When Dutch traders began swapping tulip bulbs in the winter of 1636, they were not cultivating mania so much as cultivating a market — one that grew faster than the flowers themselves. A bloom that lasted only a few days each spring had become a collectible, prized for its symmetry and rarity. What followed has been described as mass delusion, but was rather a kind of social experiment in how value forms, and ultimately unravels, when enthusiasm becomes a currency

The annual announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize is a prestigious political event that always sparks attention. US President Donald Trump repeatedly expressed his desire to win this year’s prize, but in the event the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado for her work in promoting democratic rights. Whilst reading the news I was reminded of the Nobel Committee in 2010 awarding the prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned in

“Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard.” This is one of my favorite aphorisms, and that’s because I’ve seen examples of it in action in so many different areas of life. Across the sports we love, I’m sure we can all think of a player who took the world by storm but eventually faded away. Or even peers in school who were brilliant at understanding what was taught in class but never got around to doing the assignments.

In Salman Rushdie’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, we are introduced to the concept of the P2C2E. How does a magic carpet actually fly? It’s a P2C2E. When you say there’s a genie trapped in that lamp, how does that actually, mechanically, happen? Another P2C2E.[1] It’s a bit like the ‘flux capacitor’ in the Back to the Future series: something extremely important and impossibly difficult to explain. There are a couple of real-world examples of this floating around

I have a confession: I used to be a gold bear. I was sceptical about gold’s soaring price around 15 years ago, when advanced economy central banks launched quantitative easing and gold rose to almost $2000. Investors were betting that this might cause inflation. I struggled to see the appeal of the yellow metal — it did not provide an income stream and was not much practical use to industry. It was challenging to value, and seemed mostly to appeal to

‘MAN + VAN’ read the sign. ‘Cheap removals, Garden Waste, Student Moves, Gumtree Ebay/IKEA Pick up’. Phone number. This was my man, I thought, my Ford Transit driver in shining armour. My man with a van. I dialled the  number, hope welling up. But alas… “£100 for the hour, plus petrol, and a little extra if you need help getting it up the stairs.” I’d heard enough. One piece of furniture! What did I do to deserve such an unfavourable

Economic data are hard to measure. In most cases, we know what we’re looking for — inflation reflects changes in the average price level, GDP is a measure of domestic goods and services production, and unemployment counts the number of people who can’t find a job. For these indicators, the problem is often the resources required to collect the data in a comprehensive and accurate manner. But sometimes we don’t even have a clear definition of what we’re aiming to

My partner Tom often accuses me of what he calls my ‘Scandinavian supremacy’, essentially that I think most things Scandi are superior to their UK or other counterparts. I, of course, find this an unfair accusation as it is simply factual that Norway has better washing up liquid (Zalo), superior suncream to everyone but the Koreans, that Danish mid-century furniture is the most aesthetically pleasing, and that Swedish pick and mix is of god-tier quality. On a recent trip home,

From the moment we’re born, we are all compelled to enter the lottery of life. We have no choice in the matter. We don’t pick our parents, our genetics, or where we grow up. We’re simply dropped into the middle of what I call the “statistical soup of life”— a messy, unpredictable concoction of luck, tragedy and opportunity that is constantly washing around us. For the rest of our days, we navigate this soup, sometimes unaware that it is swirling

It is strange what a difference one small, apparently insignificant change to the way things are measured can make to an overall finding. This realisation came home to me when I was reading about the resident doctors’ pay grievance. The resident doctors have a clear narrative about the way their pay has been eroded. Their union, the British Medical Association (BMA), has published the following chart to illustrate it. One thing in the chart title caught my eye: the chart