Nicolae Ceaușescu was not beloved. His regime was vicious and he treated Romania as his personal wallet: while Ceaușescu emptied the coffers to construct a vast, ornate palace, his people starved. He imposed disastrous population control policies on his country too, which saw hundreds of thousands of unwanted children left to rot in squalid orphanages. Ceaușescu’s rule endured for a quarter of a century – then crumbled overnight. How do dictatorships unravel? Tim Harford partners with HBO’s new series “The Regime” to investigate real-life dictatorships and the social science that ex ..read more

The “Wendy’s Dave’s Triple” is a fast-food offering that stacks two possessives and three hamburgers. I am not sure how easy it is to swallow in either regard, but what has really been sticking in people’s throats is the prospect of surge pricing at the Wendy’s fast-food chain.  A few weeks ago, the new CEO of Wendy’s announced that the company would be installing new digital menu displays that would allow “dynamic pricing” — that is, changing the price of products in real time. A minor backlash erupted, and Wendy’s patiently explained that they would, of course, not be charging higher pr ..read more

Here’s a discovery to bring you up short: unemployment is good for you. Really? Well, no, not really. But a new research paper has found a correlation that points in that direction: more unemployment, fewer deaths. Underneath lies something real, shocking and yet somehow inspiring. First, let’s unpack the research, conducted by economists Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Notowidigdo, Frank Schilbach and Jonathan Zhang. They examine the impact of the great recession of 2007-09 on death rates in different parts of the US, some of which suffered sharper increases in unemployment than others. They discove ..read more

Why are so many autocrats germaphobes? Why was the truth so dangerous for Soviet engineers? And what can salami reveal to us about the mind of Vladimir Putin? Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, examines the true stories behind the HBO series The Regime. In the first of two special episodes, Tim investigates real-life dictatorships and the social science that explains them, drawing on insights from game theory and psychology. [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] Further Reading The discussion of salami slicing drew from Thomas Schelling’s book Arms and Influence, and How Democracies Di ..read more

My colleague John Burn-Murdoch recently presented striking evidence of a new trend: young men and young women are becoming politically segregated. Young men now sit substantially to the right of young women on the political spectrum. This is an international phenomenon and it’s new. Should we be surprised? Society seems to be polarising along every possible axis and on every conceivable issue. Consider the apparently simple question of how the US economy is faring. The answer is simple: it depends whether the sitting president is on your team or not. Little else matters. From the public’s pers ..read more

Chuck Yeager’s plane pitched and rolled as it plummeted from the sky. He grappled with the controls inside the cockpit, but to no avail: he couldn’t steady the aircraft. The test pilot was known for his nerves of steel but, as the barren Mojave Desert hurtled towards him, even he was afraid. What to do? It’s tempting to think that adding to our lives – more action, more work, more possessions – will lead to greater success and happiness. But sometimes doing less is the wiser choice, as Chuck Yeager was to learn the hard way. In their second crossover episode, Tim Harford teams up with Dr. Lau ..read more

Do you think the leading large language model, GPT-4, could suggest a solution to Wordle after having four previous guesses described to it? Could it compose a biography-in-verse of Alan Turing, while also replacing “Turing” with “Church”? (Turing’s PhD supervisor was Alonzo Church, and the Church-Turing thesis is well known. That might befuddle the computer, no?) Shown a partially complete game of tic-tac-toe, could GPT-4 find the obvious best move? All these questions, and more, are presented as an addictive quiz on the website of Nicholas Carlini, a researcher at Google Deepmind. It’s worth ..read more

When the spreadsheet launched in 1979, it was a bewildering piece of software. People had no idea what they were looking at. A computer screen, filled with a grid of numbers? As Keith Houston explains in his new history of the pocket calculator, Empire of the Sum, they hadn’t realised that the rows and columns of a spreadsheet could be functional rather than decorative. Accustomed to writing numbers by hand on an 11-by-17 inch sheet of gridded paper designed for accountancy, they would type the same numbers into the computer grid and then do what they had done for the past couple of decades: f ..read more

On June 1 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished on a routine transatlantic flight. The circumstances were mysterious until the black box flight recorder was recovered nearly two years later, and the awful truth became apparent: three highly trained pilots had crashed a fully functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 288 people on board, because they had become confused by what their Airbus 330’s automated systems had been telling them. I’ve recently found myself returning to the final moments of Flight 447, vividly described by articles in Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair. I cannot shake ..read more

When he first heard the music, Brian Eno grabbed a copy of the single and ran to find David Bowie. “I’ve found the sound of the future,” he breathlessly announced. It was 1977, and the sound of the future was “I Feel Love”. Donna Summer’s ethereal vocals were backed by producer Giorgio Moroder’s pulsing, looping Moog synthesiser. Moroder offers a curious account of his inspiration. He says he went to see the film of the year, Star Wars, and took note of the scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina, a wretched hive of scum and villainy in which a band of strange alien musicians perform a jaunty tune. (O ..read more