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At the start of the 20th century, Britain was slowly becoming a freer place for women. Young Grace Oakeshott seized every opportunity to learn and improve the world around her – though she found those opportunities frustratingly narrow. One day, she vanished suddenly, leaving behind only a pile of clothes on a beach. A hundred years later, the truth about Grace’s disappearance has finally come to light.
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Further reading
The key source for this episode of Cautionary Tales is Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels: How The Two Lives of Grace Oakeshott Defined an Era (2016) by Jocelyn Robson
We also drew on:
“Shooting Affair at Parakae”, Poverty Bay Herald, 10 June 1908.
Breton Folk: An Artistic Tour in Brittany (1881) by Henry Blackburn
And my own book The Logic of Life (2008) .
The following websites were useful:
Christmas now is drawing near at hand, and your favourite undercover economist has been observed performing some most uncharacteristic acts. My father used to make amazing Christmas puddings and distribute them to his children. Now that he’s dead, I have the recipe and the solemn duty falls to me. Any economics textbook could explain that I am undervaluing my time. I could buy a hundred good puddings with the money I could have earned, had I not been making half a dozen.
Then there is the Harford-Monks Christmas card, designed using a still life created by my wife. And the Harford-Monks Christmas mixtape. (This used to be a true labour of love, requiring dozens of CDs to be burned. Spotify makes life easier, although that somewhat cheapens the ritual.)
No such shortcuts for the Christmas Game, an all-day role-playing game in which, since time immemorial, my friends and I have gathered and pretended to be wizards — often in some seasonally inflected adventure, and always created by one of the group rather than bought off the shelf in a gaming store. This is the way.
I’ve devoted many columns over the years to the “deadweight loss of Christmas” — the grotesque waste involved in buying badly chosen gifts. I remain convinced this loss is quite real, and that if you are choosing a gift for your grandchild or niece, picking from a wishlist or sending cash are underrated choices. Face facts, you’re not demonstrating that you’re down with Gen Alpha, you’re transferring purchasing power.
But there is a different kind of gift-giving going on in homespun rituals. Lewis Hyde’s much-loved book, The Gift, recently gave me a new perspective on the matter. Hyde looks upon creative acts as gifts, and gifts as creative acts. One gift inspires another, he argues, retelling fairy tales to underline the common motif of a small act of generosity which begets a larger one, and a larger one. One story begins with a mother giving a small loaf and a blessing to her daughter; the daughter gives the bread to some birds; a virtuous spiral begins and before the end of the story, she has been gifted with a flask of cordial that can raise the dead. The gift grows as it is passed along.
Hyde devotes a chapter to the way gifts establish bonds between people. This is certainly true of my Christmas game, and is the impulse behind those handcrafted cards, the family pudding recipe and even the endless burning of CDs. One friend insists that the spell of Christmas can only be woven on Christmas Eve by the playing of the Harford-Monks Christmas album with a glass of champagne in hand. Flattery perhaps, but the idea of connecting with that friend compensates for the knowledge that many others will quite reasonably shrug and listen to their own music instead.
Bonds of friendship are all very well, but sometimes bonds can be graver. Consider the connection between kidney donor and kidney recipient: the recipient is literally walking around with part of the donor’s body inside them. (Few gifts, incidentally, create more value than a live kidney donation, where the recipient has their health transformed while the donor usually suffers no more than temporary discomfort. It is the deadweight loss of Christmas in reverse.)
It is easy to romanticise such gifts, but they can be socially complicated. In 2006, the writer Virginia Postrel donated her kidney to Sally Satel — a friend, but “no one would have called us close”. Postrel argued for a legal market in kidneys, and once told me that Satel “would really have liked to do an arms-length transaction with a stranger, where she paid somebody she didn’t know, because there can be a great deal of emotional entanglement when there is a gift”.
Lewis Hyde describes the flip side: a daughter who offered to donate a kidney to her mother, in exchange for a fur coat. “It really shook me up,” said the mother, who agreed to the terms but came to view her own daughter with something close to contempt. Hyde writes, “the gift did not render the mother subservient to the daughter. And for a good reason: it wasn’t a gift.” The daughter turned it into a barter, and in doing so surrendered her moral authority. Evidently, she preferred the coat.
The gift is neither superior nor inferior to a market transaction; it’s different. Sometimes we want those bonds with others, and use gifts to strengthen them. Sometimes we want to be cut free, and then cash is king.
Cash for kidneys remains frowned upon, but one intriguing development has been the emergence of kidney exchanges. Cruelly, it’s quite common for people who’ve had children together not to be compatible for transplants, but two couples can pair up and donate to each other. Such exchanges have to be simultaneous, because of the risk that one couple gets the kidney they want and then backs out on the (legally unenforceable) deal.
But much more can be done if someone volunteers to donate a kidney, no strings attached, to any stranger who needs one. That donation can trigger a series of sequential kidney exchanges — in 2015, an altruistic donor, Kathy Hart, started a record-breaking chain of 35 transplants, each one involving a pair of people who received a kidney, then donated one to keep the chain going. That’s a more complicated affair than simply paying cash for a kidney, but everyone seems to feel a lot better about it. One gift inspires another — and the gift grows as it is passed along.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 December 2024.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
It’s become something of a seasonal tradition – with apologies to the remarkable Randall Munroe – for me to tackle your bizarre hypothetical economics questions. To give you a sense of what I meanm here are some questions from previous years:
- What if DogeCoin became the official US currency?
- How big would an asteroid made of precious metal have to be for it to be worth doing a space mission to bring it back?
- What if interest rates were controlled by the net run rate in a never-ending cricket match between the Treasury and the Bank of England?
- What does the world look like if all monetary transactions are now conducted with only penny coins?
You get the idea.
I’m hoping to publish more answers to more strange questions, so please send them in – if you’re receiving this post via email just hit reply, or you can send them in to me at tim.harford at my ft.com email address. Brief is good, weird is good, political is probably not as funny as you think – looking forward to tackling your questions!
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Underpromise and overdeliver, that's what I've finally learnt.
Or, at least... deliver.
Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!
November 30th, 2025 02:42 am![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_newskarzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )
Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.
On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
Cautionary Tales – Homo Deceptus: Science’s Dirty Little Secret
November 28th, 2025 06:30 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tim_harford_feedIn 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years, and countless scientific articles later, a man at the Natural History Museum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn’t quite right.
This episode was first released to members of the Cautionary Club.
Further reading
Two excellent and comprehensive books about the case are Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh, and The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell.
Other useful articles on the Piltdown forgery:
Freeman, E.F. (2017), Piltdown Man’s ‘Treasure Map’. Geology Today, 33: 108-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/gto.12187
Kate Bartlett Piltdown Man: Britain’s Greatest Hoax BBC History 17 Feb 2011
Nandini Subramaniam The Problem of Piltdown Man Science History Institute 4 May 2023
Robin McKie Piltdown Man: British archaeology’s greatest hoax The Observer 5 Feb 2012
Isabelle De Groote Solving the Piltdown Man crime: how we worked out there was only one forger The Conversation 10 August 2016
On the Data Colada Affair:
Gideon Lewis-Kraus Big Little Lies The New Yorker 9 October 2023 and How A Scientific Dispute Spiralled Into A Defamation Lawsuit The New Yorker 12 September 2024
Cathleen O’Grady Honesty researcher’s lawsuit against data sleuths dismissed Science 12 Sep 2024
Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can’t make this stuff up. Or, can you? Planet Money 28 July 2023
Dan Engber The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger The Atlantic 19 Nov 2024
Data Colada Posts 98, 109, and 118 – and their article False-Positive Psychology.
Tim Harford How To Spot Scientists Who Peddle Bad Data The Financial Times 8 September 2021
Kelsey Piper The staggering death toll of scientific lies Vox 26 Aug 2024
Given how many things there are to rage-tweet about these days, it was almost a pleasure to stumble upon the hate for the Analog™ to-do list system, available from a Philadelphia-based design studio, UgMonk, for a mere $100. What does that $100 buy you? Basically, some nicely formatted index cards, and a luxurious wooden box (walnut or maple) to keep them in. You can even get a subscription to get more cards sent to you every quarter! What’s not to despise?
I have no plans to abandon my trusty notebook. Still, I think the haters are sadly mistaken, as haters often are. This rather pretentious piece of design gestures towards three truths about productivity systems that we’d do well to embrace.
The first is that the multifunctionality of our digital devices is often a curse. Tools that do less often give us more.
Our electronic devices don’t work for us; they work for Big Tech. Anyone using apps for basic organisation must run a gauntlet of distractions before they can answer the simplest questions about what needs doing.
Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span, is known for her increasingly alarming studies of our proclivity to be distracted. Using software to log people’s computer habits, Professor Mark has found that we now average 47 seconds on one screen or window before clicking away to the next thing. You don’t need to believe the precise number to recognise the problem.
Some of these distractions (TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts) don’t even pretend to be useful, but checking email or Slack can feel productive, responsive and professional while actually diverting you from the serious projects you hoped to accomplish. What were those serious projects again? You can’t remind yourself without running that gauntlet.
In such an environment, trying to make real progress on what matters to you is like trying to lose weight by signing up for a gym located between an ice-cream parlour and a hamburger joint. It’s not impossible, but you are demanding of yourself an act of focus and willpower every time you try to do the right thing.
Such acts of focus and willpower are possible, but you can do yourself a favour by avoiding the worst offenders entirely — nobody needs TikTok in their lives — and relegating others to the desktop rather than the phone, and by installing blocking software on your browser to remove the temptation to check email or YouTube for the next hour or so. All this can help make your technology work more in your interests and less in the interests of the tech titans.
Still, it is telling that such measures are tempting. We have computing power at our fingertips that previous generations could barely have imagined, and yet what often passes for productivity advice these days starts with trying to kneecap the computer before it kneecaps us. Should we really be surprised that a paper-based productivity system seems attractive?
The second truth is that the art of productivity is mostly quite simple. Keep track of what’s on your mind by writing it down. When you’re deciding on what to do next, pick from a short list, not an exhaustive (and exhausting) one. Use a calendar so you don’t miss appointments. Be decisive. Don’t let small tasks linger. Do them, delegate them or discard them. If a large task is hanging around, stop to clarify what it really involves. Be realistic and be kind to yourself about what anyone can really achieve in a day.
Is that it? No, but that’s about 80 per cent of it, and it’s all perfectly achievable with a paper calendar and a notebook or, sure, fine, a stack of index cards.
The other 20 per cent of useful personal productivity skills are more complicated and more controversial, and, in most cases, technology won’t help much with the complicated stuff either.
That, then, is the case for a simple paper-based productivity system. It’s not a compelling case — digital calendars have some useful features and so do project-management tools such as Trello. But while it would be a radical act to insist on using a typewriter instead of a word processor, or to spend days at a time without internet access, there is absolutely nothing odd or self-denying about relying on pen and paper as an organisational tool.
The final question, then. Does it have to cost $100? Of course not. A stack of 3in x 5in cards will do the same job. But one could say the same thing about a Rolex or a Birkin bag: alternatives are available that will do almost the same job for a fraction of the price. We all get to have our own priorities.
For what it’s worth, there is a defence to be made for buying high-end productivity tools. David Allen, in his personal-productivity bible Getting Things Done, argues that a good productivity system isn’t reliant on fancy equipment, but adds that the fancy equipment can be a big motivator. Allen is a fan of label-printing machines and nice pens. “I have done some great thinking and planning at times, just because I wanted to use my great-feeling, smooth-writing fountain or gel pen!” he enthuses. You may chuckle (I do) but if he’s brainstorming his next big idea while you’re playing Clash of Clans on your iPhone, perhaps the joke is on you.
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, emphasises the importance of ritual in helping us to focus. If you’re trying to get into German philosophy, for example, take the book to the pub and order a German beer to sip while you read it. (He calls this the “Heidegger with Hefeweizen” tactic.) Looking for what’s fun and memorable about the real world helps us push back against the endless samey stimulation of the digital.
I don’t think I need any more walnut or maple in my life, and I don’t need a subscription to get fancy notecards. I suspect I’ll be sticking to my unglamorous combination of notebook, Trello boards and Google calendar for now. But this morning I experimented with pulling out an index card, writing a list on it, and propping it against my monitor.
A second card of a different colour represents the “next” list. It includes a bunch of other tasks that I might have been tempted to face immediately, but which are tucked away out of sight and out of mind until the first list is finished. This is a delightfully simple way to focus on just a few urgent or important tasks, secure in the knowledge that the backup list is in easy reach. A multicoloured pack of index cards costs £2.99 for 100 cards, and even without the walnut box, they seem to be working just fine.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 Oct 2025.
I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.