1 Von Hayek quote: Friedrich von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2 The electric toaster seems a humble thing: http://www.toaster.org/1900.php
3 ‘It warms bread when I plug it into a battery’: telephone interview with Thomas Thwaites, 30 June 2009.
4 The range of products: Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth (London: Random House, 2007), p. 9.
5 We’re proud of the change we’ve brought: Barack Obama, ‘Speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 2009’. Available at: http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/barackobama/a/obama-white-house-correspondents-transcript_2.htm
6 Perhaps we have this instinct: Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, p. 9.
7 Perhaps the best illustration of this: Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement (New York: Princeton University Press, 2005).
8 ‘The best lesson of Tetlock’s book’: Louis Menand, ‘Everybody’s an Expert’, New Yorker, 5 December 2005.
9 Just two years later: Business Week: ‘Oops! Who’s Excellent Now?’, 5 November 1984; Christopher Lorenz, ‘ “Excellence” Takes a Knock’, Financial Times, 1 November 1984.
10 The ‘who’s excellent now?’ experience is reinforced: Leslie Hannah, ‘Marshall’s “Trees” and the Global “Forest”: Were “Giant Redwoods” Different?’, in N. Lamoreaux, D. Raff and P. Temin (eds), Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms and Countries (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
11 At the time of writing, it was not even in the top five hundred: FT Global 500, 2008. Available at: http://media.ft.com/cms/8aa8acb8-4142-11dd-9661-0000779fd2ac.pdf
12 Ten of Hannah’s top hundred: Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 12.
13 Consider the early printing industry: Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, p. 15.
14 It eventually found one: Tom Scocca, ‘The First Printed Books Came with a Question: What Do You Do with These Things?’, Boston Globe, 29 August 2010. Available at: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/29/cover_story/?page=full
15 At the dawn of the automobile industry: Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, p. ix.
16 The modern computer industry is a striking example: Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, p. 333.
17 Meanwhile, Xerox, struggling to survive: John Kay, The Truth about Markets (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 101–103.
18 It took several decades: http://www.toaster.org/museum.html
19 Biologists have a word for the way: there is no shortage of popular accounts of evolution. I have relied here on Eric Beinhocker’s excellent summary in The Origin of Wealth.
20 Yet the blind evolutionary process produced: see Karl Sims, ‘Evolving Virtual Creatures’ Computer Graphics’, Siggraph ’94 Proceedings, July 1994, pp. 15–22. Available at: www.karl sims.com/papers/siggraph94.pdf. Videos available at: http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
21 Given the likely shape: Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, ch. 9.
22 He discovered the same thing: Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, chapters 9 and 10.
23 If companies really could plan successfully: Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail, ch. 11; and Paul Ormerod and Bridget Rosewell, ‘How Much Can Firms Know?’, Working Paper, February 2004. Available at: http://www.paulormerod.com/pdf/intent6mar03.pdf
24 A railroad foreman named Phineas Gage: Malcolm McMillan of Deakin University maintains a trove of information about Gage. Available at: http://www.deakin.edu.au/hmnbs/psychology page/
25 When Palchinsky sent back his findings: Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 51–5.
26 ‘For a day and a half’: quoted in Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, p. 69.
27 When the US historian Stephen Kotkin: Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown USSR (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 254.
28 In Magnitogorsk, there were two types: Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, p. 75.
29 There had been no trial: Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, p. 46.
30 ‘You can be watching TV’: Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt, 1975), p. 100.
31 He had been in power for eight years at the time: Tim Harford, ‘How a Celebrity Chef Turned into a Social Scientist’, Financial Times, 7 November 2009. Available at: http://timharford.com/2009/11/how-a-celebrity-chef-turned-into-a-social-scientist/; and Michele Belot and Jonathan James, ‘Healthy School Meals and Educational Achievements’, Nuffield College Working Paper. Available at: http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/downloads/schoolmeals.pdf
32 There is some evidence that the more ambitious: see James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (London: Abacus, 2005), pp. 253–4. Surowiecki refers to two studies that reach this commonsense conclusion, but I have not been able to discover a precise citation.
33 Even when leaders and managers: Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 138–9.
34 I spent the summer of 2005 studying poker: Tim Harford, ‘The Poker Machine’, Financial Times, 6 May 2006. Available at: http://timharford.com/2006/05/the-poker-machine/; and Tim Harford, The Logic of Life (New York: Random House, 2008).
35 The brain refuses to register: Gary Smith, Michael Levere and Robert Kurtzman, ‘Poker Player Behavior after Big Wins and Big Losses’, Management Science, Vol. 55, No. 9 (September 2009), pp. 1547–55.
36 The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1979), p. 287.
37 Found the perfect setting to analyse the way we respond to losses: Thierry Post, Martijn J. Van den Assem, Guido Baltussen and Richard H. Thaler, ‘Deal or No Deal? Decision Making under Risk in a Large-Payoff Game Show’, American Economic Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (March 2008). Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=636508. Having written about Thaler’s research before, and even presented a radio documentary on the show, I am indebted to Jonah Lehrer and his book How We Decide (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) for emphasising how striking this result really is.
38 Unfortunately, selling winners and holding on to losers: Terrance Odean, ‘Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?’, Journal of Finance, Vol. 53, No. 5 (October 1998), pp. 1775–98. Available at: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/Papers%20current%20versions/AreInvestorsReluctant.pdf.
1 ‘It’s so damn complex’: quoted by George Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’, The New Yorker, 10 April 2006.
2 ‘In the absence of guidance’: David Petraeus, interview with The Washington Post, 9 February 2010, http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/panelists/2010/02/transcript-gen-petraeus.html
3 ‘Saw that children were in the room’: Thomas Ricks, The Gamble (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), pp. 3–6.
4 What happened after the bomb exploded: ‘A hard look at Haditha’, New York Times, 4 June 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/opinion/04sun1.html
5 One marine sergeant admitted: Mark Oliver, ‘Haditha marine “watched superior kill surrendering civilians” ’, Guardian, 10 May 2007.
6 ‘I watched them shoot’: ‘Collateral damage or civilian massacre in Haditha?’, Time Magazine, 19 March 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174682,00.html
7 The battalion commander thought: Ricks, The Gamble, pp. 3–6.
8 Vast numbers of people fled the country: Ricks, The Gamble, chapter 2, and George Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’.
9 The facts about Haditha: news briefing transcript, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, 29 November 2005, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1492
10 The fear of the ‘i-word’: Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’.
11 General Eric Shinseki had warned: Eric Schmitt, ‘Pentagon contradicts General on Iraq occupation force’s size’, New York Times, 28 February 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/28/politics/28COST.html?th; and Thom Shanker, ‘New strategy vindicates ex-Army Chief Shinseki’, New York Times, 12 January 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.html?_r=1
12 He had moved with his pregnant wife: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, pp. 27–34 & 84–7.
13 Feith had responded with: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, pp. 113–14.
14 There was the case of Andy Krepinevich: Ricks, The Gamble, pp. 16–17.
15 Johnson had sacked three military aides: H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (Harper, 1997), p. 52. 47 Johnson and his advisers saw: McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, pp. 88–9. 47 McNamara himself looked for ‘team players’: McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, pp. 60, 109.
16 A famous set of experiments: S. E. Asch, ‘Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment’, in H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press, 1951).
17 Less famous but just as important: S. E. Asch, ‘Opinions and social pressure’, Scientific American, 193 (1955), pp. 31–5.
18 In a surreal variant: Vernon L. Allen & John M. Levine, ‘Social support and conformity: the role of independent assessment of reality’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 7(1) (Jan. 1971), pp. 48–58.
19 Their decision-makers are simple automatons: Lu Hong & Scott E. Page, ‘Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 46, 16 November 2004, pp. 16385–9, http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~spage/pnas.pdf
20 H.R. McMaster’s book gives a telling example: McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, pp. 89–91.
21 Johnson ‘made the critical decisions’: McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, p. 324.
22 The first glimmerings of success came in a place called Tal Afar: for this section I draw heavily on George Packer’s comprehensive ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’. Other sources include Ricks, The Gamble; Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star; and my own interviews with H.R. McMaster in March and August 2009.
23 Some of the FOBs were enormous: see Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’; also Jim Garamone, ‘ “Head Fobbit” works for quality of life at forward operating base’, Armed Forces Press Service, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=18520
24 On his first day in Iraq, Major Nagl: author interview with John Nagl, 4 February 2010.
25 It was why Iraqi teachers made excuses: Packer, ‘The Lesson of Tal Afar’.
26 ‘Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully’: Ricks, The Gamble, p. 60.
27 ‘In one case,’ recalls Col. H.: H.R. McMaster interview with Sunday Times, ‘Leaving now not the way out of Iraq’, 29 July 2007.
28 He apparently had little time for: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, pp. 199–200, 207.
29 When I first spoke to him: author interview with H.R. McMaster, 18 March 2009.
30 Col. H. was twice passed over: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 291.
31 As early retirement beckoned: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/07/contrary-peter-principle/ and http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/hr_mcmaster_passed_over_-_reverse_peter_principle/
32 MacFarland’s men started in Tal Afar: Niel Smith & Sean MacFarland, ‘Anbar awakens: the tipping point’, Military Review, 1 March 2008.
33 MacFarland learned from McMaster’s approach: Ricks, The Gamble, pp. 60–72.
34 David Kilcullen’s ’28 Articles: George Packer, ‘Knowing the enemy’, The New Yorker, 18 December 2006.
35 Kilcullen said he wrote with the aid of: Kilcullen interview with Men’s Journal: http://www.mensjournal.com/is-this-any-way-to-fight-a-war/3
36 ‘We willingly implement lessons’: Correspondence with Brig. Gen. Andrew Mackay, February 2010.
37 Another famous piece of bottom-up advice: Travis Patriquin, ‘How to win the war in Al Anbar by Cpt. Trav’, available in various locations online including http://abcnews.go.com/images/us/how_to_win_in_anbar_v4.pdf
38 At his memorial service: Andrew Lubin, ‘Ramadi from the Caliphate to capitalism’, Proceedings Magazine, April 2008, http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/story.asp?STORY_ID=1420
39 It’s not that David Petraeus was an empty vessel: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, chapter 7.
40 Petraeus’s predecessor at Leavenworth: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 217.
41 ‘What is startling is the severity of his comments’: Richard Norton-Taylor & Jamie Wilson, ‘US army in Iraq institutionally racist, claims British officer’, Guardian, 12 January 2006.
42 Petraeus didn’t just seek out: Ricks, The Gamble, pp. 23–5.
43 One of the journalists at the conference: James Fallows of The Atlantic, as described by John Nagl in the Counterinsurgency Manual foreword: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/841519foreword.html
44 ‘H.R. was conducting counterinsurgency’: Author interview with John Nagl, 4 February 2010.
45 ‘David Petraeus is the best general’: Ricks, The Gamble, p. 22.
46 Galvin was a man who understood: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 42.
47 Can quickly fall into the habit of reinforcing: Irving Janis, Victims of Group Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972).
48 Passing through Dublin Airport: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 172.
49 The diversity of opinions: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 220; and Ricks, The Gamble, pp. 24–31.
50 Petraeus had recommended that he be appointed: Ricks, The Gamble, p. 96, and more generally on the entire process by which Jack Keane, David Petraeus and Ray Odierno changed the strategy in Iraq.
51 If he tried to respond to a tip-off: author interview with John Nagl, 4 February 2010, and Peter Maass, ‘Professor Nagl’s war’, New York Times, 11 January 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/magazine/professor-nagl-s-war.html?pagewanted=all
52 Explain what the images had been supposed to advertise: author interview with Andrew Mackay, May 2009.
53 His efforts did lead to a more efficient: Michael Ellman, ‘Economic calculation in socialist countries’, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, ed. Steven N. Durlauf & Lawrence E. Blume (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
54 McNamara’s centralised analytical approach did not bring victory: Raymond Fisman & Edward Miguel, Economic Gangsters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 160–7.
55 ‘We are and always shall be in favour’: Eden Medina, ‘Designing freedom, regulating a nation: socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile’, J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 38 (2006), pp. 571–606, http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/EdenMedinaJLASAugust2006.pdf
56 Moved to a cottage in rural Wales: Andy Beckett, ‘Santiago dreaming’, Guardian, 8 September 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
57 Yet the control room itself never became operational: Stafford Beer, The Brain of the Firm (Chichester: Wiley, 2nd edition, 1981), chapters 16–20.
58 Donald Rumsfeld had better computers: James Kitfield, ‘The counter-revolution in military affairs’, National Journal, 5 December 2009; and Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 171.
59 An air-conditioned tent inside a metal shell: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 111.
60 It was hard to persuade them to telex: Medina, ‘Designing freedom, regulating a nation’, pp. 571–606, http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/EdenMedinaJLASAugust2006.pdf
61 Hayek’s essay pre-dated modern computers: Friedrich A. Hayek, ‘The use of knowledge in society’, American Economic Review, XXXV, no. 4 (September 1945), pp. 519–30, http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html 72 Similar problems plagued coalition forces: H.R. McMaster, ‘On war: lessons to be learned’, Survival 50:1 (2008), 19–30.
62 ‘We had been moving through what was’: H.R. McMaster interviewed for a documentary posted on YouTube by ‘ColdWarWarriors’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBG_G678Trg&feature=related
63 Eagle Troop ‘dramatically illustrates’: Robert Scales, Certain Victory: The U.S. Army in the Gulf War (Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1993), chapter 1, and Tom Clancy, Armoured Cav (Berkeley Trade, 1994).
64 Examined large US firms from the mid-1980s throughout the 1990s: Raghuram Rajan & Julie Wulf (2003), ‘The flattening of the firm’, NBER Working Paper 9633.
65 To get the most out of that flexibility: Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, Claire Lelarge, John van Reenen & Fabrizio Zilibotti, ‘Technology, information and the decentralization of the firm’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2007, and Erik Brynjolfsson & Lorin M. Hitt, ‘Beyond computation: information technology, organizational transformation and business performance’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 2000).
66 Didn’t have the authority to print his own propaganda: John Nagl, lecture at King’s College London, 2 February 2010.
67 He couldn’t tap into the massive USAID budget: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, pp. 146–7.
68 Sean MacFarland’s men broadcast news from loudspeakers: Ricks, The Gamble, p. 70.
69 A careful statistical analysis later found: Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro & Joseph H. Felter, ‘Can hearts and minds be bought? The economics of counterinsurgency in Iraq’, NBER Working Paper no. 14606, December 2008.
70 ‘Every officer I spoke with knew about it’: Fred Kaplan, ‘Challenging the generals’, New York Times, 26 August 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26military-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
71 David Petraeus took the unprecedented step of flying: Cloud & Jaffe, The Fourth Star, p. 291, and Ricks, The Gamble, p. 276. Ricks says that the flight to the Pentagon was made in November 2007, Cloud & Jaffe date it 2008. The decision was announced in the summer of 2008.
72 Army doctrine declared that ‘unmanned systems’: 2001 capstone concept quoted in H.R. McMaster, ‘Centralization vs. decentralization: preparing for and practicing mission command in counterinsurgency operations’, in Lessons for a Long War: How America Can Win on New Battlefields. 2009 concept is available at: http://www.tradoc.army.mil/tpubs/pams/tp525-3-0.pdf
73 His first assignment as a general redeveloping Army doctrine: Video promotion for the 2009 Army Capstone Concept: http://www.vimeo.com/7066453
1 ‘Nothing we design’: David Pye, The Nature of Design, quoted in Daniel Roth, ‘Time your attack’, Wired, January 2010.
2 ‘The end of surprise’: Robert Friedel, ‘Serendipity is no accident’, The Kenyon Review, vol. 23, no. 2 (Spring 2001).
3 The Air Ministry briefly went so far as: Leo McKinstry, Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 37.
4 When Supermarine approached the ministry with a radical new design: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 47.
5 ‘The bastards can make such infernally’: all quotes collected in McKinstry, Spitfire, pp. 3–6.
6 Hitler had been single-mindedly: Andrew Roberts, ‘Hitler’s England: what if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?’, in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 284.
7 The RAF boasted fewer than 300 Spitfires: McKinstry, Spitfire, pp. 188–9.
8 Predicted that the Luftwaffe’s first week: Roberts, ‘Hitler’s England’, pp. 285–6.
9 It might even have given Germany the lead: Roberts, ‘Hitler’s England’, pp. 310, 320.
10 The prototype cost the government: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 51, and Lawrence H. Officer, ‘Purchasing power of British pounds from 1264 to present’, MeasuringWorth, 2009, http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/
11 ‘Positive black swans’: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007).
12 We should now build: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 12.
13 He soon discovered some remarkable examples: Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (London: Bantam, 2009), pp. 254–73.
14 Bright ideas emerge from the swirling mix of other ideas: See also Richard Florida, ‘The world is spiky’, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005, my The Logic of Life (2008), Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (2010) and Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (2010).
15 A playboy politician most famous as a campaigner against lesbianism: McKinstry, Spitfire, pp.17–18.
16 ‘Bloody good cup of tea, Mitchell’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 20.
17 ‘It’s either him or me!’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 31.
18 ‘Freak machines’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 29.
19 England’s pride was intact: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 32.
20 ‘The Battle of Britain was won by Chamberlain’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p.194.
21 One might think that there is no problem enouraging innovation: as this book was going to press, Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2011) appeared. Owen’s book offers further evidence of an innovation slowdown in addition to that presented here.
22 Even the design of niche cars: Chris Anderson, ‘In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits’, Wired, February 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/
23 ‘Failure for free’: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (London: Penguin, 2008).
24 US health secretary Margaret Heckler announced: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june01/aids_6-27.html
25 The whole process has become harder: Benjamin F. Jones, Brian Uzzi & Stefan Wuchty, ‘The increasing dominance of teams in the production of knowledge’, Science, May 2007, http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/ResearchframeTeams.htm
26 Jones argues that scientific careers: Benjamin F. Jones, ‘Age and great invention’, Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming, http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/AgeAndGreatInvention.pdf
27 Elite offered space combat: ‘The making of Elite’, Edge, 29 May 2009, http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-elite?page=0%2C0
28 Duke Nukem Forever was never finished: Clive Thompson, ‘Learn to let go’, Wired, January 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1
29 Gamers have been eagerly awaiting Elite 4: ‘Frontier reveals Elite 4’, http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/092/092218p1.html 93 The plane took a quarter of a century to enter service: measuring time from original government specification. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor; Ben Rich & Leo Janos, Skunk Works (New York: Sphere, 1994), p. 350; Samuel H. Williamson, ‘Six ways to compute the relative value of a U.S. dollar amount, 1790 to present’, MeasuringWorth, 2009, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
30 You will discover that by the year 2000: The Hudson Institute, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years, Herman Kahn & Anthony J. Wiener (New York: Macmillan, 1967). John Kay first called my attention to Kahn & Wiener’s predictions.
31 The real winner of the vote was: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/01/what_business_travellers_appreciate_most
32 The number of new drugs approved each year: Murray Aitken, Ernst R. Berndt & David M. Cutler, ‘Prescription drug spending trends in the United States’, Health Affairs Web Exclusive, 16 December 2008.
33 The number of patents produced per researcher: Benjamin F. Jones, ‘The burden of knowledge’, Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming, http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/BurdenOfKnowledge.pdf
34 We should be spending fifty times more on research: Bjorn Lomborg, ‘We should change tack on climate after Copenhagen’, Financial Times, 23 December 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5369f3e8-ef69-11de-86c4-00144feab49a.html
35 ‘A method of swinging on a swing’: Hal Varian, ‘A patent that protects a better mousetrap spurs innovation. But what about one for a new way to amuse a cat?’, New York Times, 21 October 2004, Section C, p. 2; Jeff Hecht, ‘Boy takes swing at US patents’, New Scientist, 17 April 2002; Adam Jaffe & Josh Lerner, Innovation and its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 2004).
36 The auction expert Paul Klemperer points out: Paul Klemperer, ‘America’s patent protection has gone too far’, Financial Times, 2 March 2004.
37 He soon discovered that patent 6,134,548: Alex Tabarrok (2002), ‘Patent theory versus patent law’, Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy, vol. 1, issue 1, article 9, http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol1/iss1/art9
38 This was the fate of Bayer: Keith Bradsher with Edmund L. Andrews, ‘Cipro’, New York Times, 24 October 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/business/24BAYE.html
39 The owner of the patent on Tamiflu: James Kanter, ‘Roche offers to negotiate on flu drug’, New York Times, 19 October 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803EEDF123FF9 3AA25753C1A9639C8B63&sec=health 97 Mario Capecchi’s earliest memory: Mario Capecchi’s extensive and moving autobiography is available on the Nobel Prize website: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/capecchi-autobio.html
40 Urges ‘researchers to take risks’: http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/
41 The Howard Hughes Medical Institute invests: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants are $700 million annually. Global R&D spending was $1,100,000 million in 2009. See Gautam Naik, ‘R&D spending in U.S. expected to rebound’, wsj.com, 21 December 2009, sec. Economy, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703344704574610350092009062.html
42 ‘Firms are reluctant to risk their money’: McKinstry, Spitfire, pp. 34–5.
43 There is an inconvenient tale behind this: I have drawn much of this account from Dava Sobel’s Longitude (London: Fourth Estate, 1996).
44 Compared with the typical wage of the day: Officer, ‘Purchasing power of British pounds’, cited above, n. 10.
45 In 1810 Nicolas Appert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Appert
46 Ultimately the Académie began to turn down: Maurice Crosland, ‘From prizes to grants in the support of scientific research in France in the nineteenth century: The Montyon legacy’, Minerva, 17(3) (1979), pp. 355–80, and Robin Hanson, ‘Patterns of patronage: why grants won over prizes in science’, University of California, Berkeley, working paper 1998, http://hanson.gmu.edu/whygrant.pdf
47 Innovation prizes were firmly supplanted: Hanson, ‘Patterns of patronage’.
48 The prize was eventually awarded in September 2009: a follow-up prize was announced and then cancelled following a lawsuit over privacy. One Netflix user alleged that the data released by Netflix didn’t sufficiently conceal her anonymity, and might allow others to discover that she was a lesbian by connecting her with ‘anonymous’ reviews. (Ryan Singel, ‘Netflix spilled your Brokeback Mountain secret, lawsuit claims’, Wired, 17 December 2009, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/)
49 ‘One of the goals of the prize’: author interview, 13 December 2007.
50 Not everybody responds to such incentives: ‘Russian maths genius Perelman urged to take $1m prize’, BBC News, 24 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8585407.stm
51 The vaccine prize takes the form of an agreement: the advanced market commitment idea was developed by Michael Kremer in ‘Patent buyouts: a mechanism for encouraging innovation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113:4 (1998), 1137–67; but also see http://www.vaccineamc.org/ and the Center for Global Development’s ‘Making markets for vaccines’, http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_archive/vaccinedevelopment
52 Only the very largest pharmaceutical companies spend more than: Medicines Australia, ‘Global pharmaceutical industry facts at a glance’, p. 3, http://www.medicinesaustralia.com.au/pages/images/Global%20-%20facts%20at%20a%20glance.pdf
53 Children in Nicaragua received: Amanda Glassman, ‘Break out the champagne! The AMC delivers vaccines’, Center for Global Development, Global Health Policy blog, 13 December 2010: http://blogs.cgdev.org/globalhealth/2010/12/break-out-the-cham pagne-the-amc-delivers-vaccines.php
54 Prize enthusiasts think that even an HIV vaccine: Tim Harford, ‘Cash for answers’, FT Magazine, 26 January 2008, http://timharford.com/2008/01/cash-for-answers/
55 ‘Innovation is what we do because there’s nothing else to do in Mojave’: Leonard David, ‘Brave New World? Next steps planned for private space travel’, Space.com 06 October 2004, http://www.space.com/news/beyond_spaceshipone_041006.html
56 The age of private space flight: Ian Parker, Annals of Aeronautics, ‘The X Prize’, The New Yorker, 4 October 2004; and also see the Discovery Channel footage of SpaceShipOne Flight 15P, for instance at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29uQ6fjEozI
57 When first reaching the brink of space: Leonard David, ‘Brave New World? Next steps planned for private space travel’, Space.com 06 October 2004, http://www.space.com/news/beyond_spaceshipone_041006.html
1 ‘An empiricist, I was willing’: Muhammad Yunus & Alan Jolis, Banker to the Poor (London: Aurum Press, 1999), p. 65.
2 ‘The barrier to change’: Bill Gates, Harvard University Commencement Address, 2007, http://ow.ly/JwQH
3 ‘They were everywhere, lying very quiet’: Yunus & Jolis, Banker to the Poor, p. 3.
4 His facility for pragmatic problem-solving: Yunus & Jolis, Banker to the Poor, p. 31.
5 Nor is Grameen the world’s largest microfinance lender: ‘The hidden wealth of the poor’, The Economist, 3 November 2005, http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5079 324; and Tina Rosenberg, ‘How to fight poverty: 8 programs that work’, New York Times, 16 November 2006, http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/opinion/15talkingpoints.html?page wanted=3&_r=1
6 ‘I thought I should rather look’: Yunus & Jolis, Banker to the Poor, p. 5.
7 ‘Each time I’ve visited a PlayPump’: Owen Scott, ‘The Playpump III: the challenge of good inquiry’, http://thoughtsfrommalawi. blogspot.com/2009/11/playpump-iii-challenge-of-taking-photos.html; for the hand-pump versus PlayPump trial, see http://barefoot economics.ca/2010/04/11/the-playpump-iv-playpump-vs-afridev/
8 ‘The message is stop immediately’: Case Foundation statement is here, accessed 5 June 2010: http://www.casefoundation.org/blog/painful-acknowledgement-coming-short, and Laura Freschi, ‘Some NGOs can adjust to failure: the PlayPumps story’, 19 February 2010, http://aidwatchers.com/2010/02/some-ngos-can-adjust-to-failure-the-playpumps-story/. Also see the PBS report on PlayPumps, ‘Troubled Water’, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/video_index.html
9 ‘If he vomits he’s more likely’: the Benjamin Spock example (and quotation) comes from Testing Treatments: better research for better healthcare by Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton & Iain Chalmers, with a new foreword by Ben Goldacre, downloadable at http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/testing-treatments.html
10 It was only in 1988 that new parents: R.E. Gilbert, G. Salanti, M. Harden & S. See, ‘Infant sleeping position and the sudden infant death syndrome: systematic review of observational studies and historical review of recommendations from 1940 to 2002’, International Journal of Epidemiology (2005), 34:874–87.
11 ‘Let us take out of the Hospitals’: Jan Baptist van Helmont, Oriatrike, or Physick Refined: The Common Errors Therein Refuted and the Whole Art Reformed and Rectified (London: Lodowick Loyd, 1662), p. 526, quoted in Iain Chalmers, ‘Comparing like with like’, International Journal of Epidemiology (2001), 30:1156–64. Note that van Helmont’s book was published posthumously. He died in 1644.
12 Other suggestions included sea water: Evans, Thornton & Chalmers, Testing Treatments, p. 3.
13 Ships started to carry greater stores: G. Sutton (2004), ‘James Lind aboard Salisbury’. The James Lind Library (www.jameslindlibrary.org).
14 The scales remain heavily loaded against trials: Evans, Thornton & Chalmers, Testing Treatments, p. 57. 125 But one young German doctor: Archie Cochrane with Max Blythe, One Man’s Medicine (British Medical Journal, 1989), pp. 62–70.
15 It turns out that verbal reprimands: Cochrane with Blythe, One Man’s Medicine, pp. 7, 191–2.
16 ‘There was dead silence’: Cochrane with Blythe, One Man’s Medicine, pp. 7, 211.
17 ‘I had no morphia’: Cochrane with Blythe, One Man’s Medicine, p. 82.
18 ‘If we don’t know whether we are doing any good’: Esther Duflo’s talk at TED, February 2010, http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty.html and author interview, April 2009.
19 When Glewwe, Kremer and Moulin analysed the randomised trial: Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer & Sylvie Moulin, ‘Many children left behind? Textbooks and test scores in Kenya’, NBER Working Paper 13300, August 2007.
20 The flip charts flopped: Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer, Sylvie Moulin & Eric Zitzewitz, ‘Retrospective versus prospective analyses of school inputs: the case of flip charts in Kenya’, NBER Working Paper 8018, November 2000.
21 Treated for intestinal worms: Edward Miguel & Michael Kremer, ‘Worms: education and health externalities in Kenya’, Working Paper, May 2002.
22 ‘It pains me to be in a village that’: Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘Shower of aid brings flood of progress’, New York Times, 8 March 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/world/africa/09kenya.html
23 A randomised trial for the Millennium Villages: Michael Clemens, ‘Why a careful evaluation of the Millennium Villages is not optional’, Views from the Center, 18 March 2010, http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2010/03/why-a-careful-evaluation-of-the-millennium-villages-is-not-optional.php
24 ‘Model villages of all kinds’: Madeleine Bunting, ‘The Millennium Villages project: could the development “wonk war” go nuclear?’, Guardian online, Thursday, 4 November 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/nov/04/millen nium-villages-sachs-clemens-demombynes?CMP=twt_gu
25 Evaluation experts such as Esther Duflo and Edward Miguel: Ian Parker, ‘The poverty lab’, The New Yorker, 17 May 2010, pp. 78–89; author interview with Edward Miguel, 16 March 2010. Also see Michael Clemens & Gabriel Demombynes, ‘When does rigorous impact evaluation make a difference? The case of the Millennium Villages’, Center for Global Development Working Paper 225, http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424496 132 ‘Questions that are completely FUQed’: author interview with Joshua Angrist, March 2010.
26 Olken discovered that in a typical Indonesian: Benjamin Olken, ‘Measuring corruption: evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 115, no. 2 (2007), pp. 200–49.
27 Approached Indians who were learning to drive: Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna & Sendhil Mullainathan, ‘Obtaining a driving license in India: an experimental approach to studying corruption’, Working Paper 2006, http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mullainathan/files/driving.pdf
28 Teacher absenteeism plummeted: Esther Duflo & Rema Hanna (2005), ‘Monitoring works: getting teachers to come to school’, NBER Working Paper No. 11880, http://www.nber.org/papers/w11880.pdf
29 The researchers found over 400 very small businesses: Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie & Christopher Woodruff, ‘Returns to capital: results from a randomized experiment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 123 (3) (2008), pp. 1329–72.
30 Other randomistas have teamed up with a bank: Dean S. Karlan, Margaret McConnell, Sendhil Mullainathan & Jonathan Zinman, ‘Getting to the top of mind: how reminders increase saving’, Working Paper, 1 April 2010, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1596281 136 And randomly selected villagers in Rajasthan: Ian Parker, ‘The poverty lab’.
31 Liberians have one sixth the paltry income: World Bank, ‘Liberia at a glance’, September 2009, http://devdata.worldbank.org/AAG/lbr_aag.pdf
32 When former rebel-turned-president Charles Taylor stood trial: the prosecution’s accusations are gathered here: http://www.charlestaylortrial.org/trial-background/who-is-charles-taylor/# four. The testimony of Joseph ‘ZigZag’ Marzah is reported here: http://www.charlestaylortrial.org/2008/03/13/zigzag-marzah-says-taylor-ordered-cannibalism-defense-works-to-discredit-his-testimony/
33 In Lofa County in Northern Liberia: author interview with Macartan Humphreys in New York, February 2009, and telephone interviews in May and June 2010; James D. Fearon, Macartan Humphreys & Jeremy Weinstein, ‘Can development aid contribute to social cohesion after civil war? Evidence from a field experiment in Liberia’, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 99:2 (2009), pp. 287–91; and James D. Fearon, Macartan Humphreys & Jeremy Weinstein, ‘Development assistance, institution building, and social cohesion after civil war: evidence from a field experiment in Liberia’, Center for Global Development Working Paper 194, December 2009.
34 ‘Rape capital of the world’: BBC News, ‘UN official calls DR Congo “rape capital of the world” ’, 28 April 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8650112.stm
35 ‘Laughed out of court’: Cochrane with Blythe, One Man’s Medicine, p. 183.
36 ‘We should not try to design a better world’: Owen Barder, ‘What can development policy learn from evolution?’, Blog Post, 27 October 2010, http://www.owen.org/blog/4018
37 Within six years, the percentage of grants: Ritva Reinikka & Jakob Svensson, ‘The power of information: evidence from a newspaper campaign to reduce capture of public funds’, Working Paper, http://people.su.se/~jsven/information2006a.pdf
38 Vaccination rates rose by almost a half: Martina Björkman & Jakob Svensson, ‘Power to the people: evidence from a randomized field experiment of community-based monitoring in Uganda’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (forthcoming), http://people.su.se/~jsven/PtP_QJE.pdf
39 César Hidalgo has never studied economics: César Hidalgo’s research papers and maps of product space are available at: http://www.chidalgo.com/. Other sources: author interviews with César Hidalgo and Bailey Klinger, summer 2007, and with Ricardo Hausmann, September 2010.
40 Chile’s salmon industry grew tenfold: ‘Dying assets’, The Economist, 30 July 2009, and ‘Chilean salmon exports’, PREM Notes Technology and Growth Series no. 103, World Bank, October 2005, http://www1.worldbank.org/prem/PREMNotes/premnote103.pdf
41 Taiwan is now the world’s largest orchid exporter: see Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 104; Keith Bradsher, ‘Once elusive, orchids flourish on Taiwanese production line’, New York Times, 24 August 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/24/business/once-elusive-orchids-flourish-on-taiwanese-production-line.html?fta=y&pagewanted=all; and a press release from the Taiwan International Orchid Show 2010, http://www.tios.com.tw/tios_test/eng/5_2taiwan.php
42 Silicon Valley venture capitalists need lose little sleep: Jim Pickard, ‘Venture capital fund turned £74m into £5m’, Financial Times, 9 March 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76859892-2ae1-11df-886b-00144feabdc0.html; and Josh Lerner’s opening statement in The Economist debate on Industrial Policy: http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/177/Industrial%20policy
43 The Holy Roman Emperor himself: Sebastian Mallaby, ‘The politically incorrect guide to ending poverty’, The Atlantic, July/August 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/1/; Wikipedia; Simon Heffer, ‘Lübeck: the town that said no to Hitler’, Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/5428909/Lubeck-The-town-that-said-no-to-Hitler.html
44 Romer has pushed the charter city concept: Paul Romer, ‘For richer, for poorer’, Prospect, issue 167, 27 January 2010.
45 Before turning down the job of Chief Economist of the World Bank: David Warsh, ‘Learning by doing’, Economic Principals, 19 July 2009, http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.07.19/571.html
46 He argues that foreign ownership: author interview with Paul Romer, 20 September 2010.
47 It’s a free economic zone: Sean Campbell, ‘Metropolis from scratch’, Next American City, issue 8, April 2005, http://americancity.org/magazine/issue/i08/; and Greg Lindsay, ‘Cisco’s big bet on New Songdo: creating cities from scratch’, Fast Company, 1 February 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html
1 ‘I think we’re going to find’: Prince Charles, interview with the BBC, October 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4382264.stm
2 ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’: obituary: Professor Leslie Orgel, The Times, 6 December 2007, http://www.timesonline.co. uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3006557.ece
3 A dazzling lecturer at London’s Royal Institution: Gabrielle Walker & Sir David King, The Hot Topic (Bloomsbury, 2008), pp. 14–18; Wikipedia entry on John Tyndall, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall; & James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 68–71.
4 Earth’s atmosphere contains traces of other gases: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report, Table 6.1, http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/221.htm#tab61
5 ‘Comparing a single atom of oxygen’: cited in Fleming, Historical Perspectives, pp. 70–1.
6 Richard Lindzen, a contrarian meteorologist: ‘350 science’ at 350.org http://www.350.org/about/science; and ‘Top climate scientists share their outlook’, FT Magazine, 20 November 2009.
7 But that is what has just happened to Geoff: Geoff Mason is fictional. My wife did become an environmentalist after reading Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, in the early 1990s, so the idea of Al Gore creating born-again environmentalists is close to home.
8 Cows emit a lot of methane: Martin Cassidy, ‘Tackling problem of belching cows’, BBC News website, 3 June 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8078033.stm
9 Add all the other inputs to the milk: ‘The environmental, social and economic impacts associated with liquid milk consumption in the UK and its production’, Department for Agriculture and Rural Affairs, December 2007, http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/food/industry/sectors/milk/pdf/milk-envsocecon-impacts.pdf
10 By not boiling his kettle: direct measurement of kettle’s power consumption.
11 Geoff would have done better: Elizabeth Baldwin of Nuffield College, Oxford, worked this out for me. A 1000W toaster operating for 90 seconds to toast 2 slices of bread is responsible for just 7g of carbon dioxide per slice. The bread itself is 52 g of carbon dioxide per slice. Butter is 80 g of carbon dioxide per ounce according to http://www.eatlowcarbon.org/Carbon-Calculator.html and Elizabeth allows a miserly 3 grams (1/9th oz) of butter per slice of toast, for about 9 g of carbon dioxide for the butter on one slice of toast. (I spread my butter more thickly, alas, at the planet’s expense.) Total 68 g of carbon dioxide per slice. Data for the milk and muesli from Prashant Vaze, The Economical Environmentalist (London: Earthscan, 2009) via Elizabeth Baldwin.
12 Geoff’s choice of a cheeseburger: Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas? (London: Profile, 2010), p. 86.
13 Especially ones (such as herring, mackerel and whiting): Vaze, The Economical Environmentalist, chapter 3.
14 An entirely vegan supper: there is a school of thought that says veganism would be unnecessary, if only we farmed meat with climate change in mind. See George Monbiot, ‘I was wrong about veganism’, Guardian, 6 September 2010, http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation
15 Geoff’s choice of British lamb over New Zealand lamb: one of several of these New Zealand studies is picked over by Michael Shuman, author of Going Local, at http://www.ethicurean. com/2007/08/10/shuman-on-lamb/. Shuman questions the numbers but his main point is not that they are wrong, but that they could be changed: if British farmers switched to more environmentally friendly methods and British energy came more from renewable sources, then British lamb would have a lower carbon footprint.
16 Geoff’s choice of British over Spanish tomatoes: I am assuming 100g in a helping of tomatoes. Vaze, The Economical Environmentalist, p. 57.
17 As for avoiding Chilean wine: Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas?, p. 78.
18 A plastic bag is responsible for only: Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas?, p. 18.
19 A Prius in congested traffic: a Prius emits 104g/km according to http://cars.uk.msn.com/features/green-motoring/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=147863613 and 89g/km according to http://carpages.co.uk/co2/
20 Cars carry, on average, 1.6 people: Tim Harford, ‘A marginal victory for the well-meaning environmentalist’, Financial Times Magazine, 6 February 2010. Also see Justin Rowlatt’s blog posts for the BBC at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2009/11/why_cars_are_greener_than_buses.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2010/01/justin_piece.html
21 It’s more eco-friendly to chuck them out immediately: David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air (Cambridge: UIT, 2009), p. 58, Figure 9.3.
22 He shouldn’t have scorned the dishwasher: Brendan Koerner, ‘Is a dishwasher a clean machine?’, Slate, 22 April 2008, http://www.slate.com/id/2189612; and Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas?, p. 63. Berners-Lee figures 540g–8000g for washing dishes by hand, and 770 g for a 55°C machine wash. For the seriously low-carbon hand wash, use two sinks, one for soapy water and one for rinsing, and don’t let your plates near running water. For pure extravagance wash by hand and then in the dishwasher.
23 Line instead of relying on the tumble dryer: Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas?, p. 84.
24 One of these toy windmills: MacKay, Sustainable Energy, p. 268.
25 Leaving his desktop computer on standby: MacKay, Sustainable Energy, p. 70.
26 Magnificently puny 6 grams of carbon dioxide a day: I am assuming that mains electricity is responsible for about 600 g of carbon dioxide per 1000 watts per hour. This is about right for the UK and US, although across the European Union the figure is closer to 350 g thanks to hydroelectric and nuclear generation (MacKay, Sustainable Energy, p. 335).
27 75 grams of carbon dioxide for a packet of potato snacks: source: The Carbon Trust, ‘Product carbon footprinting and labelling: the new business opportunity’, October 2008, and author interview with Euan Murray, 4 June 2009.
28 Readers of my first book, The Undercover Economist, might have noticed: when I wrote the opening pages of The Undercover Economist I was tapping in to a modern folk tale that economists tell each other – vaguely under the impression that it might have originated with Milton Friedman. I had not realised that the folk tale had an identifiable source, but it does: Leonard Read’s remarkable 1958 essay, ‘I, Pencil’. You can read it online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPnclCover.html
29 Starbucks alone claims to offer 87,000 different beverages: this figure was claimed in a UK Starbucks advertising campaign in 2008. A 2006 article in The Economist (‘Face value: staying pure’, 23 February 2006, http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVQVVJD) put it at 55,000, so the number seems to be rising quite fast. 166 37 per cent said ‘nothing’: opinion poll data reported in Vaze, The Economical Environmentalist (London: Earthscan, 2009), pp. 8–9. The polls were conducted in the UK in 2007 and each questioned over 2000 adults.
30 For power companies to build natural gas power stations: the carbon content of various fossil fuels is available here: http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html. Wikipedia’s page on carbon taxes also contains a handy table on the price implications of a carbon tax on different fuels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax, accessed 3 November 2010.
31 The ‘Merton Rule’: conversations with the energy consultant Tim Crozier-Cole alerted me to the Merton Rule and its unintended consequences. Other references include ‘Councils aim to enforce microgeneration targets’, ENDS Report, 28 August 2009; Bibi van der Zee, ‘Renewables rule making green a reality’, Guardian Unlimited, 11 December 2007; Vicki Shiel, ‘Mayor’s city energy policy faces debate’, Planning, 12 October 2007; ‘Golden rule hits backlash’, Planning, 14 September 2007; Emma Clarke, ‘The truth about … the Merton rule’, Climate Change Corp, 30 Jan. 2009, http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?Content ID=5932
32 The national government then introduced the rule more widely: interview with Geoffrey Palmer, Thursday, 19 November 2009.
33 Even if the CAFE standards: on CAFE standards, see Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, ‘The effects of the corporate average fuel efficiency standards in the US’, Journal of Industrial Economics, vol. 46, no. 1 (Mar. 1998), pp. 1–33; Feng An & Amanda Sauer, ‘Comparison of passenger vehicle fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards around the world’, The Pew Center on Climate Change, pp. 6–7 and Fig. 1, http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Fuel%20Economy%20and%20GHG%20Standards_0 10605_110719.pdf; ‘Fuel economy fraud: closing the loopholes that increase U.S. oil dependence’, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2005, p. 4, http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/exec utive_summary_final.pdf; and Christopher Knittel, ‘Automobiles on steroids’, July 2009, NBER Working Paper w15162, http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/knittel/papers/steroids_latest.pdf
34 European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive: Susanne Retka Schill, ‘EU adopts 10 percent mandate’, Biodiesel Magazine, February 2009, http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=3140; and ‘EU in crop biofuel goal rethink’, BBC News, 11 Sept. 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7610396.stm
35 The European rules do not yet reflect this: United Nations Environment Programme, ‘Assessing biofuels’, October 2009, http://www.unep.fr/scp/rpanel/pdf/Assessing_Biofuels_Full_Report.pdf, pp. 53–54; John Gapper, ‘Corn kernels are no cure for oil junkies’, Financial Times, 29 January 2007; and Gabrielle Walker, ‘Biofuels: the sweet smell of power’, Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2008.
36 Smarter than pedigree dog breeders: Nicola Rooney & David Sargan, ‘Pedigree dog breeding in the UK: a major welfare concern?’, a report commissioned by the RSPCA.
37 Ship them, neatly sorted and with instructions: Alan Gibbs, ‘Does tariff protection cost jobs?’, speech in Wellington, 25 June 1990, http://www.nzbr.org.nz/site/nzbr/files/speeches/speeches-90-91/tariff-spch.pdf
38 High energy prices spur energy-saving patents: David Popp, ‘Induced innovation and energy prices’, American Economic Review, 92(1), March 2002, pp. 160–80, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3083326
39 Almost a tenth of the total contribution to greenhouse gas emissions: George Monbiot, ‘I was wrong about veganism’, Guardian,6 September 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation
40 Australian scientists have realised that: ‘Quest to make cattle fart like marsupials’, The Age, 7 December 2007, http://www.theage.com.au/news/climate-watch/quest-to-make-cattle-fart-like-marsupials/2007/12/06/1196812922326.html
1 ‘We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle’: John Maynard Keynes, ‘The Great Slump of 1930’, first published London, The Nation & Athenœum, issues of 20 and 27 December 1930, http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-slump/keynes-slump-00-h.html
2 The rig burned for three more weeks: BBC, On This Day, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/6/newsid_301 7000/3017294.stm; Piper Alpha Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha; The Fire and Blast Information Group, http://www.fabig.com/Accidents/Piper+Alpha.htm
3 Parts of the spiral are still being unwound over two decades later: John Kay, ‘Same old folly, new spiral of risk’, Financial Times, 14 August 2007, http://www.johnkay.com/2007/08/14/same-old-folly-new-spiral-of-risk/ and personal communication with an insurance lawyer.
4 The connection is obvious: a number of researchers and writers have studied or commented on the link between finance and industrial accidents, including: Stephen J. Mezias, ‘Financial Meltdown as Normal Accident: The Case of the American Savings and Loan Industry’, Accounting Organizations & Society, 18: 181–92 (1994); James Reason, Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1997); Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents, second edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Andrew Lo, ‘The Three P’s of Total Risk Management’, Financial Analysts Journal, 55 (1999), 13–26; Richard Bookstaber, A Dream of Our Own Design (New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, 2007) and James Surowiecki, ‘Bonds Unbound’, The New Yorker (11 February 2008).
5 ‘I used to speak to bankers about risk’: author interview with James Reason, February 2009.
6 Argued that in a certain kind of system: Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999; first edition published by Basic Books, 1984).
7 ‘Exceeds the complexity of any nuclear plant’: author interview with Charles Perrow, 25 February 2010.
8 The two end supports would often settle: A.M. Dowell III & D.C. Hendershot, ‘No good deed goes unpunished: case studies of incidents and potential incidents caused by protective systems’, Process Safety Progress 16, 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 132–9.
9 At the Fermi nuclear reactor near Detroit’: Perrow, Normal Accidents, pp. 50–4.
10 It did so with the explicit permission of the regulators: Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold (London: Little, Brown, 2009), pp. 51–6.
11 ‘It’s as if people used the invention of seatbelts’: John Lanchester, Whoops! (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 65.
12 Innocent bystanders were among the casualties: See Steven Peterson, George Hoffer, & Edward Millner, ‘Are drivers of air-bag-equipped cars more aggressive? A test of the offsetting behavior hypothesis’, Journal of Law & Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 38(2) (October 1995), pp. 251–64. The evidence on the Peltzman effect is mixed, so for an alternative view see Alma Cohen & Liran Einav, ‘The effects of mandatory seat belt laws on driving behavior and traffic fatalities’, Discussion Paper No. 341, Harvard Law School, November 2001, http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/341.pdf
13 And as its rating is downgraded: James Surowiecki, ‘Bonds unbound’, The New Yorker, 11 February 2008; and Aline van Duyn, ‘Banks and bond insurers ponder CDS costs’, Financial Times, 24 June 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f6e40e9a-4142-11dd-9661-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz1GDDrJ3OR
14 It started when engineers trying to clear: Perrow, Normal Accidents, chapter 1; and Trevor Kletz, An Engineer’s View of Human Error (Rugby, Warwickshire: Institution of Chemical Engineers, 2001; first edition published 1985).
15 It was impossible even for highly trained operators: Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design (New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, 2007), pp. 149–50.
16 With better indicators of what was happening: Perrow, Normal Accidents, chapter 1; and John G. Kemeny, ‘President’s Commission: the need for change: the legacy of TMI’, October 1979, Overview, http://www.threemileisland.org/resource/item_detail.php?item_id=00000138
17 ‘When you look at the way the accident happened’: author interview with Philippe Jamet, 24 March 2010.
18 Turned back to concentrate on the Lehman Brothers problem: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 235–7.
19 ‘Hold on, hold on’: Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, p. 372.
20 ‘We’re a million miles away from that at the moment’: Squam Lake Working Group on Financial Regulation, ‘A new information infrastructure for financial markets’, February 2009, http://www.cfr.org/publication/18568/new_information_infrastructure_for_financial_markets.html; and Andrew Haldane, ‘Rethinking the financial network’, speech given on 28 April 2009 to the Financial Student Association in Amsterdam, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2009/speech386.pdf, and author interview with Andrew Haldane, August 2010.
21 And that man was Tony Lomas: for the account of Lehman’s bankruptcy in Europe, I have relied on the superb account by Jennifer Hughes, ‘Winding up Lehman Brothers’, FT Magazine,8 November 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e4223c20-aad1-11dd-897c-000077b07658.html
22 It had one million derivatives contracts open: Andrew Haldane, ‘The $100 billion question’, speech given at Institute of Regulation & Risk, Hong Kong, 30 March 2010, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2010/speech433.pdf
23 The courts refused: Jane Croft, ‘Definition on Lehman client money sought’, Financial Times, 10 November 2009; and Anousha Sakoui & Jennifer Hughes, ‘Lehman creditors face long delays’, Financial Times, 14 September 2009.
24 It is quite possible that Lehman’s financial indicators: Henny Sender & Jeremy Lemer, ‘ “epo 105” accounting in focus’, Financial Times, 12 March 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1be0aca2-2d79-11df-a262-00144feabdc0.html
25 About three years after the bankruptcy process began: Sakoui & Hughes, ‘Lehman creditors’.
26 Dominoes, unlike banks, are supposed to fall over: Andrew Haldane, ‘The $100 billion question’.
27 The job the poor bird had started: BBC News, ‘Sparrow death mars record attempt’, 19 November 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4450958.stm; and embedded video at http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4450000/newsid_4452600/4452646.st m?bw=bb&mp=wm&news=1&bbcws=1 203 The credit crunch made it clear that the banks were carrying too little: ‘Reforming capital requirements for financial institutions’, Squam Lake Working Group Paper, April 2009, http://www.cfr. org/content/publications/attachments/Squam_Lake_Working_Paper2.pdf
28 Those bonds should be held by private individuals: Lex, ‘CoCo bonds’, Financial Times, 11 November 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/d7ae2d12-ced1-11de-8812-00144feabdc0.html; Gillian Tett, ‘A staple diet of CoCos is not the answer to bank failures’, Financial Times, 13 November 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d791f38a-cff4-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.html; and interview with Raghuram Rajan, July 2010.
29 Worst possible decision is indecision: ‘Improving resolution options for systemically relevant financial institutions’, Squam Lake Working Group Paper, October 2009, http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/Squam_Lake_Working_Paper7.pdf
30 Bridge bank continues to support the smooth running: Willem Buiter, ‘Zombie solutions: good bank vs. bad bank approaches’, VoxEU, 14 March 2009, http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3264; Robert Hall & Susan Woodward, ‘The right way to create a good bank and a bad bank’, VoxEU, 24 February 2009; Tim Harford, ‘A capital idea to get the banks to start lending again’, FT Magazine, 4 April 2009, http://timharford.com/2009/04/a-capital-idea-to-get-the-banks-to-start-lending-again/
31 John Kay points out that in some ways it is less meddlesome: John Kay, ‘The reform of banking regulation’, 15 September 2009, http://www.johnkay.com/2009/09/15/narrow-banking/; and author interview, September 2010.
32 ‘We cannot contemplate keeping aircraft’: John Kay, ‘Why too big to fail is too much for us to take’, Financial Times, 27 May 2009, http://www.johnkay.com/2009/05/27/why-%E2%80%98too-big-to-fail%E2%80%99-is-too-much-for-us-to-take/
33 This one cost £200 million: Leo Lewis, ‘Exchange chief resigns over “fat finger” error’, The Times, 21 December 2005, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/japan/article775136.ece
34 Includes all the famous scandals such as WorldCom: Alexander Dyck, Adair Morse & Luigi Zingales, ‘Who blows the whistle on corporate fraud?’, European Corporate Governance Institute Finance Working Paper No. 156/2007, January 2007, http://faculty.chicago booth.edu/finance/papers/Who%20Blows%20The%20Whistle.pdf
35 He says that he was thanked by the Chairman: HBOS Whistleblower Statement: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7882581.stm; and Paul Moore’s interview on the Radio 4 documentary The Choice, Tuesday, 9 November 2009.
36 Moore walked out on to the street: Paul Moore took HBOS to an employment tribunal and the bank settled with him. The terms of the settlement included a gagging order, which Moore later ignored after he heard God telling him to ‘bear witness’.
37 Crosby’s account is different: Crosby’s full statement can be seen here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7883425.stm
38 Dirks fought his case for ten years: Brian Trumbore, ‘Ray Dirks v. the SEC’, http://www.buyandhold.com/bh/en/education/history/2004/ray_dirks.html; and Ronald Soble & Robert Dallos, The Impossible Dream (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975).
39 Unwise to dismiss whistleblowers too casually: John Gapper, ‘King Lear proves the point: listen to that whistleblower’, Financial Times, 14 February 2009, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/09a0a19c-fa07-11dd-9daa-000077b07658.html
40 ‘Don’t you make a fucking enemy of me’: Paul Moore’s interview in The Choice, 9 November 2009.
41 The sums of money at stake are much larger now: David Kocie-niewski, ‘Whistle-blowers become investment option for hedge funds’, New York Times, 19 May 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/business/20whistleblower.html?pagewanted=all
42 The deputy chairman of the FSA at the time?: BBC News, ‘Timeline: The Bank of Scotland’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7620761.stm; Robert Peston, ‘Lloyds to buy HBOS’, 17 September 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09/lloyds_to_buy_hbos.html; and BBC News, ‘UK Banks receive £37bn bail-out’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7666570. stm
43 Celebrate seven years without a notable accident: Ben Casselman, ‘Gulf rig owner had rising tally of accidents’, Wall Street Journal, 10 May 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704307804575234471807539054.html
44 Just as his own computer monitor exploded: ‘Blowout: the Deep-water Horizon disaster’, CBS 60 Minutes, 16 May 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml
45 Last been inspected five years before the accident: David Hammer, ‘Rig’s blowout preventer last inspected in 2005’, Times-Picayune, 26 May 2010, http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_rigs_blowout_prevente.html
46 For months BP engineers had been expressing concern: Ian Urbina, ‘Documents show early worries about safety of rig’, New York Times, 29 May 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.htmlP_r=1
47 The Macondo well’s manager reported problems: Julie Cart & Rong-Gong Lin II, ‘BP testimony: officials knew of key safety problem on rig’, Los Angeles Times, 21 July 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/21/nation/la-na-oil-spill-hearings-20100721
48 The company was showing signs of stress after a merger: Casselman, ‘Gulf rig owner had rising tally of accidents’.
49 Oil companies, like banks, need to find ways: Elena Bloxham, ‘What BP was missing on Deepwater Horizon: a whistleblower’, CNN Money, http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/22/news/companies/bp_horizon_macondo_whistleblower.fortune/index.htm. Transocean defended its safety record.
1 ‘One doesn’t have to be a Marxist’: Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, The Future of Management (Harvard Business Press, 2007), p. 130.
2 ‘Your first try will be wrong’: Cory Doctorow, ‘How to prototype and iterate for fun and profit’, 9 November 2010, http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/09/howto-prototype-and.html
3 Endler decided to test his hypothesis: Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (London: Bantam Press, 2009), pp. 135–9, and http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0072437316/ 120060/evolution_in_action20.pdf
4 Sales were $8 billion in 2009: Whole Foods Presentation at Jeffries 2010 Global Consumer Conference, 22 June 2010, http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/pdfs/jefferieswebcast.pdf
5 The description of many of the management practices: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, chapter 4.
6 Timpson has several hundred: Timpson website accessed July 2010, http://www.timpson.co.uk/
7 And he drops in frequently: details about Timpson’s management methods, and interview with John Timpson, from In Business: Hell for Leather, broadcast Thursday, 7 August 2009, 8.30 pm, BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvlv3
8 Nor do we want to allow a situation: John Kay, ‘Too big to fail? Wall Street, we have a problem’, Financial Times, 22 July 2009, http://www.johnkay.com/2009/07/22/too-big-to-fail-wall-street-we-have-a-problem/
9 ‘It made us pay more attention’: Glynn Davis, ‘Interview with James Timpson’, HR Magazine, 4 January 2010, http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/news/974936/View-Top-Interview-James-Timpson-managing-director-Timpsons/
10 Views his role at Google as: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, p. 119. 230 Schmidt took the second desk without protest: Ken Auletta, Googled (London: Virgin Books, 2010), p. 71.
11 ‘If you tell anybody what to do here’: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, pp. 88–92.
12 The instant correction of a problem: author visit to Hinkley Point, Somerset, 22 July 2010.
13 A machine he’d built himself: Auletta, Googled, p. 95.
14 The book went from paper to pixels in forty minutes: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, p. 115.
15 Every engineer at Google had the same deal: Auletta, Googled, p. 18; and Google website, ‘What’s it like to work in Engineering, Operations, & IT?’ 232 An astonishing portfolio of failures: Auletta, Googled, p. 286.
16 The aim is not to stifle more projects: ‘Creative tension’, The Economist, 19 September 2009, pp. 80–1.
17 No room for people who don’t play their part: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, p. 108.
18 Much longer than the World Wide Web: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, chapter 5.
19 Gore had no experience in the music industry: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, pp. 90–1.
20 Because people will remember the ones that stick: Hamel with Breen, Future of Management, p. 104.
21 Two of the five worst technology products: Jason Hiner, ‘The five worst tech products of 2009’, TechRepublic, 14 December 2009, http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=3430
22 The few big successes seem to justify: Kevin Maney, ‘What scares Google’, The Atlantic, September 2009, p. 28.
23 Use of randomised experiments on the website: Ian Ayres, Supercrunchers (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 54.
24 Thomas Edison may have been known: Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), chapter 3.
25 ‘If I find 10,000 ways’: Thomke, Experimentation Matters, p. 24. 236 ‘The real measure of success’: A. Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 40, cited in Thomke, Experimentation Matters.
26 Thousands of different chemical compounds: Thomke, Experimentation Matters, pp. 40–1
27 When a problem reaches a certain level of complexity: Thomke, Experimentation Matters, pp. 36–88; and Malcolm Gladwell, ‘The treatment’, The New Yorker, 17 May 2010.
28 Ariely could use the collaboration: Dan Ariely, ‘Why businesses don’t experiment’, Harvard Business Review, April 2010, http://hbr.org/2010/04/column-why-businesses-dont-experiment/ar/1
29 The ‘technology mudslide’: Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
30 Lockheed’s basic corporate culture: Ben Rich & Leo Janos, Skunk Works (Little, Brown, 1994).
31 Schwab itself would likely have been marginalised: Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), p. 198.
32 Whole structure of Virgin Group has always been: Richard Branson, Business Stripped Bare (Virgin Books, 2008), pp. 169–214.
33 ‘I’ll be damned if I permit’: anonymous officer quoted in John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 172.
1 ‘He was not a very careful person’: Shimura is quoted in ‘Andrew Wiles and Fermat’s Last Theorem’, MarginalRevolution.com, 29 August 2010, http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08/andrew-wiles-and-fermats-last-theorem.html
2 ‘Let us try for once not to be right’: Tristan Tzara, The Dada Manifesto, 1918.
3 ‘Stupefyingly clichéd and almost embarrassingly naïve’: Hedy Weiss, ‘Good music, flashy moves can’t fill emotional void’, Chicago Sun-Times, 21 July 2002.
4 ‘Crazily uneven’: Michael Phillips, ‘ “Movin’ Out”? Maybe not; Broadway-bound Tharp-Joel show has to get acts together’, Chicago Tribune, 22 July 2002.
5 ‘If you stand in Twyla’s way’: Cathleen McGuigan, ‘Movin’ to Broadway: Twyla Tharp heads uptown with Billy Joel’, Newsweek, 28 October 2002.
6 Oklahoma! started as the flop: Linda Winer, ‘Top secret? Get out of town!’, Newsday, 11 August 2002.
7 ‘I was completely lost’: Robin Pogrebin, ‘How Twyla Tharp turned a problem in Chicago into a hit on Broadway’, New York Times, 12 December 2002.
8 ‘Shimmering portrait of an American generation’: Pogrebin, ‘How Twyla Tharp …’
9 ‘To understand why two separate’: Anna Kisselgoff, ‘The story is in the steps’, New York Times, 25 October 2002. 249 ‘How did this happen?’: Michael Phillips, ‘Manhattan transfers successful and not so’, Los Angeles Times, 20 December 2002.
10 ‘The best failures are the private ones’: Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter, The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 213.
11 ‘Like a jazz musician jamming’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 99.
12 ‘It requires you to challenge’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 218.
13 This odd phenomenon was first pinned down: Leon Festinger & James M. Carlsmith, ‘Cognitive consequences of forced compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (1959), 203–10.
14 ‘It means that the sperm found’: Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (London: Pinter & Martin, 2008), p. 150.
15 Bromgard had spent fifteen years in prison: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (London: Portobello, 2010), pp. 233–8.
16 ‘One of the worst professional errors’: Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, p.130.
17 ‘I didn’t promote myself as a star’: Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 82. 253 ‘That experience remains intensely painful’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 84.
18 ‘Bob and I had lost a baby’: Tharp, Push Comes to Shove, p. 98.
19 Naturally the subject usually chose: M. D. Lieberman, K. N. Ochsner, D. T. Gilbert, & D. L. Schacter, ‘Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change’, Psychological Science, 12 (2001), 135–40.
20 ‘Happiness being synthesised’: Dan Gilbert at TED, February 2004, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy. html
21 Taught Petraeus that everyone is fallible: David Cloud & Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 43.
22 ‘She didn’t try to console me’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 221.
23 The reviews are harsh but fair: Reviews by Hedy Weiss, Michael Phillips & Sid Smith, references above. 257 ‘All you need are people’: Tharp & Reiter, The Creative Habit, p. 229.
24 People with regular jobs tend to receive feedback: Andrew Oswald, ‘What is a happiness equation?’, May 2006, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/oswald/happinessformula06.pdf
25 Vaulted from one vantage point to another: Tim Harford, ‘What really counts’, FT Magazine, 28 January 2006, http://timharford.com/2006/01/what-really-counts/; Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Late bloomers’, The New Yorker, 20 October 2008, http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html; David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
26 State of profound uncertainty that comes with: Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong.
1 ‘Ever tried. Ever failed’: Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983) published in Nohow On (The Limited Editions Club, 1989).