Cautionary Tales will be LIVE on stage in London 21 May 2024. Tickets are on sale now.  Neatly dressed in his suit, Hans Ferdinand Mayer was every inch the unassuming corporate executive. So, when he asked to borrow a typewriter from his hotel in Oslo, nobody could have guessed he would use it for one of the most extraordinary intelligence leaks in history. Mayer’s gloved fingers punched out the details of Nazi Germany’s most sensitive military operations and, when he had finished, he immediately dispatched his documents to the British  —  who did nothing. Why did the British i ..read more

Jasmin Paris is not built like ordinary mortals. Last month she won a moment of fame after completing the Barkley Marathons, a race so brutal that only 19 men have managed to finish in the past 35 years. Paris is the first woman to complete the race. It is not Paris’s first brush with greatness. Five years ago, she won the Spine Race: 268 miles along the Pennine Way in January, when it is dark 16 hours a day, cold enough to be covered in snow but warm enough for the rain to soak through everything, and where every snatched minute of sleep is a minute conceded to one’s rivals. As the mother of ..read more

Earlier this year, two distinguished gentlemen, Judge Hyde and his adviser Julian Stafford, sampled a mineral-enriched flapjack — alas, a year past its sell-by date — and pondered its qualities. (Flapjacks are slabs of oats stuck together with a glue made of butter, sugar and syrup.) The question: was this unconventional flapjack, designed as a pre-exercise snack, “of a standard to be served to guests as a treat with afternoon tea”? Much turns on the answer, since the enriched flapjack hovers in the liminal space between a muesli bar, which, in the UK, attracts value added tax at 20 per cent ..read more

Bonus: When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in 1526, it was the beginning of the end for the Inca. Their bloody pursuit of gold, fame and fortune was rife with treachery and deceit. Within a few short years, the once-thriving Incan empire had been decimated. Tim Harford is joined by Dan Snow for a special crossover episode of Cautionary Tales and Dan Snow’s History Hit. Tim and Dan first recap the spectacular defeat of the French Knights at Crécy in 1346 and draw surprising parallels with the fall of the Inca Empire two centuries later. [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher ..read more

US legislators are eager to ban TikTok. They are missing a bigger question: should they also ban Instagram, Facebook and the network formerly known as Twitter? The obvious answer is “no”, because although everyone grumbles about social media, we still use these networks, which strongly suggests that deep down we still value them. But what if that’s wrong? What if something about social media networks induces us to use them even though we dislike them? One obvious parallel is with addictive activities, such as smoking or playing slot machines. A famous study by the economists Jonathan Gruber an ..read more

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