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My mom just started playing so she can catch me some regional stuff when she goes on an international vacation this summer (politics willing). But she's going through Pokéballs fast; anyone mind if I go through and add you as her friend? I'm hoping to get her some gifts to offset things while she gets the hang of throwing.
Cautionary Tales – The Sightseeing Flight and the Invisible Mountain
March 27th, 2026 06:01 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
tim_harford_feedIn November 1979, Flight 901 departs New Zealand on a sightseeing journey over Antarctica, heading directly towards a volcano. When the plane vanishes, investigators are left with a mystery: how could a seasoned pilot miss a 12,000-foot peak? As they try to piece together the incident, conflicting stories emerge, key evidence disappears, and a troubling picture takes shape – one defined by human error, deceptive illusions, and the hunt for someone to blame.
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Further reading
Many of the key documents are collated at the website https://www.erebus.co.nz, including the initial report of the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents and the findings of Peter Mahon’s Royal Commission. Mahon later wrote a book called Verdict on Erebus. Gordon Vette also wrote a book about the accident and his research into whiteout, called Impact Erebus.
In 2011, New Zealand journalist Paul Holmes worked with Jim Collins’ widow and daughters to write the book Daughters of Erebus. In 2019, Stuff and RNZ interviewed many of the surviving key figures for the podcast series White Silence. For a flavour of the debate that Erebus can still provoke, see forum threads such as this and this. James Reason comments on the Mahon report in his book Beyond Aviation Human Factors, co-authored with Daniel E. Maurino, Neil Johnston and Rob B Lee.
One of the most famous experiments in social psychology took place in the early 1950s. Solomon Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, gathered together groups of young men for what he told them was an experiment in “visual judgment”. It was no such thing.
What happened is often known as the “conformity experiment”, but that is a misleading label for an oft-misunderstood study. Asch ran many variations on his experiment, and the most surprising and powerful lesson is not about the power of conformity, but about the power of disagreement.
Asch’s basic approach was to show two cards to a group of about eight people. One card had a single line on it: the reference line. The other card displayed three lines of different length. The task was a straightforward multiple choice, picking the line that was the same length as the reference line. This wasn’t hard; when people were asked to do this task on their own, they almost never made a mistake.
However, Asch was not asking people to do this task in isolation, but as a member of a group. Participants would be asked, one by one, to tell the rest of the group their answer. This made space for the possibility that experimental subjects would be guided not by their own eyes, but by the opinions of others.
The groups were asked to do this 18 times, but Solomon Asch had a trick to play. Everyone in each group was a confederate working for Asch, except a single unsuspecting experimental subject. This poor dupe would be sitting near the end of the line. The confederates had instructions to get the first two questions right and then unanimously agree on the wrong answer for most of the rest.
Imagine the jolt of surprise and anxiety as the experimental subject saw one person after another contradict the evidence of his own eyes. People felt real pressure to conform, with more than one-third of the answers matching the group’s delusion rather than the obvious truth.
Why? When debriefed, some people said they had changed their minds, figuring the group must be right. Others said they didn’t change their minds, but did change their answers, not wanting to spoil the experiment. Still others were staunchly independent, saying that they presumed the group was right and they were wrong, but felt a duty to call them as they saw them.
What fascinates me about Asch’s experiment is what happened when one of the confederates had been instructed to disagree with the group and give the correct answer instead. The answer: the spell of conformity was broken. People made only a quarter as many errors, with the error rate falling below 10 per cent. The pressure from the group had lost much of its power.
Even more brilliant was another variation in which Asch again instructed a confederate to disagree with the group. This time, however, the confederate was an “extremist dissenter”, giving an answer that was even more wrong than the majority consensus. The result? The experimental subjects generally gave the correct answer; their error rate was still below 10 per cent.
Asch had demonstrated three things. First, people will go against the evidence of their own eyes if contradicted by a unanimous group. Second, group pressure is much weaker if even a single person dares to disagree with the group. Third, and most remarkable: it does not matter if the dissenter is mistaken; dissent punctures group pressure either way. People are liberated to say what they believe, not because the dissenter speaks the truth but because the dissenter demonstrates that disagreement is possible.
I thought of Solomon Asch when I heard about a cookbook by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. It’s full of the classics, but there are two very different recipes for each dish — one by Julia and one by Jacques. In the margins, each offers a jovial explanation of what the other cook has done wrong, why they made different decisions and what effect those decisions have on the final meal. It is, writes philosopher C Thi Nguyen, “the record of an argument — a rowdy conversation between friends”.
This matters because, as with Solomon Asch’s duplicitous experiment, it shows us that disagreement is possible. The two cases seem very different, not least because while there is only one correct answer to Asch’s visual perception test, there is more than one way to sauté a fish. Yet the disagreement is valuable either way, because it gives us permission to think for ourselves.
Many years ago I was involved in scenario planning for the oil company Shell. It was always a fascinating exercise, but I now realise that one of the most important strengths of the process was rarely discussed: there were always at least two scenarios, and all the scenarios were given equal status. This was Cooking at Home meets corporate strategy: the fundamental assumption was that there was more than one plausible future, and a rowdy conversation about the different possibilities unlocked a treasure chest of fresh thinking.
Charlan Nemeth is a psychologist and the author of No! The Power of Disagreement in a World that Wants to Get Along. She cautions against “contrived” dissent — for example, the Catholic tradition of having a “devil’s advocate” to argue against the canonisation of a putative saint. This sort of thing sounds good in principle, she argues, but in practice there is a limited benefit in a rote play-acting of disagreement. For one thing, everyone knows the devil’s advocate is just pretending, so nobody feels much pressure to persuade them to change their mind. “Role-playing,” writes Nemeth, “does not have the stimulating effects of authentic dissent.”
Yet some contrivances are better than others. Nemeth writes approvingly of an investment firm only making decisions after considering serious arguments both for and against a position. What makes this different from playing devil’s advocate? Perhaps the sense that the contrary arguments are not a game, but made in all seriousness.
Another contrivance is the idea of “red teaming” an idea — giving a group the task of trying to rip a new idea apart before that idea is adopted. Is this an empty ritual, or a serious practice? Depending on people’s intent, it could be either.
Contrived dissent is better than nothing, especially if the contrivance itself is taken seriously. But the most valuable form of dissent is authentic, even stubborn and brave. There is no substitute for finding one of those people who feel a duty to call things as they see them.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 Feb 2026.
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.
If the 21st century has produced a more prescient book, I’ve not seen it. I’m thinking of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman. The book was published in late 2005, making it the same age as this column.
Friedman’s argument was wide-ranging but the bottom line is easy to summarise: “Economic growth — meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens — more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.”
Friedman noted that a thriving economy might have a number of welcome side-effects, consequences which we might call moral progress. For example, if jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce, discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or religion “most often gives way to the sheer need to get the work done”.
Yet for Friedman, the key to unlocking the virtues he admired was not jobs but an increase in broad-based material living standards, which is measured — or at least proxied — by GDP per person. He argued that we naturally judge how things are going by making comparisons, and two types of comparison are readily available. The first is to compare ourselves with others. The second is to compare our current situation with our own past experiences. If living standards were briskly increasing, then we would notice that we were comfortably richer than we had been a decade ago. If living standards were stagnating or falling, then we would stop making contended comparisons with our former selves, and our envious gazes would turn to the lives of others.
Such zero-sum thinking is likely to be toxic and counter-productive. After all, as Friedman writes, “Nothing can enable the majority of the population to be better off than everyone else. But not only is it possible for most people to be better off than they used to be, that is precisely what economic growth means.”
At the time, Friedman was criticised from the left for being too reductive about what economic progress meant (what about inequality? What about environmental sustainability?) and from the libertarian right for confusing moral progress with centrist ideals such as an inclusive, redistributive welfare state (what about rewarding excellence? What about freedom?).
These critiques have lost their bite. The events of the past two decades have proved that on the big questions, Friedman was unnervingly, tragically correct. The 21st century has been an era of economic trauma, and the consequences for our attitudes and our politics have become all too obvious.
The US economy has certainly grown over the past 25 years, but the growth has been uneven, uncertain and repeatedly interrupted. The century began with the unnerving popping of the dotcom bubble, followed by the post-9/11 recession, which blurred into the “China shock”, an influx of Chinese imports that for a few years inflicted localised but traumatic damage on US communities dependent on manufacturing. All that was made to look tame by the banking crisis of 2007-08, which depressed growth rates for years afterwards, as well as draining the US economic system of legitimacy. The final one-two punch was the Covid-19 lockdown followed by the surge in inflation of the past few years.
What does all this drama look like in the economic data? Simple. Over the quarter-century beginning in 1950, real GDP per person grew almost 80 per cent. Over the following quarter-century, 1975-1999, real growth per person was again just under 80 per cent. But from 2000-2024, total real growth per person halved, to just under 40 per cent.
Or consider the experience of the finance-heavy UK economy, in which the banking crisis looms even larger. That crisis was followed by an anaemic recovery — not helped by the tax rises and spending cuts of the coalition government — and then, in 2016, the vote for Brexit. The data, again, tells the story: between the peak of 2007 and the last full year before the referendum, 2015, the UK’s real economic output per person grew by a grand total of 1 per cent. Since 2016 the average is still well short of 1 per cent a year. For context, in the 1990s, real per capita growth was more like 1 per cent every six months.
Friedman’s basic thesis was that robust, broad-based growth would encourage tolerance, social mobility, fairness and a commitment to democratic values. Should we be surprised that an economic slowdown has given us the opposite?
Since The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth was published, economists have investigated its thesis with a more quantitative lens. Lewis Davis and Matthew Knauss looked at more than 80 countries between 1989 and 2007. They found that people were more eager for governments to “take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for” where the growth rate had recently been rising and income inequality had recently been falling.
That’s an intriguing finding, particularly the counterintuitive proposition that people want more government provision in places where income inequality is falling. And not everyone would agree that there is anything “moral” about wanting government to take a bigger role as a provider. Still, it is striking that Davis and Knauss find that in economies that are misfiring, with falling growth and rising inequality, the typical response is: every man for himself.
In January, Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann and Sacha Dray published a study of “Growth Experiences and Trust in Government”, and concluded that individuals who had experienced higher GDP growth since they were born “are more prone to trust their governments”. Again, trusting your government is not quite the same thing as moral rectitude, but Besley and colleagues are pointing to some of the same fundamental issues as Friedman was: when economic growth sags, it doesn’t just change what we can afford — it changes what we value, what we believe and who we trust.
We shouldn’t be reductive about this link between material flourishing and moral flourishing. There are certainly moments, such as the Great Depression in the US, when both the government and the people seemed to rise to the challenge rather than sinking into infighting and recrimination. And the increasing power and attention given to unsavoury political characters around the democratic world is surely about more than merely low growth. Still: low growth matters, not just because it empties out our shopping bags, but because it hollows out our character.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 Feb 2026.
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.