenience, it's about knowing how long the weight is going to be and setting the expectation. Am I going to miss my plane or am I not going to miss my plane? It's fundamentally, the plane is going to take off when it takes off. And if I'm on it, it doesn't really matter how long I wait for security. And if I'm

not on it, then it makes all the difference. It's surprising how difficult this is, but Rory's terrific at noticing these kind of things. But can I offer a challenge to something you said, two, three minutes ago, before we started riffing on travel delays, you were talking about skin in the game and how important skin in the game is. And of course that's true and there's lots of good work written on it, but you can overdo the skin in the game. So one of the cautionary tales podcast, one of the very first ones is called Barred by the Wall Street Crash. So for people who don't know the cautionary tales podcast, it's basically about half an hour, tell a story, quite a rich story of something going wrong, got actors, we got music,

and something goes wrong, and then the social science in what went wrong comes out. And this particular story is about these two great economists, John Maynard Cains, everyone said, John Maynard Cains, Irving Fisher, Leswell Mone, and both of them making this catastrophic failed forecast and missing the Wall Street crash of 1929, which wiped 89% off the value of shares. It was huge, just devastating. I don't want to give too many spoilers, but one of the, they ended up in a very different place. Having made the same mistake, they had totally different fates. And what doomed the guy who was doomed was that he had so much skin in the game. And he had so much that he could, he was just completely invested, he could no longer think clearly, he was completely backed into a corner. Whereas the guy who did much better

clearly he was completely backed into a corner. Whereas the guy who did much better was able to basically say, oh yeah, I've lost some money, but it's no big deal, I haven't lost my reputation, I'll be fine. And so, yeah, skin in the game is important, it's a good thing, but you can have too much of a good thing. Overcooking anything at the moment is something that I've been thinking about a lot. So, a lot of advice online in the personal development world for a good example would be the classic Jordan Peterson line. If you know, take responsibility and you need to do so. That works in maybe on average,

perhaps on average right now in 2022, most people or more people need to take responsibility. I have a group of friends who are pathological responsibility takers, they are the sort of people that will take responsibility. I have a group of friends who are pathological responsibility takers. They are the sort of people that will take responsibility for something that wasn't even theirs to take responsibility for. And what you see is some really interesting extreme examples that basically you're optimizing to try and get people into somewhere that's like a nice gentle mean in the middle of the bell curve, trying to take people out of the extreme of you have no skin in the game at all. Why would you be invested in this thing?

It's cheap signals, but you're also not necessarily optimizing with that advice, but the people that are at the top end that have 99.9% of their net worth tied up in crypto, for instance. Like how are you ever going to be anti crypto? How are you ever going to be able to have an unbiased opinion of the crypto market at the moment? Another thing, I saw you do a blog post about what people keep getting wrong about inflation. And that's,

I mean, inflation must be perhaps a contender for word of the year 2022. So what should we understand about inflation and what do people keep getting wrong about it? and what do people keep getting wrong about it? People think of inflation as prices going up. And indeed, it's measured by CPI, consumer prices index, which measures prices going up. And journalists, very good journalists, who know what they're talking about, we'll talk about, oh, CPI was 10%,

that means inflation was 10%, prices went up 10%. I mean, and it's not wrong, but it's missing a really, really important insight, which is your classical pure textbook inflation is basically everything, the price of everything going up by roughly the same amount, including your wages, so the price of your labor is also going up. So basically, nothing is really getting any more expensive in real terms, because the price in the store went up by 10%

and your salary went up by 10%, and kind of the problem is it's all a bit confusing. Here's another form of inflation, which I would say is not really inflation at all, but it's still going to come out in the price indices. And that's, Vladimir Putin turned off the taps for the global energy system. The price of food went through the roof. The price of natural gas went through the roof. The price of oil went through the roof. And we spend a lot of money on food and natural gas and oil, especially in Europe. And so that went, you know, absolutely skyrocketed. And so on average, prices have

gone up by 10%. But the prices of a lot of stuff haven't gone up by 10% and importantly, your salary didn't go up by 10%. Your take home paid didn't go up by 10%. So that's a relative price change. And in many ways, that's much worse than inflation because you're actually poorer. As the stuff you want to buy, the stuff you need to buy is more expensive. Now, having explained that difference, you might say, well, why does that matter? Well, it matters because the way a central bank should respond to that is totally different. I mean, the way a central bank should respond to the price of everything is going up about the same, including wages. Well, that's probably

a need to sit on that quite hard, raise interest rates high. But the price of energy goes through the roof because there's a war. That's not something the central bank should really be trying to deal with at all. And what makes the current situation difficult is we've got a mix of both, and central banks are trying to figure out which of these two types of inflation to respond to.

And when I wrote that piece, which again was a financial times column, two of the best economists in the financial times I showed it to them and said, what do you think? And they said, you're absolutely right, of course. But I just had one more thing. And the just one more thing they wanted to add was two two pieces of sort of policy advice that completely contradicted each other because one of them thought central banks should stop raising interest rates and the other thought that central banks weren't raising interest rates nearly enough and you know and they're really really smart guys that's the mess we're in and that's why you know the problem that central banks

face and the problem we're all going a face is not a straightforward one. Even the experts don't agree. No and there's a lot of talk about how there was this famous line in the Brexit referendum in the UK that people have had enough of experts. There's a lot of anti-expert talk and then there's this sort of the pendulum swings and now people are saying well you're an idiot you should listen to the experts and the truth is, the experts probably know more from you and me about whatever it is that they're expert in. But knowing more, having more expertise, having more experience, having more training, it doesn't guarantee that you get it right.

So you want to listen to the experts, but you don't want to make the mistake of thinking the experts are infallible. And as you were saying, you can over cook anything. You can over cook the skepticism of the experts were infallible. And as you were saying, you can over cook anything, you can over cook the skepticism of the experts, you can over cook the faith of the experts, which is why this whole game of trying to understand the world and think clearly is an endless project. You've got a quote that says, indiscriminate doubt is at least as dangerous as indiscriminate belief. That must be very similar. Yeah, so my that is a point I made in my most recent book, which is called the Data Detective in the US, and it's called How to Make the World That Up in the UK. And it's a book about how to

think clearly about the world, but in particular how to use numbers, how to use data to think clearly about the world, but in particular how to use numbers, how to use data to think clearly about the world. And the point I observed is I found that people were falling into a trap when it came to anything involving statistics. There was a reflexive skepticism, or like lies, down lies and statistics, or you can prove anything with statistics, or this famous book, How to Lie with Statistics. And just this idea that you seem kind of really clever if you say, oh, oh, yeah, you can prove anything with statistics. But if you're basically just rejecting everything on the grounds that it's got statistics in, well, that's not smart either. And so the challenge is to be

discriminating in what you doubt and what you believe. But all too often, we just let our emotions lead us astray and we just paid, we believe whatever we want to believe, we disbelieve whatever we want to disbelieve. But when it's framed too much as, oh, people will believe anything and they should be more skeptical.

I'm not so sure about that. When you think about the, think about Q and on, what's going on with Q and on? I mean, are these people who believe anything, or are these people who doubt everything, who are skeptical of everything and every source of authority, you can frame it either way? That's an interesting horseshoe that I hadn't thought of, yes, the fact that they seem to net out at a very similar sort of position. The people I did a conversation with Peter Teal a little while ago, and he gave this great example of climate skepticists and climate optimists net out at the same position. The people that say,

we're going to be absolutely fine with technology, it's going to come down the pike, and everything will be sweet just hold on. The people that say, we're locked into this terrible future, both of them net out at the same position, which is we don't do anything right now. Now, the way that they get to that is different, and the futures that they envision are also very different, but they net out at the same position. I think the reflexive heterodoxy or reflexive contrarianism is a very easy way

for people to seem smart, and that, to me, seems to be the primary seductive quality that taking that on has. Is that what your position is as well? Would you think that mostly what people are doing is looking cool by being a cynic? I think that that's definitely part of it. I think that Smacklion's work on social media. If you're calling somebody an idiot, that works a lot better than saying that somebody's somebody's great. So they're more likely to go viral, they're more likely to get purchased. But another thing that's driving this push towards excessive skepticism, the sort of

toxic cynicism, is just that it's generally easier to think of negative arguments than positive arguments. So there's a, discuss some of the evidence for this early on in my book, The Data Detective, how to make the world that up, where psychologists ask people to reason, to produce arguments about a politically contentious issue. I think it was capital punishment at the time. It was the work was done in the 1990s. And as you would expect,

people find it much easier to generate arguments on their side or against the side that they oppose. That's not a surprise. But the arguments that were easiest to generate were arguments attacking the opposing belief. If you ask people to come up with reasons why the other side is stupid, they

can do that. So many arguments is stupid, they can do that as so many arguments they find incredibly easy to do that. Those arguments just flow really, really freely. People also find it easy to come up with positive arguments for their own side, but not as easy. So the power of negativity, I think, is really fundamental there. Why do you think it is that it's so much easier for people to come up with dunks on the other side than arguments for their own side?

I'm not sure. I mean, it may just be there's more ways to be wrong than to be right. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, I'm not absolutely sure. It's an interesting question. Yeah, I think that certainly the credentials that you get on Twitter come from dunking, right?

Twitter is just a dunk porn fest for the most part. Very rarely do you see, there's something interesting I noticed online. If somebody crosses a line with the type of language that they're using, the insults that they draw, whatever it might be, I haven't seen in as long as I can remember on Twitter, someone breaking the fourth wall of the argument and saying, you've gone too far that's out of order, that's unacceptable. No one ever seems to say that. They want to continue playing this sort of dry, side-eye, satirical, I don't care about, you can't affect me, bro, type, debate.

That's the game of tennis that appears to be being played. It's very rarely, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're not allowed to say that. That's too much because that would indicate that they'd actually finally got to you, even if they perhaps had, but people will put up this front. So you have public, uh, so you have public self deception, which is probably reflecting internal self deception as well, but that person may very well go away and spend the rest of the evening

stewing over what the detractor online just accused them of. Yeah. And social media are built for engagement and engagement is driven a lot by emotions. And often it's the negative emotions, not always. I mean, cat videos, that's that's positive emotions, but a lot of it is driven the negative emotions, not always. I mean, cat videos, that's positive emotions, but a lot of it is driven by negative emotions. I'm quite struck by the fact,

I've got nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter. I never get new retweets, no, whenever, no one ever engages with anything I post, because I'm, I mean, maybe I'm boring, but I like to think there's, because I'm calm, I just sort of say reasonable things, and people might like it, people might follow me, but they don't retweet that stuff. And the few tweets I've had that have gone viral are often something like, oh, it's a direct quote of a former government minister admitting that the government

that she just left is completely ridiculous or something like that. And then that's something that people can really get into. Oh, finally, this, you know, these politicians have admitted what hypocrites they are, whatever, hundreds thousands of retweets. But, you know, that's rare because I'm not, I'm not really interested in, in playing that game. And the statistician Gellman though, he makes an interesting point. So I think in a longer form, like blogging, for example, there's more of a bias towards excessive positivity. So there's no harm in writing a blog post about other people's ideas and basically just saying, hey, they're great, these ideas are great. Yeah, that's fine. There's no cost to that. No one's

going to complain about that. If on the other hand, you write a blog post, or a long social media post on Facebook or a medium, whatever, sub-stack, whatever the format is, if you write something, taking somebody down, there are consequences for that. You've got to get your facts right. Otherwise, you could get sued, for example. No one cares if you've got your facts right right if you're just being friendly to everyone.

So it's an interesting observation that the bias towards positivity or negativity depends on the scale of the media and the type of the media. And actually it's related to a point I make in my latest book about how the scale of news, the timescale of news relates to the kind of news stories we pay attention to. So if you're checking the news hour by hour, it's got to be gossip, market moves, stuff blowing up. If you look at the news once a year, you can actually pick up totally different sorts of events. And if you were to look at the news once every 10 years, you can actually start to track stuff that really means something important, like the decline in childhood mortality or the increase in global temperatures.

You're impossible to track these on a daily or weekly basis, but 10 years, 25 years, you can see them. Yeah, do not confuse the noise for the signal, I think. And that's what everybody's doing. Another really terrifying insight that David Paral came up with is that almost all of the content that we consume will have been created in the last 24 hours. There's entire social media platforms that are dedicated to producing and publishing content that expires

after 24 hours. The only way that you can consume it and for anyone that knows what the Lindy effect is, they are platforms that are designed to be anti-Lindy. There is literally no way that it gets to stick about. Thinking about the concern that people have over relying on statistics, that sort of reflexive heterodoxy, I understand coming out of the back of a period where many experts said things and then went back on saying things and then did a double U-turn and then kept on going again. I wonder whether it's a British thing, but I think we're kind of perennially orderly and the respect of authority. It seems to be a little bit better in the UK. Maybe we don't have that rebel spirit that the US does and maybe Australia as well. But even for

me, I've come out the other side of the last two years with a very different view of experts and expertise and the people in power. And I think it, for me, it seemed very much like a mask off moment that it's the same degree of idiocy all the way up. And that's not a bad thing. It's idiocy all the way down as well, all the way down to me. But realizing the humanness and just how flawed the people that are given positions of Realising the humanness and just how flawed the people that are given positions of prestige power expertise, I think that's going to be very very difficult to regrow and I wonder whether it can ever be done at least in the sort of medium-term future.

I think I'm not sure that it can. I think one of the interesting things is that we tend to want to take an expert in one field and ask them to opine in other fields. And it can be very difficult both for us and for the expert to realise they've strayed outside their area of expertise. So for example, in the pandemic, you might have somebody with really deep expertise in tracking virus variants and understanding mutations and what impact those mutations might have. And then you might say, well, you know, should we have another lockdown? Which actually immediately gets you into questions of compliance,

would people accept another lockdown? How would they behave? Epidemiology, how would it spread? If there was another lockdown, if you sort of move from... And it seems like, oh, this is an expert in COVID, therefore I should ask them a question about COVID, but actually, no, they were expert, an expert in viral mutations, and now you're asking them about behavioral science, in fact. But which is ridiculous, but it doesn't seem ridiculous. And I think even to most experts, it wouldn't seem ridiculous, because they do know something, wouldn't seem ridiculous to ask them to speculate. I mean, I interviewed British statistician called David Spiegelhalter many times. He's a national treasure here in the UK. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter,

former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and he's terrific, but he's one of the few experts I encountered who would wax liaver with great confidence about something, and then you'd ask him a question and say, I don't know anything about that. And that's, it was striking because it's so unusual for people to say, not a clue. Ask me another question. But I think it's, it's because he's so good, he's such a great communicator, and he's got that confidence to say what he knows and then to shut up when he thinks he doesn't

know anything. I mean, he still gets things wrong, We all get things wrong, but it's a good start. It's a signal of trustworthiness, I think, and honesty. It's actually something that people could hack. But I wonder whether ego defeats desire to manipulate when it comes to this, that people can't get their own egos out of the way, that the opportunity to pretend that they don't have a particular opinion on something, that they maybe don't actually know anything about, is pushed to one side in place of the opportunity to proliferate, to propagate their ideas about the fact that they could or should be this

polymath of solutions. Well, think about the media ecosystem as well. If you're, say, a radio producer, you want to get an expert on to talk about COVID or anything else, the economy, whatever it is. You know, once someone who you ask them a question and they give you an answer and then you ask them a second question and they say, I don't know. I don't know about anything about that stuff. I mean, of course, you could go super deep into their area of expertise, but you know, I could, well, yeah, I mean, good morning Britain to the one. I often want that, but yes, good morning Britain doesn't want that. The most mainstream outlets don't want that. For good

reason, right? That's not what, not what most consumers of information on Tidey give me a broad overview. But yeah, then you have you selected to the very few people who are actually capable of giving that broad overview, or the large number of people who are happy to go on TV and just bluff it. I really like the term toxic cynicism. I think that it's a wonderful way to package up the current milieu that you really see online. The fact that it is really excessive skepticism applied across everything apart from things that you have a prior that you want it to be true. things that you have a prior that you want it to be true. Previously, people would have already had biases around whatever motivated reasoning they've got, but I'm not convinced that their degree of skepticism or cynicism about everything else would be quite as tuned up as it has been.

So what you have now is an even greater bias functionally and even greater bias toward the things that people want to believe and an even greater cynicism Against the things that they don't want to believe Yeah, and it's reinforced by all the things we're very familiar with the echo chamber effects the political tribalism and so on Audio-camsher And things that I'm sure you've you've discussed many times on the podcast, but yeah, it it it doesn't help it doesn't help at all I mean when I when I think about why we get things wrong, why we make mistakes when we're consuming information from social media or media, fundamentally, I think there are three different things happening, and we've paid different

amounts of attention to them. So the first, the most logical is, are we get stuff wrong because we don't know enough? So it's kind of incompetence. You don't have the expertise, you don't have the skills, you need more training, more information, you need to learn more about statistics or more about the history of Ukraine or more about whatever. And that's fine. That information deficit model is obviously important.

And the second thing that's going wrong is these echo chambers, it's motivated reasoning. I want to reach a particular conclusion. And that's incredibly important. That's why I, one of the first chapters in my book, which is also one of my cautionary tales, is all about this great art critic falling for this terrible fraud. I mean, a really terrible forgery that he should never have fallen for.

And my point is this guy knew more about Vermeer as it was a Vermeer. This guy knew, well, or it wasn't a Vermeer, I should say, this guy knew more about Vermeer than anybody in the world. You couldn't have given him any more information, you couldn't have given him any more skill. He still made the mistake, he made the mistake because he was just so desperate to believe. So that's his second thing, you've got lack of skill, you've got the motivated reasoning, the desperation to believe. And this third thing I think we often miss, which is just not really paying attention. You're scrolling through on a small screen and you know,

it's 144 characters and you get so easily just read something and you think you read something but actually you read something else or you know you didn't stop to think for a moment, is that actually true? Could that be true? It's amazing and in all three cases, we've also got a meta problem, which is a lack of awareness. The fame has done in Kruger effect, unskilled and we don't know where unskilled. But you've also got motivated reasoning and the I'm not biased bias. Think about it. If you thought you were biased, you wouldn't be biased. Obviously, you think you're occupying a reasonable position on the spectrum. Otherwise, if you thought it was a matter of time, you're you wouldn't be biased, right? I mean, obviously you think you're occupying a reasonable

position on the spectrum, right? Otherwise, if you thought there was another unreasonable position, you'd move your position. And then, of course, the brain's incredibly good at creating these illusions that we really are paying attention that you really can drive and look at your phone at the same time, you really can read the paper and listen to a podcast at the same time and of course you can't.

So we make these three mistakes and we also make these meta mistakes where we convince ourselves that actually this stuff doesn't really apply to us. I suppose as well the fact that we need to deceive other people, the easiest way to deceive other people is to believe the deception ourselves. Right. The fact that if it is, and this is an adaptive quality, in fact, I remember seeing something about one of the justifications and one of the reasons that was put forward as to why humans have got theory of mind and consciousness at all, is that it allows us to be able to model what other people might think and therefore be able to put our ideas forward in a way which would create the kind of outcome that it is that we want because we're socially so complex. There was a story that you had Apollo Robbins, the world's most famous theatrical pickpocket, says, the things right in front of us are often

the hardest to see, the things you look at every day that you're blinded to. What was the similarity between magic and misinformation? Yeah, well, it is partly this fact of believing firmly, you've got this incredibly powerful belief that you are noticing things that you are paying attention and you're not. So, Apollo Robbins, his TED talk is fantastic. It's only nine minutes. I won't spoil it. You should just watch it. It's an absolute masterclass in storytelling as well as, you know, he's an amazing pickpocket. But he's just lifting stuff. He'll say, oh, have I just just checked your pocket? Have I got your wallet? And while he checks the the pocket, he takes his watch. And then he says, oh, now you've noticed,

I've got your watch. And then he suddenly reaches for his watch. And then follow Robin's takes the wallet out of his pocket because he's looking at his watch. And you think, oh, I can pay attention to my wallet and my watch at the same time. Like, you know, I am, my senses are monitoring them both, but they're not.

You've just got the solution that they are. And that's what the pick pocket exploits. And the same thing is true for information on the media, social media. So a fantastic little study done by, if I remember rightly, David Rand at MIT and Gordon Penny Cook at Regina University in Canada, where they, what they did was they asked people, What they did was they asked people, some people showed them a bunch of headlines, some of which were fake news and said, would you retweet this or not? Basically, people would retweet a lot of fake news

that was on their side. If you're a Trump supporter and there's some fake news about Biden being an idiot, you'll tweet it. If you're a supporter and there's some fake news about Biden being an idiot, you'll tweet it. If you're a Democrat and you see some fake news that has Trump done something ridiculous, you'll retweet that. So that's not surprising. What's surprising about this study is, they, if they instead just ask people,

can you tell me whether you think this headline is true or not? They were actually very good at figuring out, oh, that's actually... No, there's no way Trump is going to deport Melania. That's not actually going to happen. It's a delicious headline. I'd like to retweet it, but it's obviously not true. So if you ask people instead of will you retweet it, is it true? They can figure out the difference between truth and pulsar.

If you say, if you ask them, well, do you think it's important to retweet only stuff that's true? People will say, yeah, it is important. I don't want to retweet misinformation. I only want to retweet stuff that's true. So you go, well, this is weird. People retweet fake news. People can spot fake news.

People say, it's wrong to retweet fake news and I wouldn't do it. So what's going on? And the answer is they're just not paying attention and so the final kicker to this study is when random penny cook asked people to show them a headline and say and this is done they did it in the lab but they also did it in the wild on Twitter. They show people a headline and they say do you think this headline is true or not and And people will evaluate it. And then they just watch their behavior for the next 48 hours,

and they are less likely to retweet untrue claims, because you ask them once to stop and think about it. And having stopped and think about it, you're just in a different frame of mind. It's like, oh, I should probably think about whether stuff's true or not. And it lasts 48 hours. It's incredible. And that just shows, you know, we're just not, we're not paying attention. We think we would naturally evaluate the truth of every claim we see on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. We just do it. And if we get it wrong,

it's because we're not smart in our form, because we're biased. But often, we don't notice that something's true or false, because it never occurs to us to spend a second's energy on evaluating the claim. And so we don't. I wonder whether revealed and stated preferences clash up against each other a little bit here. I think a lot of people, when asked, do you think that you should be retweeting things which are only proven to be true or obvious satire? Yes, but if you see something which is advantageous to your particular side, you're going to let that one slide, of course you are. You think, well, you know, this may not be true. I don't need to check too much, but it's pretty fortunate for whatever my point of view is.

I agree, but that's why it's so important to have done the experiment, where they tested the impact of just asking people to evaluate one statement for truth, and then we're able to observe in the wild on social media that it changed people's behaviour. So yeah, I'm sure people exaggerate how important it is to them only to retweet the truth, but you can just ask them to think about it for a second. Just for a second, you can change their behaviour over the course of the next couple of days. So what we've talked about so far has been logic, rationality, understanding of cognitive biases, motivated reasoning and stuff like that.

You also say that economists should get more in touch with their feelings, and I'm very interested in the limits of the usefulness of a rational approach. What role does intuition have if any in the modern world and stuff like that? So what do you think there? So I've changed my mind over over the years. So as an economist, as a young economist, I was taught rational choice theory and you know this is a good way to understand people's decision making and of course people aren't always rational all the time but it's a great way of it's a great starting point. And in fact I wrote a whole book called The Logic of Life,

which is all about the different ways in which rational choice theory could be used to understand things like addiction and discrimination, crime, all kinds of things that don't seem to have any logic. They're just human weakness or they're evil things, and some of them are evil things, but they're evil things and some of them are evil things but their evil things were the logic behind them. I wouldn't write that book today because I'm much more interested now in the psychology of things in what's now known as behavioral economics. So taking into account

emotions, taking into account our cognitive limitations alongside rational choice. Actually, I think the two together are quite powerful because if you've got a good grounding in rational choice theory, you have a good sense of what the optimal decision is, at least under certain conditions, enough information, enough data. And if you've got a good grounding in behavioral economics and in psychology, you've got a good sense of what it is that's going to stop you from making that. What's going to mediate it?

What's going to stop you from being that optimal decision maker? Yeah. And I mean, this is why, and it comes into not just decision making, but also the way we process information. So this is why the opening of my latest book, instead of teaching you some statistical trick or talking about correlation or anything like that, I say look, the first thing you have to do is observe your emotional response

and you're reading a headline, you're reading an article, looking at something on social media. Before you start calculating or evaluating or looking for sources or any of that, first of all, just say, how does that make me feel? Am I angry? Does it make me feel vindicated how does that make me feel? Am I angry? Does it make me feel vindicated?

Does it make me feel scared? Whatever it is, what's that emotion? And then just, and then go and have another look, look at the claim again. Having observed your own emotion, it's going to look different. And I'm not saying don't feel emotions, don't feel angry, you know, it's,

don't feel happy. It's obviously it's legitimate to feel emotions, don't feel angry, you know, don't feel happy. It's obviously it's legitimate to have emotions, but you know, you should notice that you're having that emotional reaction before you go back and try to engage your powers of logic, because they're not friendly to each other. It's best to try and keep them a bit separate. So yeah, understanding emotions is incredibly important. I wonder, it seems to me to be a common trajectory. Russ Roberts from E.Conn talk was on the show a little while ago and his new book, Wild Problems, is literally all about this.

The limits outside of economic theory and why you need to have something else that you could call intuition or good instinct or whatever. And I find it fascinating to look at people that have spent a long time in a particular industry and where they get to was the trajectory starts to really sort of accumulate a ton of experience. And it seems like everyone's zeroing in on this. You know, it's the same way as looking at your grandparents for how to live a good life as the grandparents towards the end of it. They're, you know, not really chasing the state as so much anymore. They're not playing with keeping up with the Joneses.

They're not picking fights with people for no apparent reason. They're just settling into something that's a little bit more simple. And I think that, yeah, you and Russ as flag-waving economist ambassadors for someone integrating a little bit more felt sense, holistically seems like a good signal to me. Yeah, well it's very flattering to be compared to Russ. He's got an amazing podcast and he's he's got a lot of experience and he's coming in from a slightly different angle to me but I think it's a very it's a very important angle which is he's he's just super skeptical about our ability to know anything, to understand any system.

It's like it's always more complicated than you think. I have a little bit more faith in our ability to comprehend the world than Rust does, but I think it's a really useful check to say, do you really think you understand this? Do you really think we can fix this now with with enough data Because that's a very tempting path and it's very important to have someone like Russ just whispering in your ear. Are you sure? Sure, you really understand What was that story about Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairies? I love it. I love that story. It's one of the

cautionary tales and it's quite a famous story although as with many of the cautionary tales you've heard, you might have heard some of the story but you don't know all the details and the details are so delightful. But it's all about Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most famous men in the British Empire, hearing that two little girls from Yorkshire, Nick Bradford, have taken photographs of fairies at the bottom of the garden. And he heard about this, I think, in 1920. The first photograph is actually taken in 1916, if I remember rightly.

And he wrote a whole book, The Coming of the Fairies. And he said, well, obviously this could be a hoax, and you'd be the judge, but I think more likely, it is in the epoch making discovery. You know, spoiler, it was not an epoch making discovery, it was a hoax. Or I was just so fascinated by both by how

Doyle convinced himself of this thing that is transparently ludicrous, but also what the girls were thinking, what makes two little girls perpetrate such a hoax, and at what point did they think, oh, this is all got much bigger than we ever intended. And so both sides of that story are rather beautiful. It's something to see a author that created a character who is supposed to pay attention to the little things and be aware of his cognitive biases, fall prey to two little girls. How did they make the photo? Well, this is one of the interesting things. This whole thing was deconstructed much, much

later by the British Journal of Photography, which for decades had said, this is ridiculous. We're not going to descend. In the end, this is all right, fine. We'll look at this. And the editors of the British Journal of Photography published like a 10, 10 issue, expose it's about 80 pages long in total, it's incredible. And there are I think there are five photos, there are four different methods of fakery. And that's one of the things that did confuse people, because if you're looking for like, what is the one thing they did to make these photos? There is no one thing you will never find it. And and and funnily enough that licks back to that we were talking about stage magic. One one of the ways in which really good stage magicians will fool people and it helps them to fool other magicians is they'll

do the same trick over and over again. You say people say oh you should never perform the same trick twice but they do. They'll perform the same trick over and over again. People say, well, you should never perform the same trick twice, but they do. They'll perform the same trick over and over again. But each time there's a different method to achieve the same effect. So we know one time, it's like you've harmed the coin and another time it's kind of, you're doing this, you're doing that,

you're using a dummy. And so somebody who's trying to get a sense of like, oh, how they're doing that? Oh, I think he might have done that. And then they'll watch the next time you do it and you do it in a different way. And they're just more confused than ever. And so this is the problem that Conan Doyle had. So one of the paintings, one of the photographs was actually heavily post-processed by an expert. So it was basically Photoshopped, you know, physically painted over the negative, and that was supposed to be to enhance it for display and to lecture.

Another one was a double exposure, which is not surprising given one of the girls was actually a little girl. She's 17 years old and she worked in a photo studio doing double exposures all day. Not really that surprising, she could do that. Another one was just paper cutouts. Just took a photograph of a little girl sitting next to a paper cutout and the photo is too dimensional, so you can't tell it's paper cutout. So these different methods, and he just went through these extraordinary contortions to convince himself that it must be true. And he wasn't just the creator of Sherlock Holmes, of course he was that, two other things.

He had intervened in a kind of, in the serial of, you know, the serial podcast, you know, this whole thing. He was involved in the Edwardian equivalent of serial where there was somebody who had been convicted of this crime and co-downed oil was convinced he was innocent and it assembled this amazing amount of evidence and got him off. And I think probably rightly. So he could be completely forensic. The other thing, do you want to guess where co Doyle's first ever work was published? You'll never guess.

No idea. British Journal of Photography. He was actually an expert photographer. He knew loads about photography. And so that was all just, you think, well, how could he be fooled? And it was just, oh well, I know so much about photography. I know how hard photography is.

These little girls can't possibly have pulled off trick photography because I know how hard trick photography is. So, something we see over and over again is expertise is an advantage if you're thinking clearly and you're not emotional. But once you're emotionally engaged, expertise can be an active disadvantage.

You can actively drag you down because you create more reasons, even if they're serious reasons, to believe whatever it is you're wanting to believe. One of my friends, Gwinder Bogle, has this fantastic insight where he says, when intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion and to very cleverly become stupid. Conan Doyle is an example and so was Abraham Radius the art critic we were talking about. He saw things in this fake vameer that I would never see, that most people would never see, incredibly

sophisticated reasons to believe that it was genuine. And there was one big reason to think it wasn't genuine, which is it didn't look anything like anything Vermeer had ever painted. But he was willing to look past all of that because he could see all these subtleties. And yeah, expertise. I'm in favour, but it can be misused like anything else. Tell me about what you learned to do with the invention of the bicycle, because one of my friends, George Mack, sent me a study years ago that explained the efficiency, the movement efficiency of different animals in the animal kingdom, And it's some particular number, whatever it is, energy versus distances,

something like that. And then he adds in, they add in a human on a bicycle. And then a human on a bicycle is like the factor of 10 better than the best moving albatross or whatever it marlin or whatever it is. So what did you learn about the bicycle? What did I learn about the bicycle? I mean, there's so many different things.

I studied the bicycle for another book of mine called 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy, which also is a podcast series. And I just explored different inventions. And one of the delights of the bicycle was just the way that it reshaped society. Now, when people were ready, the bike was quite a long time in gestation, but when people were ready, it just turned everything on its head. So it was a real forcefully emancipation of women who could cycle around without a chap around. And there were various campaigners who said, oh, you know, this is going to lead to fornication

and prostitution and so on. Deportuary on the back of a bicycle. But and there's a wonderful, there's a kind of tabloid news headline of the day which is about a woman. I think it was a Malia Allen, if I remember her name rightly. And it was front page news because she'd gone bicycling in trousers. And so this headline was, she walked trousers and she's divorced lady, cycling around in trousers. But the interesting thing was like,

everyone was excited about this divorced lady in trousers. No one was worried about the bicycling. So it's incredible freedom. And there was one of the leading women's rights campaigners, I'm blanking on her name, who was basically campaigning for Universal Suffrage and so on throughout the 19th century, and I think died in about 1920, and she was asked what had been the greatest contributor to women's freedom and she said the bicycle. So, these inventions, whether it's the brick or whether it's paper or whether it's the bicycle, they changed the world by changing us. It's not just they solved a little problem that we had,

they slot right into our society and we just go on as normal except that one little thing is easier. We've got a better mouse trap. They work because they just create new winners and new losers and reshape the way we live and the bicycle is a great example of that. I remember learning about when caffeine was first introduced when coffee shops first came about because up until that point during the middle of the day, if a gentleman and his friends wanted to go and discuss some serious philosophical, or political ideas, the only place that they could go would be the tap house,

or the pub. And inevitably, after a few of the only drinks that were mostly consumed there, the conversation degenerated somewhat. Whereas, as soon as the introduction of caffeine happened, that actually permitted people to go out during the day and maybe even not only have it degrade but improve over time, as they drank a little bit more caffeine and they were a little bit more alert. And they were, and this is something I remember reading about Aristotle, he was going to

these discussions at a influential friend's house, dinners on an evening time, and he put forward a suggestion that they replace all of the cups and the glasses on the tables with smaller ones. He said, because it'll make us think that we're drinking the same amount, but we'll actually drink a little bit less. And that will facilitate, to go into foster a better conversational environment. The same thing, whatever, 1500 years later, is stop drinking so much during the day

if you want to have a good conversation. I would love to see the randomized trial on that. Did that work. But yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And there's a related example, which is Henry Pellan, the British Prime Minister. This is 1700s. if I'm correct, if I remember rightly, he changed the tax wage in Monti. So, T was taxed at 100% or more,

and so loads of smuggling, not much T, actually drunk, and he slashed tax on T and put the smugglers out of business. People consumed a lot more tea. Tax revenues from tea went up. This is what the current British government is trying to do, but it turns out it's not as easy as Henry Pellum made it look. So the cut taxes revenues went up and an economist, Francesca Antman, found that she could track this massive spike in the consumption

of tea because there had been this big policy change and she could actually track it through to the mortality figures. She got all the births and deaths and was able to see the decline in the mortality rate because people were boiling their water because that's what you need to do for tea. And then they didn't have germs here, they didn't know it was making the water safer, but it was. And you can see it in the dead figures. That's very cool. I got suggested complete tangent. I got suggested a book this weekend, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Are you familiar with this?

No, I immediately want to read it now. I am going to be harping on about this for quite a while. So, in 1939, before Germany invades Poland, there's murmurings at the war's afoot, and the British government decides that they need to start up a secret clandestine gorilla arm and they need to come up with very innovative ways to disrupt the potential oncoming Nazi offensive and occupation. So they start to find inventors, criminals, soldiers, but they've all got very unique different skill sets. One of them had created the limpit mine, the inventor of the limpit mine, and he was now driving around in a 18-foot high caravan, complete with four bedrooms and two bathrooms and hot and cold running water in the 1930s.

And they got a hold of him, and they got a hold of this Scottish guy that had lived under this incredibly sort of austere environment and was just the most reckless guy and he would go out and womanize on an evening time and then come in during the day and he created the first pamphlet of guerrilla warfare ever and it was edible in case they were captured by the enemy and he timed himself to see how long it would take to eat it and he said said that with a good size glass of water gentlemen could consume the entire pamphlet in less than two minutes. And it's like the Avengers, but sort of in the 1930s and gentlemenly. And it's just outstanding. So Churchill's ministry of ungentlemanly warfare, really well written, super beautiful prose, really easy, super accessible. And I'm in love with it at the moment. It's very good.

I love it. I have to read it and investigate cautionary tales. I'm always finding whenever I read anything these days, I'm like, just, I'm just here for when something goes terribly wrong and I can start learning lessons. That's the cautionary tales, cautionary tales mission in life. You can justify it however you want for the podcast. There was one of the things that he'd done with the limpit mind, this guy, they were struggling to find a way to create a time release mechanism that would dissolve in water or would reduce down in water at an even time. So you could have a different type

of powder that could be used, but the compression of the powder was there was varieties and that too much compression it would never go off to a little compression and it might kill the diver that's supposed to set it. And this guy was eating anacid balls. His daughters dropped some on the floor because he was always shifting them off the bench where they needed to work in his house before they got this office in London. And he realised that the aniseed balls almost always seemed to dissolve in his mouth at the same speed, no matter what he did. So they ended up using aniseed balls as the detonation triggers for these things. But then they realised that they needed to keep them dry because if they got slightly wet during transportation or

whatever that they did, they would have changed the length of time that the fuse would have gone forward as soon as he gets in water. So he then realized that a condom was the exact size and shape to be able to protect this thing. So this is before you could Amazon anything. So they went around his hometown, picking up aniseed balls and condoms, apparently bought all of the aniseed balls and condoms in the local town where he lived and ended up. And they said the author just decided to add a side note saying it is unclear whether or not there was an increase in childbirths, nine months later in and around gilford or wherever it was that this guy was from. But yeah, it's phenomenal. So I'm pretty confident that you'll enjoy that. I love it.

I love it. On the subject of an increase in childbirths and cutting taxes, which we were talking about with T, there is a fantastic study of something that happened in Australia about 15 years ago, where the government said, oh, we're going to give you a baby bonus. If you have a baby, $3,000 Australian dollars, that's about $1,500 US dollars, something like that. So, like, it's worth

having. And they announced it with six weeks notice. So, they announced it in mid-May and was going to come into effect at the end of June, beginning of July. And people said, is that not a bit reckless? I mean, are people not going to try and time their babies to get the baby bonus? Then the Australian, shouldn't you just announce it with immediate effect? And the Australian government were like, oh no, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine, no one will do that. And the birth rate on the 1st of July was more than twice the birth rate on the last day of June. All those people basically just going, just hold on, just hold on. And it's amazing, it's amazing, you eat your birth and indeed

your death responds to tax incentives because they've had a similar effect with abolishing inheritance tax. So yeah, people respond to incentives. This is the classic economist in me, rational choice theory. It does actually explain a few things. My friend's wife is a schoolteacher, and in her class last year, she had a sweepstakes where all of the kids choose pregnant. Sweepstakes up on the board. This is the month that

the new baby is supposed to be born in and everybody pick a day. When do you think it's going to happen or whatever? But she didn't tell them the actual due date. It's like this is the month or whatever. This is the period. And her least favorite student, the one that she really hates, chose the correct due date. And sure enough, she was getting closer to the time that she's supposed to give birth. And her water's broke on the evening of that day. And she held on to not give birth to the baby until the next day to spite this child that she hated. She sounds like a really inspirational teacher. I really, I thought that that conversation was phenomenal. It was absolutely great. There were many lessons there. Although I would have said, could you not just have to

baby and then lie about the birthday? Perhaps, yeah, which would be more more surreptitious. But there's a degree of manipulation and honesty going on here, which is sort of beautiful dance. Speaking of taxes and speaking of children, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you, what do you think about incentivizing British mothers with tax deductions to have children? I think it was originally a Hungarian policy. If we can put to one side the person that actually came up with it or proposed it or okayed it, I thought when I first heard of that a month ago, I was like, surely this is a win. Surely this is going to be a win for mothers that want to decide to have

children. It's going to open up their financial freedom. It's going to give them more time at home. It's going to maximize, we're going to the population collapse and all of the different things that we need. What's the view of an economist philosopher? So, I mean, the two things I would say up front is, is first of all, do you have any reason to believe that society wants more or fewer children than individual mothers would choose by themselves? You know, is there some reason to believe that they're,

they're not taking into account, you know, some social across-door social benefit? It's not clear because you can cut it both ways. The second thing I'd say is we do already incentivise children in the sense that the income support is paid, there's a child benefit paid. So if you have children, you do get money until they're 18 years old to offset the cost of having them. It's the third thing there is, if fundamentally if what you want is more people, you could also be more welcoming to immigrants. So you could do both. And I find it interesting that the people advocating the baby bonuses

are generally not advocating free immigration restrictions. And I would have thought that actually when you look at it logically, but those things are probably pushing in the same direction. Certainly something we've had in the UK from open borders with the EU was lots of quite young people come by young, I mean like people in their 20s coming working hard, paying taxes, not really demanding a lot of benefits because they're young, they're working age and it didn't seem to be very popular but it's not clear to me that that's actually a worse solution than trying to incentivize mothers to have children. Does that feel like I don't know if I've over engineered the answer to the question or

dodging it? I think it's interesting. It's things that I hadn't considered. Certainly, the immigration point is one that people would point to. I think that it shouldn't be the case that your population growth is at the stage where you need to import other people in order to be able to supplement it. It feels like immigration should be a bonus on top rather than something that because if you continue the clock forward based on the current trends, you would end up with a very non-British-born

British population, although you would have second generation and third generation and whatever, whatever. And everybody is a hodgepodge of everything. I'm sure that if I looked at my genetic tree that I would end up being from Ireland or Scotland or some other place, I understand the concern that some people have about diluting down British culture by importing too many people that aren't necessarily immediately a part of that. Integration would be great. Being from the northeast of the UK, it's pretty diverse, at least in the schools and the areas that I was at, it was.

It's an interesting one. I don't know. I think that the really cool question around is the reason that women aren't having more children because they don't think that they can afford it? Basically. I see in the comments on a lot of videos that I've done to do with the mating crisis, stating challenges, young people not having sex, more than 50% of women for the first time in history, childless by 30, that wasn't right as it was the other one

that did that study, 22 to 45 year old women, unmarried and childless for the first time, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some of the comments from an end of one completely unrandomised study, we're talking about, it's very difficult to bring a child into this world because it's pretty expensive. Yeah. So just a couple of thoughts then. So one is, I mean, it's a good question, but we're not the right people to answer it. I would basically two blocs, and if you've got children, I've got three children, but I think my wife probably knows more about the decisions to have these children

that I do. We should probably ask more women who have decided to have children and who have decided not to have children. The second point is that Daniel Karneman, I think he originally got this idea from Kurt Lewin, great psychologist of the early 20th century and mid 20th century. Daniel Karnival says we often think of the, if you imagine the analogy with a car, we want to get the car to move faster and we're always thinking about... Rather than removing your brakes. Hitting the accelerator, but yeah, take your foot off the brake. So yeah, I think your instinct is absolutely right. Before you say we should pay women more money to have children, we should look around

and go and figure out why they're not having children in the first place. And is there a problem? Or are they not having children for completely legitimate reasons that no reason you'd want to have them stay in the position? That would be a great study for someone to do to look at for a woman, for women, big chunk of women, nice big sample. How many children would you want to have? How many children do you think you'll have? Or perhaps even if you were to take a, it would be difficult to do it for right now, but you'd certainly be able to look at maybe the

last 20 years, women that were 50s, perhaps, how many children did you want to have and how many did you end up having? I mean, how many different different, like fertility issues, availability of husbands cycling through different partners, like, oh, there's a million different things that could get in the way, but that would be fascinating to look at how many children a woman would want to have and how many she ends up having. And if I remember rightly, so I interviewed for my BBC podcast more or less, I've interviewed Marina Adshade a few times, she's a she's an economist at British Columbia University

and she's written a book called Dollars and Sex if I remember rightly. And she, if I may be misremembering, but the last time we were talking about fertility rates, I think she told me that women are in general having fewer children than they would like. And that is something that would concern me much more than just looking at a demographic pyramid and saying, or I don't like that. It turned upside down. I would be much more interested in, well, how do the people who are alive today feel about the decisions that they're making and would do they want to make different decisions if

only they had the money or if some other obstacle was removed? Yes, I think one of the fascinating things is that a woman's desire to have children is going to be culturally mediated. That doesn't stay static throughout time either. Neither do the economic conditions that she's trying to bring the child into the world with, which is going to mediate her choice to do that. Neither do the availability of potential partners for her to be able to create the child with and then raise the child with. So there are a lot of moving parts as we go through this. But young people between the age of 18 and 30 are having three times less sex over the last 10 years. That's gone down specifically for men,

eight percent to 28%. It's also gone up for women as well, the amount of sexlessness. And this finishes in 2018. I can't, I need someone to do the study between 2018 and 2022. I need to find out. Somebody out there, tell me how little sex

everybody's having. So talk to Marina Ratchade. See if Marina would how little sex everybody's having. So, talk to Marina Radshade. See if Marina would be interviewed. She's great. She knows way more about this than I do. And she'll be really interesting interviewer. I shall steal her contact details of you. After this, look, Tim Harford, ladies and gentlemen,

Tim, very much appreciate you, very much appreciate your work. Where should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do online? So, cautionary tales with Tim Haafard is the podcast or on the BBC, BBC More or Less and my website is TimHaafard.com. You read all the articles, you can find the Twitter links, all of that good stuff. Thanks Tim. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.