The break-in did look rather absurd at first glance – why would you break into a flat from a relatively exposed upstairs window? – until you realise that the purpose of breaking a window was not to gain access to the house, but to make a hell of a lot of noise while standing in a place from which an easy escape was possible. It thus helped the perpetrator ascertain with some confidence that there was no one around; if you smash a window and nobody intervenes, you can be fairly sure no one is going to notice you climbing through the same window five minutes later, but if a light goes on and a dog starts barking, you can simply leg it.
This example goes to the heart of how we see the world. Do we look at things from a single perspective, where you do one thing to achieve another, or do we accept that complex things are rather different? In a designed system, such as a machine, one thing does serve one narrow purpose, but in an evolved or complex system, or in human behaviour, things can have multiple uses depending on the context within which they are viewed.
The human mouth allows you to eat, but if your nose is blocked, it also allows you to breathe. In a similar way, it seems illogical to break into a building using the noisiest means possible, until you understand the context in which the offender is operating. It is not appropriate to bring the same habits of thought that we use to deal with things that have been consciously designed to understanding complex and evolved systems, with second-order considerations.
My problem with Marxism is that it makes too much sense.
The Danger of Technocratic Elites
If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalisation is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat. Unfortunately, it is difficult for such people to avoid the trap of assuming that the same skills that can explain the past can be used to predict the future. Like a criminal investigation, what looks neat and logical when viewed with hindsight is usually much messier in real time. The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.
There are two separate forms of scientific enquiry – the discovery of what works and the explanation and understanding of why it works. These are two entirely different things, and can happen in either order. Scientific progress is not a one-way street. Aspirin, for instance, was known to work as an analgesic for decades before anyone knew how it worked. It was a discovery made by experience and only much later was it explained. If science did not allow for such lucky accidents,* its record would be much poorer – imagine if we forbade the use of penicillin, because its discovery was not predicted in advance? Yet policy and business decisions are overwhelmingly based on a ‘reason first, discovery later’ methodology, which seems wasteful in the extreme. Remember the bicycle.
Evolution, too, is a haphazard process that discovers what can survive in a world where some things are predictable but others aren’t. It works because each gene reaps the rewards and costs from its lucky or unlucky mistakes, but it doesn’t care a damn about reasons. It isn’t necessary for anything to make sense: if it works it survives and proliferates; if it doesn’t, it diminishes and dies. It doesn’t need to know why it works – it just needs to work.
Perhaps a plausible ‘why’ should not be a pre-requisite in deciding a ‘what’, and the things we try should not be confined to those things whose future success we can most easily explain in retrospect. The record of science in some ways casts doubt on a scientific approach to problem solving.
On Nonsense and Non-Sense
I’ll admit it: I have only become qualified to write this book by accident. I am a classicist, not an anthropologist, but have, almost by chance, spent 30 years in the advertising industry – mostly in what is known as ‘direct response’, the form of advertising where people are urged to respond directly to your advertisement. It consists of well-funded behavioural experiments on a grand scale, and what this teaches us is that the models of human behaviour devised and promoted by economists and other conventionally rational people are wholly inadequate at predicting human behaviour.
What are the great achievements of economics? Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, perhaps? Or The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes? And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that ‘advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t’.
I’m not joking. I recently had a meeting with a client where I learned that a customer prize draw to win ‘free energy for a year – worth over £1,000’ received 67,000 entries. The subsequent draw, where you could win a cute penguin nightlight (with a value of £15) received over 360,000 entries. One customer even turned down an offer of a £200 refund on their bill, saying, ‘No, I’d rather have a penguin.’ Even though I know this is true, so great is my desire to appear rational that I would find it very hard to stand in front of a board of directors and recommend that their advertising should feature rabbits, or perhaps a family of lemurs, because it sounds like nonsense. It isn’t, though. It’s a different kind of thing, which I call ‘non-sense’.
Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.*
Behavioural economics might well be described as the study of the nonsensical and the non-sensical aspects of human behaviour. Sometimes our behaviour is nonsensical because we evolved for conditions different to those we now find ourselves in.* However, much ‘irrational’ human behaviour is not really nonsensical at all; it is non-sensical. For instance, viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology, the effectiveness of cute animals in advertising should not shock us. Advertising exists to be noticed, and we have evolved, surely, to pay attention to living things. An evolutionary psychologist might also suggest that a penguin nightlight – a gift for one’s child – might be more emotionally rewarding than a cash reward, which is a gain for oneself.*
Sometimes human behaviour that seems nonsensical is really non-sensical – it only appears nonsensical because we are judging people’s motivations, aims and intentions the wrong way. And sometimes behaviour is non-sensical because evolution is just smarter than we are. Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.
For instance, for a long time the human appendix was thought to be nonsense, a vestigial remnant of some part of the digestive tract, which had served a useful purpose in our distant ancestors. It is certainly true that you can remove people’s appendices and they seem to suffer no immediate ill effects. However, in 2007, William Parker, Randy Bollinger and their colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina hypothesised that the appendix actually serves as a haven for bacteria in the digestive system that are valuable both in aiding digestion and in providing immunity from disease. So, just as miners in the California Gold Rush would guard a live sourdough yeast ‘starter’ in a pouch around their necks, the body has its own pouch to preserve something valuable. Research later showed that individuals whose appendix had been removed were four times more l
ikely to suffer from clostridium difficile colitis, an infection of the colon.
Given that cholera was a huge cause of death only a few generations ago, and given that it is thought by some to be making a comeback, perhaps the appendix should no longer be treated as disposable – it seems that, rather like the Spanish royal family, most of the time it’s pointless or annoying, but sometimes it’s invaluable.*
Be careful before calling something nonsense.
The lesson we should learn from the appendix is that something can be valuable without necessarily being valuable all the time. Evolution does not take such a short-term, instrumentalist view. In looking for the everyday function of the human appendix, we were looking for the wrong thing. Whether something makes sense in theory matters less than whether it works in practice.
Like quite a few fellow Anglicans (but unlike my wife who is a priest and hospital chaplain) I am not quite sure of the existence of God, but I would be reluctant to disparage religion as nonsense, as some people do.
In a 1996 survey on the place of religion in public life in America, the Heritage Institute found that:
Churchgoers are more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced or single and more likely to manifest high levels of satisfaction in their marriage.
Church attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability and happiness.
The regular practice of religion helps poor people move out of poverty. Regular church attendance, for example, is particularly instrumental in helping young people escape the poverty of inner-city life.
Regular religious practice generally inoculates individuals against a host of social problems, including suicide, drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births, crime and divorce.
The regular practice of religion also encourages such beneficial effects on mental health as less depression, higher self-esteem and greater family and marital happiness.
In repairing damage caused by alcoholism, drug addiction and marital breakdown, religious belief and practice are a major source of strength and recovery.*
Regular practice of religion is good for personal physical health: it increases longevity, improves one’s chances of recovery from illness and lessens the incidence of many killer diseases.
Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.*
Business, creativity and the arts are full of successful non-sense. In fact the single greatest strength of free markets is their ability to generate innovative things whose popularity makes no sense. Non-sense includes things that are useful or effective, even though (or perhaps because) they defy conventional logic.
Almost all good advertising contains some element of non-sense. At first glance this might make it look silly – it can certainly make selling it to a sceptical group of clients painfully embarrassing. Imagine you are the board of an airline and have just spent three hours debating whether to buy 13 Airbus A350s or 11 Boeing 787s, each of which costs around $150 million. At the end of the meeting, you are presented with an idea for an advertising campaign that does not show an aircraft at all, but instead proposes to focus on the cucumber sandwiches and scones that might be served on board. This is non-sense – however, around 90 per cent of people have no idea what sort of aircraft they are travelling on or how a jet engine works but will infer a great deal about the safety and quality of the experience offered by an airline from the care and attention it pays to on-board snacks.*
Presenting such things in a business setting packed with MBA graduates is slightly embarrassing; you start to envy people in IT or tax-planning, who can go into a meeting with rational proposals on a chart or spreadsheet. However, this fixation with sense-making can prove expensive. Imagine you are a company whose product is not selling well. Which of the following proposals would be easier to make in a board meeting called to resolve the problem? a) ‘We should reduce the price’ or b) ‘We should feature more ducks in our advertising’. The first, of course – and yet the second could, in fact, be much more profitable.
This is a book written in defence of things that don’t quite make sense, but it is also a book that – conversely – attacks our fetishisation of things that do. Once you accept that there may be a value or purpose to things that are hard to justify, you will naturally come to another conclusion: that it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.
Logical ideas often fail because logic demands universally applicable laws but humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their behaviour for such laws to hold very broadly. For example, to the despair of utilitarians, we are not remotely consistent in whom we choose to help or cooperate with. Imagine that you get into financial trouble and ask a rich friend for a loan of £5,000, who patiently explains that you are a much less needy and deserving case for support than a village in Africa to which he plans to donate the same amount. Your friend is behaving perfectly rationally. Unfortunately he is no longer your friend.
It is impossible for human relations to work unless we accept that our obligations to some people will always exceed our obligations to others. Universal ideas like utilitarianism are logical, but seem not to function with the way we have evolved. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, was one of the strangest and most anti-social people who ever lived.*
The drive to be rational has led people to seek political and economic laws that are akin to the laws of physics – universally true and applicable. The caste of rational decision makers requires generalisable laws to allow them confidently to pronounce on matters without needing to consider the specifics of the situation.* And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start.* Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.
The Opposite of a Good Idea Can Be a Good Idea
Economic theory is perhaps the most overambitious attempt to create universal rules of human behaviour – ‘markets in everything’, as the phrase goes. Yet it is all too common, in certain settings, for people’s behaviour to run directly counter to the supposedly logical beliefs of standard economics. Take London housing, for example. Logic would suggest that, as house prices in London continue to rise, many Londoners who do not need to live in the city would decide to buy houses further away, gaining from price rises and relaxing the pressure on the market. In reality it seems the opposite happens: when sitting on a rising asset, people who would secretly prefer to move 50 or 200 miles away from London are reluctant to, for fear either that they will miss out on future price increases or that, once they leave, they will be unable to afford to move back again. Even though this is perfectly plausible – indeed it seems to be what often happens in reality – economics treats all markets as if they were the same. In the crude oil market, for instance, things might happen in line with economic predictions and rising prices may drive asset owners to sell, but markets for housing and oil are very different.
Does a tax rise cause you to work less because the returns for your labour are lower, or does it cause you to work harder, in order to maintain your present level of disposable wealth? It kind of depends. Logic requires that people find universal laws, but outside of scientific fields, there are fewer of these than we might expect. And once human psychology has a role to play, it is perfectly possible for behaviour to become entirely contradictory. For instance, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product: ‘Not many people own one of these, so it must be good’ and ‘Lots of people already own one of these, so it must be good.’ As the brilliant Robert Cialdini highlights in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the principles of selling and behaviour change are imbued with contradictions.
While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work. I was once asked to improve a two-page letter selling an insurance product. Paragraphs had gradually been added, each of which seemed to improve the response to it – the number of sales had gradually increased. How could I improve the letter? I suggested that it be rewritten so that it contained no more than seven or eight lines of text. My reasoning? It was an inexpensive and sensible product, being sold by a financial company with whom the customer already had a relationship. My argument was that this simple product could be explained and understood quickly. A short letter would convey that this was a no-brainer. The existing letter, which had grown to a disproportionate length, was in danger of creating confusion* – if this product was as simple and sensible as it really seemed, why were they selling it so hard? We tested a two-paragraph letter. Fortunately, I was right. What had emerged was that there were two ways to sell this product: with a very long letter – which was reassuring because it was long, and with a very short letter – which was reassuring because it was very short.
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