I believe in personal responsibility

Conservatism rests on the foundational belief that individuals have agency, and hence accountability. In contrast, some people hold that individuals are powerless in the context of their circumstances, or that societal forces are stacked against them to the extent that attempting to counteract them is futile. This mindset leads them to turn to governments or coordinated action to affect change — for instance, to ban social media for children. In contrast, I hold that people have the power and the responsibility to make their own choices.

As a result, people like me can often be seen as lacking empathy: we are quick to judge and less inclined to make excuses for people. But this isn’t to say we shouldn’t take extenuating circumstances into account. On the contrary, I believe in the old-fashioned, perhaps elitist and even condescending notion of noblesse oblige: people born to privilege have a moral obligation to use their unfair advantages for good (more on this below), and to be kind in their judgement when others don’t live up to their own ethical standards. Still, being kind in judgement does not mean not passing judgement at all. It means doing it in an empowering way: it means telling someone who has erred that it’s within their control to do better in the future, giving them a second chance, and lending them a helping hand when they need it. And while what I describe here can come across as patronising, it’s even more patronising to say that some people have no control over what they do.

I believe that kindness means more than just being nice

I use the word kind many times in the post, so I want to dispel the common misconception that kindness means making other people feel good about themselves.

Sometimes, kindness means the opposite: making people feel bad. This can be when they need to confront an uncomfortable truth, to reflect on their behaviour, to realise they’ve done something wrong; or it can be when they need to stop enjoying something now if it will cause them harm later. True kindness does not mean massaging people’s egos, helping them rationalise away their bad choices, and enabling harmful behaviours. True kindness means being harsh when that is in the other person’s long-term interest. True kindness requires the courage to upset — the difference between it and cruelty is the intention behind it, and the understanding and consideration shown to the other person.

I believe in judging people more by how they act rather than by the theories they espouse

Another pillar of my conception of conservatism is a scepticism towards grand narratives and philosophising. I love intellectual discussions and I have a lot of respect for philosophy, but at the end of the day these pursuits are more likely to lead to sophistry than good behaviour.

and

The idea captured by these two passages is that though morality is hard to define and defend on ideological grounds, most people have an intuitive understanding of common decency, of right and wrong. It has always been my strong view that the most common reason for behaving badly in everyday life, and causing harm to ourselves and to other people, is not due to moral disagreements, but due to self-deception. We lie to ourselves about our intentions, we rationalise bad choices, we find reasons to align our ethics to our short-term interests. A person doesn’t shoplift or cheat on their partner because they think they have the moral right to do so; they know it’s wrong, but do it anyway — and then they come up with reasons to justify it. People rarely question their morals out of a desire to be better people: far more often they do it to align them to their interests.

Conservatism tells us to judge people, not on their philosophy, but on how they act: are they kind? Are they generous? Are they forgiving? Are they helpful? Are they fair? Put like this, conservatism sounds uncontroversial, but it isn’t so. It compels us to make allowances, and consider a person fundamentally decent even if their worldview is bigoted: it suggests that such people should be regarded as wrong, not evil.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that few people have such power or influence that the very opinions they hold can do harm at scale, whereas everyday behaviour has an actual, direct impact on dozens if not hundreds of people. What people say, and what people think, has less of an impact than what they do. Words are cheap: there is no virtue in adopting popular moral stances if there is no follow-through. It’s hard to not feel scorn for extinction rebellion participants who eat at Macdonalds, or for actors jumping on #metoo after a life-long friendship with Harvey Weinstein. Conversely, it’s hard being consistently good even on a small scale; we should give credit to those who are.

The second and more important reason is that our collective understanding of what is moral changes over time. I think there is more-or-less objective good and evil, but our ability to tell them apart is imperfect and evolving over time — and not always monotonically either. Dismissing someone as irredeemably evil because their moral philosophy hasn’t caught up with the consensus, in the same way that it is wrong to call a child who is still making mistakes when reading stupid. Consider: many things that were once taboo are now normal, and things that were once normal but are now considered deeply immoral (e.g. homosexuality, slavery respectively). Conversely, who knows how many things that are taboo or normal now will change in the future (incest? meat consumption)? Given that our understanding of morality changes over time, and especially when our judgement of a particular behaviour can reverse (after all, homosexuality was normal in the ancient world), we should be both humble in our confidence on moral truths, and understanding of those who don’t share them. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold moral truths, or that we shouldn’t try to get others to adopt them — of course we should, otherwise there would be no moral progress. But we should do it with understanding.

Meanwhile, although our answers to big philosophical questions are in flux, our shared, instinctive understanding of common decency is more stable. I can deliver a much more confident judgement on whether someone has good intentions, whether they are true to their own ideals, whether they acted out of kindness or spite, than I can analyse their moral philosophy.

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I believe in family

Though conservatives are often seen as individualists, and indeed our views on economics support this misconception, we do not consider the individual the fundamental societal unit: rather, it’s the family.

I never cease to be amazed at just how ruggedly individualist most progressive takes on family really are. On both a literal and metaphorical level, the majority of couples keep separate accounts, and evaluate decisions by tallying the costs and benefits to their individual ledgers. ‘We will take turns in our career,’ one couple might say; ‘we will move for my job now, then in three years it’s your turn.’

Instead, my view is that upon marriage (or long-term partnership more generally), there ceases to be a personal account, and there is only a joint one. The question is not whether a particular decision will benefit one party or whether it will harm another, and whether the benefit to one former outweighs the harm to the latter; it is whether the family as a whole is better off or not. Explaining what this looks like in practice is difficult, and in fact, on the face of it the result may be the same as the transactional approach. But the feeling underneath matters a lot: in my view on how a family works, there is no cause for one party to resent sacrifices they’ve made, because those sacrifices were not made for the sake of their partner, but for the sake of the union. There is no room for keeping score or taking turns.

(It is much easier explaining the practical impact of this worldview on money matters: I believe in joint finances. I find it bewildering that the majority of people trust a partner to raise their children, but not to have access to their money.)

I also believe that family members (and friends) have a responsibility to support each other, far more than is the norm in most modern western cultures. I think it has become too common in countries like the UK to demand help from the state — effectively, to ask that strangers subsidise you — rather than to ask parents, children, or siblings for help, both financial and emotional. I know people who would be ashamed to ask a friend for a loan, but who have no compunction demanding higher taxes (on others) to fund (their) benefits; or people who’d never dream opening up about their private life to, say, a parent or a sibling, but who will gladly pay a stranger for therapy. I think this is problematic in two ways. First, it leads to abuse: it’s easier to cheat strangers than relatives and friends. A society where people rely on their network gives people access to the help they need, but also encourages them to get back on their two feet, and not to rely on that help indefinitely. Second, it leads to worse mental health. I think strong friendships and family relationships make people feel better; these relationships are formed and strengthened by placing trust in each other, discussing problems, knowing each others’ histories. Increasingly, people sanitise their relationships by taking their problems to their therapists, which does make their personal relationships more frictionless, but also more hollow. This isn’t to say there isn’t a role for therapy or for a welfare state (more on this later); but that there is a bigger role for family and friends.

I believe in raising children

By which I mean, it is your job as a parent to help your children grow into the kind of adults you want them to be. This includes shaping their character, their values, their manners, and even their tastes; of course, you need to give children leeway to find their own feet, to challenge you, and to be their own people — but their outlook ought to be an evolution over yours, not a radical departure. You should set the direction and let them forge the precise path.

And so, while I believe in having fun with your children, in spending time with them (no holidaying with nannies and childminders; no parking them at resort nurseries), and in showing them respect and engaging with them earnestly, I do not believe in gentle parenting; I do not believe in treating children as your equal. Parents are responsible for their children’s behaviour, and they must set high expectations for them. Parents must demand good behaviour, they must set limits, and they must, when necessary, be strict. As a parent, you must be able to say no.

Finally, parents must hold themselves to account for their children’s failings. Do not blame school, their friends, TV, technology, or any other external factor before reflecting on what you can do better.

I believe in tradition

Instead of relying on a theoretical foundation, conservatism draws on history, culture, tradition, and convention to define ethics. But tradition is not only what defines our values: crucially, it also serves as the medium for passing them on and for preserving culture. If you thought that all you need to do to pass on a virtue is to convince people through argument, you needn’t care for tradition: you’d hand out pamphlets or give lectures, and job done. But if you think that values and a way of life go hand-in-hand, and if you want to pass on your values to your children (which, if you think your values are good, you would), you’ll find yourself very protective of your cultural and family ways of doing things.

This does not mean tradition is sacrosanct and immune to changes. After all, as I acknowledge earlier, many of our inherited moral truths are now considered abhorrent. It is fine to question the morality handed down to us from our ancestors, but this requires a lot of evidence. The risk with abandoning tradition (practiced and tested over long periods of time) of untested theory is that the latter often does more harm than good. Conservatives accept evolution and gradual change; what we should mistrust is revolution.

I believe in decorum and good manners

When it comes to judging behaviour, the most important things are the ones mentioned earlier — the things we usually call virtues. But they aren’t the only things that matter: I believe that the more superficial aspects of behaviour are also worth considering: saying please and thank you, being on time, dressing appropriately, holding doors open, offering to pay, waiting until everyone is served before starting a meal, addressing people in polite form in the languages that support it, being considerate and quiet in public spaces, filling other people’s glasses before your own, standing up to greet someone.

These matter for two reasons. First, they are a sign of respect: contravening a widely-accepted social norm is sending a signal of (almost always) unnecessary rebellion, arrogance, and egocentricity.

(It’s worth keeping in mind though that many of these are culture- and context-dependent. ‘Dressing appropriately’ means different things in different countries and social events, and there are cultures where being late is not considered rude — in fact, the opposite (showing up early can catch the host unprepared). My point is that it’s important to be polite in the context of the culture in which you find yourself. (Though I do think some cultural norms are better than others. Like, why risk miscommunication by inviting people at a particular time, if you want them to show up later? What’s the benefit in that?) (I will also say that given the fragmentation of culture into many distinct subcultures, being polite is becoming increasingly difficult.))

The second reason is that politeness engenders awareness and consideration, and is therefore a prerequisite and an enabler for the more important virtues. Saying thank you requires you to notice when people are being kind to you; holding doors open requires you to be aware of the people walking next to you; as Tom Ford says, dressing well is a form of good manners; and so on. A person who is not aware enough, and who does not care enough to do these things, will soon find themselves not giving up a seat for a pregnant woman on the tube. I think it’s a slippery slope from ceasing to care about trivial manners to being inconsiderate in more important things.

I believe in celebrating excellence

I believe in rewarding merit. We should be doing this both on principle, because excellence is inherently worthwhile, and to be pragmatic: the world is governed by power laws. The top performers in most fields contribute orders of magnitude more than middle performers, and so it’s worth being able to identify and nurture those who have the potential to be great, as they are the ones whose contribution will move society forward.

It may seem like a strawman to suggest that belief in excellence should be a distinguishing characteristic for conservatives: doesn’t everyone celebrate excellence? No. Even besides the absurd, explicit anti-merit views of Woke 1, everyday people do not believe in singling out the excellent in practice: ‘everyone deserves a trophy’ is a real thing. While I strongly dislike it, I do understand it: imagine being a parent and seeing other children recognised as geniuses or great athletes, while yours is left behind looking crestfallen. Recognising excellence entails acknowledging mediocrity, which can be devastating for all of us who are mediocre. But it is a fact that some people are much better at some things than others. Instead of pretending it isn’t so, we should learn to accept it.

It is worth understanding why accepting our own (or our children’s) mediocrity is so difficult, because it is relevant to my conservative philosophy. In my view, excellence is neither the sole nor the most important determinant of moral worth, even though it does have inherent moral worth. The problem is that it is easy to gauge excellence through quantifiable metrics, or at the very least, proxies: we can measure athletic prowess through performance at sports, intelligence through academic achievement, commercial nous through financial success, and contribution to society through fame (granted, more tenuously), and so on; it is harder to measure, and even harder to broadcast, moral worth deriving from other virtues. And so, we focus almost monomaniacally on the things that are easy to track, and we deal with the envy we feel from seeing people do well, not by trying harder, or by learning to be content with our abilities, but by trying to erase or downplay inequality of outcome, even when it is merited.

In other words: some skills or virtues contribute visibly to status. Others rarely do, certainly not publicly: our friends may respect us and value our kindness or courage, but these virtues do not win us medals or other forms of public recognition. In a world dominated by celebrity culture, we learn to care more about status, and to resent those who have it.

We need to fight this urge. We need to learn, and to teach our children, to not only accept that others are sometimes better than us, but to celebrate excellence, and to allow ourselves to be awed and inspired by it.

It is important to recognise that, contra MAGA-style takes, recognising merit requires taking context into account. Excellence shouldn’t be judged solely by the results that someone achieved, but by the obstacles they had to overcome. Conservatives should very much be in favour of (real, not tokenistic) DEI initiatives that aim to help under-privileged people with potential.

I believe in incremental, not radical innovation

I think there is wisdom in systems and processes that have evolved over a long period of time. Things can always be better, but improvements are usually at the margin: if a particular way of doing things were fundamentally broken and unfit for purpose, it would have been abandoned already. As such, when presented with a new idea, I think it’s sensible to ask ‘if this is so great, why has no-one done it before?’ Basically, have some respect for Chesterton’s Fences.

As such, people like me do not make for brilliant innovators or VCs, but that’s fine. Our role in society is twofold: first, to make things work better over time. Not 10x better, but marginally, understanding that even 1% improvements compound over time. Second, to be the skeptics, the ones who challenge easy promises and improbable solutions. Both are valuable services, which ensure that resources are allocated correctly, and not wasted on hare-brained ideas.

This is not to say one should be dogmatic. Radical innovation does happen, and it comes in two flavours. First, there is radical, incremental innovation: the iPhone was markedly superior to all other mobile phones. Then there is disruptive innovation as outlined by Clayton Christensen. Radical incremental innovation is rare, because it’s increasingly difficult to pull off. We’ve plucked most low-hanging fruits; we’re left with the ones at the top of the tree. It takes either unusually bright brains, or immense resources to achieve. Disruptive innovation is easier, but it’s not obvious it will be profitable, certainly not in the short term and certainly not for incumbents. Disruptive innovation is worse than existing solutions in almost every respect, except some niche use case, which makes it appeal to some niche customer segment, and it is not clear that the segment will be profitable, or that the technology will improve from that low base to rival existing solutions in other use cases. And so, when someone claims they’ve found a good, profitable solution that no-one else has thought of, it’s legitimate to consider that claim with suspicion.

I believe companies should care about more than profit

This is a difficult one. At an intellectual level, Milton Friedman was right: companies’ exclusive aim should be to maximise profit. I strongly recommend everyone read his original essay — if you only click one link in this post, let it be this.

Nevertheless, though I cannot answer Friedman with arguments, I cannot help but feel that companies have responsibilities beyond maximising shareholder returns. In particular, I think companies ought to treat employees kindly and fairly, to produce their goods and services as responsibly as possible, and to foster an environment that grows the whole pie rather than their share of it (so, for instance, I don’t think it’s right for companies to lobby for tariffs in their industry).

A cop-out for espousing this so-called stakeholder capitalism is an argument that Friedman himself acknowledges:

Of course, in practice the doctrine of social responsibility is frequently a cloak for actions that are justified on other grounds rather than a reason for those actions.

To illustrate, it may well be in the long‐run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employes, it may reduce the wage bill or lessen losses from pilferage and sabotage or have other worthwhile effects.

In other words, stakeholder capitalism and long-term profitability are not only not incompatible, but the former often leads to the latter.

But this isn’t really why I believe companies should care about more than the bottom line. As I suggested earlier, I believe there is such a thing as right and wrong that is felt, rather than arrived at through argument, and I believe that people who have privilege also have responsibility, and I therefore think that people who own and run companies ought to do what is right.

Still, there are some complications. First, in today’s world, where share ownership is distributed across thousands of minority shareholders, stakeholder capitalism is less tenable on principle. If I were talking to an old-fashioned industrialist with majority ownership of a firm, I could tell them they, as an individual, ought to behave ethically and selflessly: any corporate decisions they make that cause a reduction in profit affects them personally, and it is the price to pay for doing the right thing. This argument is harder to make when a company is owned by thousands of smaller beneficiaries, and run by a professional manager with little skin in the game: when I urge that manager to put the interests of third parties ahead of their shareholders’, I’m asking them to make a moral judgement (on harming some people so as to benefit others) that they have no authority to make. This doesn’t sit quite right. For the same reason, I am hostile towards activists who aggressively demand that companies prioritise things beyond profit, as though they, the activists, have some moral claim. It seems wrong to me for people to make demands on others.

(Ironically though, modern capitalism makes stakeholder focus more tenable in practice: when everyone owns the entire S&P through their investments and pension funds, the shareholders themselves care more about growing the entire pie, than the success of any single company. And so they have a financial, not only a moral, interest in ensuring individual companies put the interests of wider society ahead of their own.)

Second, the judgement on what is fair treatment is far more complex than it seems. In Europe, we have strict labour laws that are, on the face of it, meant to protect workers. But in my view, these laws are deeply unfair: they make it hard for companies to fire poor performers; but this doesn’t lead to a net increase in jobs, it just means that a company is stuck employing someone who is bad at their job instead of someone who would be good at it. How is that fair to the latter hypothetical employee? More generally, choosing inefficiency for the sake of fairness is doing long-term harm to society — it means less abundance and higher costs in the future; inefficiency means misallocation of resources. So, when I say companies have more responsibilities than profit, I do not mean invariably prioritising things like employee welfare over it; I do mean though that those things has to be an important consideration.

Some thoughts on government

I’ve left this section for last because it’s the weakest part of this post, and of conservative thought in general: conservative philosophy on government is not as clean and absolute as, say, communism or libertarianism.

Conservative philosophy recognises a place for limited government, but in accordance with the aversion to grand narratives, it demurs from overly prescriptive, logically coherent theories. Instead, it takes a pragmatic approach where it evaluates each policy discussion on a case by case basis.

Conservative theory on government springs from the principles discussed:

• Belief in personal responsibility suggests individuals should solve their own problems where possible.

• Distrust in grand narratives means policy should be pragmatic rather than rooted in philosophy.

• Scepticism towards radical innovation means there is an aversion to overly transformative policy.

• Deference for tradition leads to an instinct for preservation.

But all these are sort of instinctual positions, rather than logically constructed frameworks.

I believe in small government

Governments have a monopoly on coercive force. This is tremendous power, and should therefore be used sparingly. Not only does government overreach risk oppression and tyranny, but also, because government is slow-moving and hard to overturn, it also risks causing long-lasting bad outcomes. It is easy to turn to government to enforce a policy you think is beneficial; but think how hard it is to overturn bad policies once they’re inscribed into law (triple-lock!).

Given this, we should only rely on government as a last resort. There must be a very compelling reason for government to provide a service (for example, it is an essential service) and the private sector cannot provide it efficiently (due to externalities or natural monopolies). There are very few things that meet these criteria — things like public order & safety (including protection from external threats), a judicial system, a basic welfare net, and preservation (see next section).

Even within these areas, we must be pragmatic as to the level of government intervention. It is hard to come up with iron-clad principles to determine the exact correct level of government action, but we should rely on cost-benefit analyses and common-sense on a case-by-case basis. For example, consumer protection falls under safety — but do we really need to ban ads for tobacco, or to force companies to print horrible pictures on cigarette packs? Doesn’t pretty much everyone know of the link between smoking and cancer by now? Or, exactly how much welfare counts as a basic net? These are hard questions, and they cannot be answered in general — except to say that proponents for more intervention need to make a compelling case on why it is needed: the burden of proof lies with them.

Notice that the belief in small government stems from a distrust in government and the state: this is something on which I find myself disagreeing with other self-proclaimed conservatives. When police shoot and kill someone, most conservatives instinctively align themselves with the police; or, many conservatives believe in the death penalty. I do the opposite: I think the state should use lethal force exceptionally sparingly. My starting position is that a death caused by government is unacceptable, exactly because they are the only ones allowed to kill people, and so it is the state that has to demonstrate why there was literally no other choice.

(Incidentally, this is a fault line in both conservative and progressive thinking, where both camps seem to hold contradictory ideas in their heads. Simplifying a bit, conservatives want small government, but believe in a powerful police state; conversely, progressives want to defund the police, even as they demand more regulation and income redistribution — but who will enforce those regulations and the transfer of wealth, if not people with guns?)

I believe in local government

It’s not surprising to me that two of the most successful countries in the world, the US and Switzerland, have devolved governments. Devolution is not a silver bullet, but it aligns voters’ interests closer with their actions, it allows for faster, nimbler policy-making, and it allows for more natural experiments — different jurisdictions can try different things, and the best ideas will win over time.

However, we must also be clear-sighted on its limitations: devolution can cause suboptimal outcomes if every jurisdiction votes for its own interests but against the interests of the whole country.

I believe in preservation

It is hard not to feel sad when witnessing how Athenians demolished most of their neoclassical gems and how Beijingers razed their hutongs, to replace them with nondescript, grey apartment blocks, or how Greek islands are being converted from quaint destinations to neon-lit, music-blasting tourist traps. As a conservative, I think government has a role to play in preserving both the environment and cultural heritage: I realise this doesn’t quite make the cut as an ‘essential’ service, but I think it’s close enough, and when done right, the cost is low enough, that it is worth it.

But ‘done right’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Despite my deep appreciation for beautiful landscapes and buildings, I am very much a YIMBY — I think most western countries need to build way more housing and infrastructure, and I think construction is over-regulated. As with everything else in this section, there needs to be a balance.

So, what principles do we rely on to find this balance? The first is a common-sense approach to designating something as a listed building or area: such designations should be made on aesthetic value, not historical importance, with very few (if any) exceptions. It is one thing to say a particularly beautiful example of Victorian or Georgian architecture is worth preserving because it is inherently aesthetically valuable. It is a different thing to want to preserve ugly brutalist buildings (n.b.: ‘ugly brutalist’, not ‘ugly, brutalist’) or even any mediocre Victorian example just because they are examples of a period.

(Of course, sometimes, it’s not an individual building that has aesthetic value, but an entire village or neighbourhood. I think it’s possible to designate entire areas as worth preserving, though even there should be some pragmatism and flexibility. Changes that do not detract from the whole effect should be permitted rather than banned on principle.)

The second is taking a holistic approach to development (and this is where devolution can be harmful). It’s fine to restrict planning permissions for mega-hotels in already overcrowded islands like Santorini; but there are many areas in Greece that are far from historically or aesthetically important communities that could be developed. The government could work with the private sector to build infrastructure there (see the success of Costa Navarino).

I do not have a good solution for putting these principles into practice. I do know that most current planning systems, where too many parties have a veto, where the rules for what’s permissible and what is not are purposefully vague (so they’re harder to meet), and where consideration is paid on inconsequential things (like bats), are not fit for purpose.

Conservatism draws on tradition and respects history because they are good guides to the future. They should not be shackles.

Conclusion

Being a conservative requires real sacrifices: first and foremost, the emphasis on personal accountability means one cannot blame external circumstances for one’s failures; the belief in raising children and supporting family members places large demands on one’s time; the respect for tradition means there is less time for new experiences. It is also a particularly challenging philosophy for young people to adopt: it requires resisting fads, moderating enthusiasm in new ideas, discouraging rebellion, being judgemental, upholding social norms, prioritising family and traditions over new friendships and experiences — in short, giving up most hallmarks of youth. Conservatism is, in other words, a restrictive philosophy, in sharp contrast with more individualistic, progressive views that prioritise self-expression and fluidity over rigidity

It is also an unsatisfying philosophy, relying more on practice and intuition rather than clean-cut logic. Indeed, many sections in this post rely more on emotional and ethical appeal — trust me guys! — rather than logical appeal.

Still, it is a philosophy that is worth adopting. Conservatism engenders self-confidence, strong relationships and networks, stability, and a sense of belonging. These are worth its costs.

The second reason is the ethics implicit in her work: why is it that her novels are often described as cosy murder mysteries, to her heirs’ chagrin? It’s because the world she depicts in her stories is not just one of moral absolutes, but one where the unambiguous good inevitably triumphs over the unequivocal evil: there exists moral order. This is a comforting thought: as a friend of mine put it, ‘a world with Poirot in it is a better world’ (like me, my friend refuses to read or watch Curtain, in which Poirot dies.)

The aesthetic case for Christie

Per Aristotle, something is good in proportion to how well it achieves its purpose. The primary purpose of a whodunnit is to entertain; my argument is that Christie subordinates every aspect of her writing – her plot construction, her settings, her characters, her prose – to achieving that purpose. Her writing is good, not despite the fact that many of its elements can be seen as weak, but because of it: they are weak in some senses only because that’s what makes her books good at being crime novels. You can dismiss the goal to entertain as too shallow to merit aesthetic and artistic praise, but it requires skill; so at the very least, we ought to consider what it is that makes Christie’s novels work.

The most important thing in a crime story is the plot (at least, if it’s to be judged first and foremost as a crime story, which isn’t always the author’s intention – see, e.g., Inherent Vice). Back in 1928, another (now overlooked) crime novelist, S.S. Van Dine, came up with a list of 20 rules for whodunnits. As he put it,

“The detective story is a game. It is more--it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more resort to trickeries and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge game. He must outwit the reader, and hold the reader’s interest, through sheer ingenuity. For the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws--unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding: and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.”

As it happens, Christie broke several of these rules1, but she did it while adhering to the spirit of Van Dine’s thesis, something a lesser writer wouldn’t have been able to do: she was fair to the reader. She did not rely on fantastic devices (such as the ones found in Japanese classics – knives thrust across slanting houses, and elaborate contraptions to remove murder weapons from locked rooms), on random characters appearing out of nowhere, or on impossible deductions a la Sherlock Holmes.

But the difficulty isn’t in playing fair, it’s in playing fair and still winning the game. It’s hard to figure out who did it in a Christie novel – like many of her fans, I sometimes find myself unable to name the guilty party, even if I’ve read the book before. Though the clues are there, though you can go back and re-read the book and realise you had everything you needed to figure out the solution, you’ll most likely miss them, because Christie places them with such skill that she manages to misdirect your attention without cheating in any way. An under-appreciated aspect of this is that Christie created plots where at least three to five characters are possible suspects, each with a valid motive and the opportunity to commit the crime; this sounds pretty basic, but it’s hard to pull off – many a whodunnit is easy to solve because there is but one suspect (a good example is Whose Body?).

Besides the technical skill, there’s the sheer range of imaginative ideas: a book where seemingly random victims are killed in alphabetic order; one where every single character is murdered; one revolving around a game of bridge, with the participants’ playing style giving away the murderer; a couple where the narrator did it; one where a child did it; one where the murderer wants to get caught; one where a murder is announced in the papers; and one where a murderer conducts a murder rehearsal. Readers do not get tired of reading the same old thing, because the same old thing is not to be found in Christie’s novels.

But Christie’s books aren’t entertaining just because they’re fun puzzles. They also create an immersive, enjoyable ambience. There are two types of setting in Christie’s novels, both alluring. First, we have the glamorous: the luxury trains, cruise ships, country houses, and exotic locations. These are as inaccessible to the modern reader as they were to Christie’s contemporaries, though for different reasons: back then, they were prohibitively expensive. Nowadays, they are all more-or-less affordable, but because of that, they’re banal compared to how they’re portrayed in Christie’s books. I can tell you from personal experience that travelling on the Orient Express you’re more likely to meet retired teachers than exiled Russian duchesses and American gangsters. Either way, the sense of mystery found in her novels is absent from readers’ real lives. Second, we have the conventional: the sleepy village, the London mews. These may be more familiar, and hence less exciting, but Christie portrays them in such an idyllic fashion as to make them desirable. Many of us would love to live in St. Mary Mead, despite its having a murder rate that would humble prohibition-era Chicago.

As I mentioned earlier, critics complain that Christie’s characters are too simplistic, bordering on being stereotypes. That’s true, but a whodunit does not require complexity, depth, or even humanity: that would be too distracting, even distressing. It says a lot about Christie that she could write novels where children die without the readers being left scarred. (In fact, the only Christie novel I’ve never re-read is Endless Night, an atypical Christie with much greater psychological depth than her other works: I found it too sad to read a second time.) Christie’s great-grandson ponders how murder can ever be considered cosy, but the answer is that one hardly cares about the victims in Christie’s books. They were just not real enough. Complaining about the flatness of Christie’s characters is like complaining about the wooden acting in Yorgos Lanthimos’s films: it’s overlooking that it serves a purpose2.

I’m not making the absurd claim that any crime novel whose characters lack psychological depth is good. There are at least two ways for characters to be bad: they can be poorly constructed – inconsistent and incoherent – or, more commonly in crime fiction, they can just be insufferable. I for one can’t stand Sayers’s Lord Wimsey, with his irritating habit of breaking into song, and even Sherlock Holmes gets on my nerves with his mock surprise when others cannot follow his impossible deductions. Christie creates characters who are believable enough without their psychology becoming a distracting focal point.

Now we come to Christie’s style. It’s characterised by short sentences, descriptive enough to give an accurate picture of whatever she’s trying to convey without unnecessary fluff:

“Frank Carter was a fair young man of medium height. His appearance was cheaply smart. He talked readily and fluently. His eyes were set rather close together and they had a way of shifting uneasily from side to side when he was embarrassed. He was inclined to be suspicious and slightly hostile.”

Contrast this to Margery Allingham:

“He was a little man who sat huddled in his high-backed chair as if his backbone was not strong enough to support his frame upright. His crop of faded yellow hair was now almost white, and stood up like a hedge above a narrow forehead. But by far the most striking thing about him was the flesh-coloured plate with which clever doctors had repaired a war-mutilated face which must otherwise have been a horror too terrible to think upon. From where he sat, perhaps some fourteen feet away, Abbershaw could only just detect it, so skillfully was it fashioned. It was shaped roughly like a one-sided half-mask and covered almost all the top right-hand side of his face, and through it the Colonel’s grey-green eyes peered out shrewd and interested at the tableful of chattering young people.”

There’s nothing wrong with this (except for the clumsy ‘like a hedge above a narrow forehead”), but notice how long-winded it is compared to Christie’s description, without being all that much more evocative.

This isn’t to say Christie was a terse writer a la Hemingway. There is playfulness and humour in her prose:

“Mr Satterthwaite was glad that the young people had gone to bed. He was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting and crude. They lacked subtlety and as life went he had become increasingly fond of subtleties.”

Or

“Also, I had a friend – a friend who for many years never left my side. Occasionally of an imbecility to make one afraid, nevertheless he was very dear to me.”

In other words, Christie wrote simply but entertainingly. Once again, the form of her prose follows its function: it’s unobtrusive, it does not call attention to itself, but is nevertheless competent and well-crafted and funny. Contrast her to authors admired for their prose, like Hemingway or David Foster Wallace: their sentences may be beautiful as standalone artifacts, but they’re too self-conscious, even indulgent: almost any analysis of their work focuses on their style, rather than what they were trying to say. There’s no trace of such self-indulgence in Christie3.

I hope that it’s clear by now that when I grant the criticism that Christie’s characters are flat or that her prose is simple, I am not admitting they are bad. I am only conceding that they are not the reason for reading her books. C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay on aesthetics, where he argued that good art is that which rewards closer inspection, and bad art that which leaves us disappointed the more closely we look at it. By this definition, Christie produces good art: the more closely we look at her writing, the more we come to realise how well it fits what she’s trying to do.

Now, you can dismiss my assertion that readers of whodunnits do not want psychological depth, or prose that is beautiful in its own right.

This is a fair question! I’m not saying you can’t have both, that you should not read Raymond Chandler because his prose is too good. Just that you should not dismiss Christie, when the very lack of flair in her work works.

On Christie’s ethics

Why do readers find Christie’s books so comforting? I offer three reasons: the first is that there is little nuance or ambiguity when it comes to her ethics, with very few notable exceptions. The second is that her characters do not only have strong opinions on big things like murder, but also on the small things: whether one tells small lies, or even whether one wears turn down collars, can be signs of, if not moral, at the very least intellectual degeneracy. Her characters do not have uniform views on manners and etiquette, but they live in a world where manners and etiquette matter. Third, in Christie’s books it’s not just that good triumphs over evil, but that evil is seen as an anomaly whose correction is inevitable. These three things taken together mean that Christie’s world is fundamentally good and ordered.

Black-and-white morality is very common in pop culture fiction, so this isn’t a particularly distinguishing feature in Agatha Christie. What is noteworthy though is just how conventional Christie’s morality is. Some novels or films like to introduce pretend-complex characters or to inject a small degree of moral ambiguity: just enough to not be dismissed as basic, without it being so much as to make us question who’s the good guy. Not Christie. Even in the rare occasions when Christie introduces some nuance, as she does in Murder on the Orient Express, it’s her characters alone who grapple with their morality, not the reader. And it’s not just that Christie’s characters are unbending in their moral views, but that these moral views themselves are, as they themselves put it, so bourgeois, so uncritical, so… basic:

“I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it”.

Her characters do not think that taking a life is inherently wrong – they have no qualms executing murderers. What they believe in is due process and the law, a law that is to be respected unthinkingly and without utilitarian calculation. In One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, Poirot unmasks the killer even though he knows that killer is indispensable to England’s prosperity:

“Don’t you realise, Poirot, that the safety and happiness of the whole nation depends on me?”

“I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur. I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.”

In other words, there are no layers to explore here, no justification for why some things are good and some things bad. There are rules, and they need to be followed, because that’s the right thing to do, and that’s all there is to say about it.

This adherence to rules extends to things like whether one is allowed to eavesdrop, snoop through other people’s possessions, or wear improper clothes. True, Christie’s characters do not all share the same views on what proper behaviour is like, and they might break their own rules, but when they do so it must be for a very good reason, and they will still feel deeply uncomfortable about it.

“The Old School Tie is the Old School Tie, and there are certain things (I know from experience) that the Old School Tie does not do! One of those things, Monsieur Fanthorp, is to butt into a private conversation unasked when one does not know the people who are conducting it.”

Or,

“Quite calmly he untied the ribbon and began to open out the letters.

‘Poirot,’ I cried, scandalised. ‘You really can’t do that. It isn’t playing the game.’”

This respect for decorum and protocol was comforting to Christie’s contemporaries: Christie wrote in a rapidly changing era, when technological progress and the world wars led to massive socio-economic upheaval. Her basically Victorian outlook4 gave readers a sense of stability. This is even more true for us modern fans: the collapse of strictly enforced norms is liberating but also bewildering and anxiety-inducing. There are few or no guidelines for anything – what clothes we should wear, how we should address each other (even more challenging in languages like French or German that have formal modes of address!), how much or whether to tip, how to give a compliment… no wonder the world where there are prescriptions for these things is appealing (if only because the readers are spared the dark and oppressive side of these norms).

Finally, the impression created by her books is that evil is not a big part of life, but a deviation from the norm. This isn’t so much a view expressed by her characters (or the implied crime rate) but by their attitudes. There is a prevailing sense of cheerfulness, of optimism, of the belief that not only their own moral worldview is unassailably right, but that it will prevail. This is the differentiating characteristic between Christie and authors such as Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, or even Arthur Conan Doyle: their characters are also incorruptible, but they are cynical. They perceive the worlds they inhabit as hostile, and themselves as rocks in seas of immorality. Maybe that makes them all the more virtuous – fighting for lost causes – but it makes their stories pessimistic, jarring, and disturbing. In contrast, reading Christie, you know that everything will be alright: Poirot will gather all the suspects in a room, he will analyse the case methodically, and will reveal the perpetrator. This, and the perpetrator’s comeuppance, are inevitable.

In summary, Christie’s writing is timeless. Her aesthetic achievement can be compared to a Swatch watch: it’s easy to dismiss it as basic and undeserving of attention, but when you realise the skill it takes to ensure that every sentence, every character, every interjection of humour or even meta reference fits and interlocks like quartz crystals and oscillators to produce a precisely functioning whole, you can’t but admire the craftsmanship. And her ethics serve to remind us that unquestioning faith in a few basic rules can be more comforting (and perhaps edifying) than studying Aristotle or Rawls.

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Curiosity

Last year, I participated in a product panel where I was asked to give advice on what young people can do to manage their professional growth in the age of AI. I said they should be curious. The funny thing is that it’s trite, oft-repeated advice, but in fact the cultural and economic structure of modern society tends to stifle curiosity rather than encourage it.

This is probably a good thing in aggregate: I’m not one of those romantics who rail against capitalism because it’s alienating; you can’t create mass wealth in any system that is not alienating. Producing things at scale is complex, and it is impossible for anyone to understand the whole system end-to-end. If we all pursued our curiosity to the full, nothing would get done. Our economy is designed around hyper-specialisation, and in general, this works: you can produce something that someone else uses as input for their work, without knowing anything about their line of business. So even though we praise curiosity, in practice the systems around us discourage it: if students follow their natural curiosity at the expense of their coursework, they will fail their exams. If engineers follow their interests rather than working on their deliverables, they’ll be let go. If academics neglect publishing, or cut corners in the process, they will not advance. Though people around you tell you to be curious, structures tell you to stay in your lane. (Unless you are exceptionally brilliant. The system needs its mavericks, entrepreneurs, and the avant-garde to prevent stagnation. If you are truly great, you can get away with breaking the conventions and processes that keep the whole thing chugging.)

But I think there is room for most of us to be a little more curious than we are, even if we’re not geniuses, without breaking the system. I think this is good for our wellbeing (engaging more with the world around us makes us happier) but also, in times of rapid change, good for our careers. Being curious, well-rounded, and able to learn quickly means we can adapt more easily.

Though curiosity is often thought more of as a character trait than a skill, it is something that can also be developed. I am not always curious, and like most people, I often do things on auto-pilot or take things for granted; but I try to do the following things to flex my curiosity muscles:

• Notice when I’m not being curious: every now and then, I ask myself whether I really understand something I think I know. Usually the answer is no: think of everyday concepts to which we refer, or things we use, and ask whether you can define them or explain them. What does ‘time’ mean? How is wine made?

• Ask why things are done in a particular way. For example, why is it so rare to see french shutters in London, even though Paris (which has quite similar climate) is full of them? (Two big reasons apparently: first, though the climate is similar, London is much windier. But second, after the Great Fire of London, Parliament passed an act that required window frames to be recessed within brick walls, which makes attaching french shutters harder. The act has been repealed, but the practice persists, since new buildings generally have to fit in with the aesthetic of other buildings in the area.)

• Name things: I realised recently that I don’t know the names for many, many things I see around me. For example: the decorative lines on furniture (fluting); the different types (orders) of columns; the kind of column that’s built into a wall, rather than be freestanding (pilaster); etc. Or I accept the name we give to something without really understanding it (e.g. what’s the difference between realism and naturalism? What’s a fish? (Most everyday markers of fish (e.g. scales and gills) are both not unique to fish, nor are they found in all fish.))

• Keep a notebook where you jot down things you learn: my wife and I got into the habit of doing this, though I’ve dropped it recently. It’s a good practice though!

• Assume something is possible: when solving a problem, it helps to start by assuming it is solvable. This is something Elon Musk is really good at — his principle is that something is feasible as long as it’s not prohibited by physics. This unlocks curiosity, because it forces you to think, if this is solvable, what are the steps to solve it? I know this sounds so obvious it’s not worth saying, but it really is a big mindset shift. Linked to this, one thing I’ve noticed is that many people ask how to do something without even trying to find out themselves — let me google that for you is a thing for a reason. In principle, there’s no reason why asking a human how to do something, rather than asking google, is an indication of lack of curiosity, but in my experience it absolutely is: people who ask google, who try to find things out for themselves, seem to be more curious and better at picking up new skills.

Sophistication

A common alleged marker of sophistication is jadedness and cynicism. If you want to appear cool, cosmopolitan, worldly, you are told you have to not appear too eager, earnest, or excited.

No matter what you do, you should look like you’ve been there, done that before. If you show too much excitement at climbing aboard a yacht or private plane, or tasting a Michelin meal or a good Bordeaux vintage, or visiting Annabel’s, or buying your first Rolex, you’re signalling that you’re new-money, gauche, a hick. In fact, you’re parochial for making these references in the first place. Everyone knows that Burgundy’s where it’s at, that only wannabes go to Annabel’s, and that no-one with taste would ever be seen wearing a Rolex. And God help you if you put effort into anything. You should definitely be good at things, but it must be effortless. Trying too hard isn’t chic. It’s not aristocratic.

Well. I’m here to tell you this advice is categorically wrong, both descriptively and prescriptively. On the descriptive side, if we use proxies such as class, education, and travel for sophistication, most advice you’ve read about how to appear more educated, upper-class, or well-traveled than you are is useless (and this includes the statements above). It’s not that these groups don’t have distinguishing characteristics, but a) as Nancy Mitford has written, most advice on how to be U is decidedly non-U, and b) joylessness and lack of excitement is not one of those distinguishing characteristics. In fact, the most U thing you can do is not care whether or not you appear U. Suppressing exuberance for the sake of appearing sophisticated is the least sophisticated thing you could do.

As for the advice being prescriptive, why would you ever heed advice that tries to stamp out your joie de vivre and your effort to better yourself? What’s the point in being cool if being cool means you can’t have fun?

Ignore the naysayers. Do your thing.

Grade inflation & cash-cow degrees

We all know grade inflation is a thing. Almost 30% of students achieve a First, about twice as many as in 2011 (though it’s come down a little recently), and almost everyone gets at least a 2:1.

In addition, what I call ‘and’ degrees (computer science and management; economics and business) and other cash-cow degrees have proliferated. These are degrees offered even by prestigious universities to generate income, but whose curricula are less rigorous than their standard courses (PPE - Politics, Philosophy, and Economics is the outlier here: it’s still a prestigious degree, despite the performance of its recipients in recent years).

There are many problems with these trends that others have analysed in depth, but the most obvious one, and the one I’ve noticed personally, is that the signalling value of a degree, even at a top university, has collapsed. I regularly interview graduates from the UK’s top universities, all of whom have at least 2:1s, many of whom have firsts, and most of whom even have masters, often with distinctions. Yet many fail to answer relatively basic questions (I asked for an example of innovative problem solving, and a candidate said they used their phone to translate from Spanish to English when they were on vacation).

Unlike many grumbling millennials, I don’t think there’s an actual deterioration in the quality of graduates, but I think it has become much harder to spot the good ones. This is bad for everyone. It’s bad for employers, who must invest much more effort in screening, but it’s also harmful for students. Since they can’t rely on grades alone to secure a job, students must now fill their CVs with spring work placements, summer internships, leadership (not mere participation) in multiple student societies, and other extra-curricular activities. Not only does this suck up time, but it’s also soul-destroying: I’m sure students know, deep-down, how superficial their engagement with the myriads of activities they undertake to pad their resumes really is. When I was at uni, I could focus on my studies, on participating in a couple of activities that I really enjoyed, and on courting my wife. My CV would never make it past the screening stage these days.

Also, most companies are not very good at screening candidates, and so students secure jobs for which they’re not actually qualified. Again, this is really bad: employers have to invest significant time and effort managing them out, and, needless to say, this process is pretty crushing for recent graduates. It is better not to get a job you can’t do (and which you will not enjoy), than to get it and be fired.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this. It’s just a sad state of affairs. All I can say is, if you’re an academic, stop making excuses and start grading students fairly.

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At around the same time, I worked for P&G’s factories in China, where engineers and I evaluated projects to reduce manufacturing costs. We squeezed every dime of excess we could find: one memorable proposal from a site manager was to limit the supply of toilet paper — a suggestion that the HR lead angrily and correctly shut down (but which the Chinese government adopted).

It seems absurd that one business unit would spend serious money on shiny posters and display cabinets, while another part of the business would closely monitor its air conditioning bills, but it shows that in most domains, bad business decisions are rarely the outcome of imperfect information or inadequate technology, but the result of poor incentives, org structures, and managerial systems.

All this is to say that at the micro level, there is a lot of misplaced optimism in AI’s potential to directly improve productivity and efficiency. But there is a great deal of nuance in this statement.

On paper, AI will increase productivity, in the sense that companies will be able to reduce headcount. Already it is trivial for companies to connect AI agents to their data sources, ask questions in plain English, and get thorough analysis that is surprisingly accurate. In the past, companies employed armies of analysts to answer questions such as: why did our business unit’s average revenue per unit go up? Should we run a 50% price reduction promotion, or a buy-one-get-one-free promotion? In which city do we have the highest market share? Should we offer annual subscriptions? Etc. Now you can have an AI agent answer these in minutes.

However! First of all, companies never needed armies of analysts to answer these questions in the first place. In my experience, the most productive analysts were always able to produce 10x the output of the average analysts. But in the past, many managers were rewarded by growing the size of their teams, and so they inflated headcount. Now we’re moving to a market that incentivises AI adoption, so managers are encouraged to show token usage and reduce headcount. Many will find that they don’t even need to use AI all that much: they can cut the size of their teams and attribute the efficiency to AI. I suspect many will do that.

So AI itself is unlikely to be the real reason for efficiency gains in terms of headcount reduction. Second, it’s even more unlikely to lead to better decision-making in most companies. There are some companies that are hyper-optimised, and there AI may be able to add value by helping managers identify ever-diminishing marginal impacts. But in most companies I’ve worked for, there’ve been big fat juicy low-hanging fruit just hanging there waiting to be plucked. The reasons they hadn’t yet been are almost always political. Let me give another example: one of my biggest successes at Google was working with GTM to establish sales teams to sell the company’s Universal App Campaigns. These were ads for clients’ apps (as opposed to their websites). It didn’t take a genius to make the case that consumers use apps at ever-increasing rates; the difficulty wasn’t in pulling the numbers together, it was in doing roadshows and convincing market VPs to re-allocate resources, which would (as always) ruffle feathers. Our job in pulling numbers together wasn’t to inform; it was to protect — to give people making decisions the arguments to push back against naysayers. You don’t need AI to uncover such insights. AI won’t make your company produce better goods and services. Cutting red tape and politics might; which, yes, easy to say hard to do — but if you can’t cut politics anyway, why do you think AI will help?

I said earlier that there is misplaced optimism at the micro level, by which I mean within individual companies. Let’s now turn to the macro-level, meaning the economy as a whole. Here there is a real possibility that AI will be beneficial, if it leads to breakthrough innovation. Pioneering companies might use AI to discover new drugs, build functional quantum computers, invent new materials, produce cheaper energy, and reduce wasteful friction and coordination costs. All this may well happen.

But until then, I worry that many people will mistake productivity growth for increase in wealth. Historically, the two go hand-in-hand: the more productive we are, the more things we can produce. But the two do not necessarily go together. If the increase in productivity comes from eliminating latent bloat, and that bloat cannot be put to other productive use, then we’ll just end up with more unemployed people and the same amount of wealth. There won’t be more things to go around; only fewer people producing them, and able to afford them.

In other words, like many others, I worry about inequality. Unless we bank on AI’s transformative impacts outlined above, I disagree with the optimists who think that the jobs lost because of AI will be offset by other, new, AI-enabled roles. Sure, this will happen to an extent: for every SAAS company that dies because its clients can now vibe-code internal tools, there will be new engineer roles created in those clients. But since most of the jobs displacement will come from the elimination of bloat, and because that bloat was engaged in white-collar jobs supporting the provision of services, and because I doubt we need more services, there won’t be much for most of the people who lose their jobs to do. Most of us don’t need more apps (since the advent of AI we’ve seen more apps than ever being published, but fewer being used); we need better houses, furniture, food, clothes. The people who’ll be fired because AI took their jobs don’t have the skills to produce these goods.

But I also have nits to pick with my fellow inequality worriers. For one thing, unlike many of them, I don’t think inequality is morally reprehensible. If some people are 10x as productive as others, it seems fair to me that they earn 10x as much. That said, pragmatically, something has to be done to anticipate the effects of inequality and unemployment, otherwise we’ll see more polarisation, division, and hatred. The obvious answer proposed by many is tax. Dario Amodei is calling for universal basic income to account for the impact AI will have on the job market, but it will be practically impossible to introduce universal income equal to the salaries of the people who’ll be laid off. A data scientist on $200k won’t feel grateful for $30k in free government money.

What we need instead is government effort to produce more of the things we want. First, make it easier for people to make things: de-regulate, open up job markets by coming down hard on licensing, re-open trade, stop NIMBYs, cut down red tape. Second, instead of universal income, offer training: help data scientists learn how to install pipes, make furniture, ferment yoghurt, cut cloth, plant tomatoes, whatever.

Companies are using AI as an excuse for realising efficiency gains they could have delivered decades ago. Maybe governments can do the same.

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1. Becca Rothfeld claims liberalism doesn’t have defining aesthetics and that’s bad

2. Oz says liberalism used to have its own aesthetics but it’s lost them because it transformed ‘from a project to a procedure’

3. Cass Sunstein says liberalism doesn’t have aesthetics and that’s fine

I side with Sunstein: liberalism encompasses a large spectrum of political opinions, but celebration of diversity and belief in freedom of thought and expression are core in almost all of them. So, of course, how can there be a unifying aesthetic to liberalism? The whole point of the project is to let different ideas flourish. The great thing about liberalism is that it produces a huge range of wildly different movements that co-exist: the high-brow and the low-brow, the crass and the refined, the esoteric and the accessible, the conservative and the revolutionary, the conventional and the avant-garde. Never before in history have we had so much basically free access to so many different ideas and styles; never before has a system been so tolerant even of movements that seek to undermine and overthrow it.

The problem with liberalism’s aesthetic isn’t that it does not have one, but that a narrow cultural class projects one onto it: one that is grating to the most readers. Look at the first and second links above: their style is stereotypical of the people who write for premium publications — the style of elitist erudition, high-brow snark, obscure-artist-or-philosopher namedropping, Latin or Greek vocabulary where everyday English would suffice; the kind of writing that features things like ‘who is [liberalism’s] Riefenstahl?’, ‘this has all the thumos of a castrated newt’, and that refers to popular films as ‘a cinematic scourge’. In short, a tone that is contemptuous of everything the average person likes.

There are many reasons why belief in liberalism is waning, and I don’t claim that journalists’ grating tone is the most important one (if I had to choose the most important factor, I’d say it’s that liberalism is a victim of its own success: though it has massively increased quality of life, it has increased expectations even beyond that, and the gap is what’s causing dissatisfaction); but it is a factor, and since we’re discussing aesthetics here, it’s what I’ll focus on.

Many of us feel we’re being talked down to: our tastes and preferences are dismissed as meaningless slop, if not morally offensive. No wonder so many are turning against ‘the elites’. Now, as many people have pointed before, ‘elites’ is a misleading term, because there are different groups of elites, many of which intensely dislike each other (most people speak of cultural vs business elites, though this is too broad a categorisation; e.g. within business elites, you have old-school industrialists, billionaire tech entrepreneurs, and corporate executives; these groups don’t see eye-to-eye either). But most elites across groups do have things in common: they are generally well-educated and usually rich (sure, newspaper editors and top civil servants don’t consider themselves rich, and compared to business executives they aren’t; but their salaries are still multiples of the national average). And so they are lumped together in the eyes of a lot of people. When one group talks down to them, the people respond with hostility to all of them. As a result, an increasing number of people distrust everyone at the top of the liberal order — politicians, journalists, business leaders, academics. So, when someone like Trump comes along — someone who, though an elite himself, creates an image as an enemy of the elites, an image that’s reinforced by the hostility most elites show towards him — many people vote for him.

But it’s not just the masses: cultural elites are themselves turning against liberalism. They may still consider themselves liberal, but they blame most of the ills they perceive in society on liberalism’s permissiveness, mainly as it’s expressed through liberalism’s manifestation in the economy — capitalism: it’s the fault of Netflix that films are dumbed down; it’s the fault of TikTok that people have short attention spans; it’s the fault of Youtube’s algorithm that people are radicalised. In fact, the relationship between capitalist output and consumer preferences goes both ways: corporations don’t so much shape preferences as respond to them (though the two are reinforcing each other). Netflix films are dumbed down because people watch them while scrolling on their phones, and they struggle to follow anything that’s not heavy on exposition. Taylor Swift is not rich because Spotify and record labels force her music on us, but because we choose to listen to her albums on repeat and pay hundreds of pounds for concert tickets. TikTok would never have taken off if people didn’t like short-form content.

But many elite liberals don’t see it that way. They feel that capitalism is not producing the outcomes they want, and the content they believe the rest of us should consume, and so capitalism is at fault, and companies must be better regulated, and social media banned (at least for children), and ticket prices should be capped, and, and, and. But this response is itself illiberal: though you can be a liberal and believe in market regulation (arguably, this is the main difference between liberalism and libertarianism: liberals believe in market regulation, with a view to increasing fairness or safety), you cannot really claim a liberal mindset when your main beef with the market is that it’s not producing the kind of art you think it should. It’s very arrogant to want to reform a system because the mainstream aesthetics it produces aren’t to your liking.

Though I am critical of this attitude, I do have sympathy for it. I don’t like many of capitalism’s outputs: I don’t like factory farming, I don’t like Starbucks, I don’t like TikTok, I don’t like Kindles, I don’t like fast fashion, I don’t like gyms, I don’t like Scandi minimalism, I don’t like that every high street looks the same. But I would rather live in a bad culture that is bad because most people around me like bad things, than a culture that is bad because someone thought their definition of good is objectively right, and therefore forced it on everyone else. The difference is that in the former system, if I don't like something, I can try to change it.

Here I have to preempt a common counterargument: we’re not calling for regulation to ban the Avengers, people say, but to ensure that capitalism’s winner-takes-all dynamic does not result in only the Avengers and artless sequels getting produced. The fallacy in this argument is that it confuses concentration with diversity: yes, consumption of pretty much any art form is pretty uniform; but access to different ideas and forms has massively expanded. It is not true that only Marvel films get made: it is easier than ever for anyone to produce and distribute films, songs, books, clothes, furniture, craftworks, anything, and so more of these things are being produced. If your problem with capitalism is that it results in homogeneity, well, that claim is factually wrong. To use an artless analogy: if culture is a buffet, capitalism has hugely enlarged the dishes on offer; it’s just that most people choose to eat the same course.

You might still object to this state of affairs: you might still dislike the fact that the Avengers gross more than a million indie films put together, and Beyonce is a billionaire while your incredibly talented singer roommate is penniless. But why do you dislike it? If it is because you think this means indie art forms will disappear, I’ve already addressed that: the opposite is happening, indie artefacts are proliferating. If it’s because you think the gap between megastars and everyone else is fundamentally unfair, well… that may be so. But two things to keep in mind: first, the fact that the gap is widening doesn’t mean that indie artists have it worse than before. The penniless artist has always been a stereotype. Second, though you may want to blame liberal society and capitalism for this gap, your real enemy here is that many people simply prefer to pay hundreds of pounds to see Beyonce than go to an indie gig. Perhaps capitalism encourages this to an extent, but I think it’s implausible that pop fans are brainwashed zombies. They have agency. If you are unhappy about how they exercise it, about the choices they make, then instead of trying to tear down the system, and instead of talking down to them, and berating them, try to explain why they should seek entertainment and edification elsewhere. And don’t do it by attacking the things they like; do it by extolling the things you think they should like.

Which brings me to what liberalism really needs: a change not only in the substance that liberal leaders have to offer, but also in their tone. (It is interesting to me that substance-wise, populists and centre liberals can be surprisingly similar: both have a tendency to pander to the voice of the people — the former through instinct, the latter technocratically, via polls and focus groups — rather than guiding, educating, and uplifting their audience. Trump’s TACOs the moment his latest gamble arouses ire is very similar to Starmer’s 15-or-so u-turns.)

Though populists’ and liberals’ rhetoric and tone are different, they both start from the premise that everything is broken (Make America Great Again), even when things are better than ever. If everyone campaigns on a platform of fixing a broken system, instead of elevating and continuing the progress of one that has already produced the most wealth and cultural and artistic diversity in the history of humanity, then most of us will come to accept the delusion that are stuck in a downward spiral as fact.

Our elites can and should do better. They should be more optimistic, and kinder: they should try to persuade without contempt and snark. They should celebrate what works. Instead of bemoaning the pockets of decay in mainstream culture, they should laud the examples of excellence they witness. And… if they feel something is lacking, then they should produce it. If critics like Rothfeld and Oz feel liberalism has lost its aesthetic mojo, they have the power (and the platform!) to define a new aesthetic.

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In my experience, this isn’t quite accurate. Expanding a little on Karlsson’s definition, I think agency requires curiosity and imagination (to come up with ideas), initiative (to start doing something about them), and perseverance (to see them through). I don’t think children have these to a larger extent than adults, but I do think there are things parents can do to help their children make the most of what they do have. Agency isn’t something children possess and adults lose; it’s something that has to be actively cultivated from an early age.

Curiosity

Children ask a lot of questions: an episode of QI claimed that children ask 107 questions per hour on average. This can’t be true — that would mean one question every thirty seconds throughout the day. But granting it actually proves that children aren’t genuinely curious — or at the very least, they lack the attention span to get answers to their questions: thirty seconds isn’t enough to hear and process a response. Parents who take their children’s questions seriously, and try to answer the countless ‘whys’, often find their kids’ interest fading after a sentence or two.

Still. The fact children ask many questions is a good foundation for developing long-lasting curiosity. I think parents can show children how to find answers, and help them realise that doing so can be exciting. Technology makes this easier than ever: children ask questions that even most educated grown-ups cannot answer, so parents can find answers to those questions in front of their children. I often put GPT on loudspeaker, and ask my children’s question (and then encourage them to ask follow-up questions). (The downside to this is that GPT has a very confused idea of my personal interests:

)

Basically, if you want children to do something, you need to do that something yourself. If you want them to be genuinely curious, you need to be so too.

Imagination

Children are brimming with imagination! say people. Counterpoint:

He has since acquired two more dinosaurs. Their names are dinosaur’s friend and dino.

Yes, children often play pretend games (where they dedicate 90% of their time to setting up the game, rather than actually doing anything: ‘Christopher pretend that we’re X.’ ‘Yes, and pretend we’re doing Y’. ‘Yes, and pretend that Z’. It’s like they’re in improv). But that doesn’t mean their games are particularly imaginative. When I discussed this with my wife, she pointed out that children are likely using these games to make sense of reality. Their games often involve playing teachers or parents (which, btw, is a great way to learn how you come across as a parent), so they are more like exercises in empathy: the children are putting themselves into the shoes of their parents (sometimes literally).

So we need to distinguish between imagination in the sense of playing games, and imagination in the sense of creative power. Unfortunately, I think the latter is a skill that some people are born with: some people have a truly unique way of looking at things, and are able to come up with novel ideas, worlds, and stories: they are original. It’s not a skill that all children have but which only a few maintain in adulthood: rather, like intelligence or height, it’s an attribute some have from birth, and others lack.

This doesn’t mean that those of us who aren’t born with exceptional imagination are hopeless. You don’t need to be truly original to come up with a good story (though you do have to learn what makes for a good story). And there is something that children do have to a larger extent than most adults: a sense of wonder. Children find things exciting, they aren’t jaded. Their imagination might lack the power to create fantastic worlds, but it can be fired up, and it lets them enjoy the worlds created by others (or even just properly appreciate the world God has created for us). Many adults let this atrophy. Sometimes this happens because we let daily stress and chores get in the way of appreciating things around us; but even worse, sometimes it happens because we’re told that being earnest and excitable is childish, naive, and something to be embarrassed about (these are the very qualities Dostoyevsky’s Idiot exhibits in the eponymous novel). One thing you can do as a parent is protect your children from this tendency.

(However! As a European who is exposed to earnest and excited Americans on the internet, I must caution against earnestness killing humour. You can be passionate and open to ideas without taking yourself too seriously. )

Initiative

Initiative is realising and acting upon the fact that you can just do things. As with imagination, I think some people are born with a higher proclivity towards taking action. At the same time, it’s probably true that children are more inclined to do things than adults, and that this is often beaten out of them as they grow up. A child sees a blank wall and writes on it; or they see a slide in the playground and they try and climb it; or they try to serve their own breakfast.

They then get told off for doing these things, sometimes rightly (no-one likes to clean paint off walls), sometimes wrongly (Jesus Christ, let your child try and climb the slide, worst case they fall and get a little bump), and they learn that acting on their initiative gets them into trouble much more than it earns them praise.

The difficulty is in communicating to the child that, when you tell them off for something they did, you are not penalising the fact that they exercised their own judgement, but that they got that particular judgement wrong, and that this should not prevent them from making their own decisions in the future.

A secondary challenge is that letting your children do things themselves is tiring. When they serve their own breakfast, or try to help with cooking, they are guaranteed to make a mess. There are many times when I stop my children from helping and doing things themselves, because it’ll be much faster if I do it for them — but this is clipping their wings. It takes conscious effort to hold back and let them take the initiative.

Perseverance

Now we come to the thing that most children (and adults) lack: perseverance. Many of us are inclined to procrastinate or to put in the minimum effort required, unless this tendency is checked by one or more of the following:

• deriving pleasure from the work itself (rather than seeing it purely as a means to an end)

• an appreciation of excellence, and a sense of duty or commitment

• incentives

Parents can teach all of these to at least some extent, yet most parents (including myself) often fail to do so.

Work for its own sake

It’s a hackneyed observation that the moment something is labelled ‘work’ it becomes less fun. But the reverse of this observation is equally true — if you reframe a chore as a fun activity, it becomes enjoyable, as Tom Sawyer proved so memorably when he got his friends to pay him to paint his aunt’s fence.

Parents can do a lot to make activities including learning and chores fun, and to teach children that how they choose to see the world is within their control. As always, role-modelling matters: if you are grumpy when you do your chores, then your child will resent doing them too. If you make things like cooking or setting the table fun, then kids will be begging you to do them.

Making mundane things fun is easier than it sounds. You can see setting the table as a boring activity in which you’re placing objects on a surface without looking at them. Or you can buy nice glasses and linen napkins and candles that you enjoy looking at, touching, and lighting (striking a match is actually very satisfying!), and you can appreciate the way it looks when you’re done — and your children will too.

Appreciation of excellence & duty

Many of us push through unpleasant or boring work by anticipating the satisfaction of having done something well, or by holding ourselves to a minimum standard even when we’d rather stop. This doesn’t come naturally. We are hard-wired to discount the future and overweight the present.

Parents can help children moderate this instinct by praising genuinely good work, by reminding them of past successes (‘remember how proud you felt when we framed that picture?’), and, crucially, by giving honest feedback when children do not apply themselves.

Most parents and teachers fail at this last part. They either have absurdly low expectations of children, or they are not honest with children when they (the children) don’t do as well as they could have done — I call this the tyranny of low standards.

You can see it everywhere: in sports classes where children perform exercises badly and no one corrects them; in school or drama performances where the focus is solely on memorising lines rather than delivering them well; in drawings praised and hung up regardless of care or effort. The message is consistent: performative effort matters more than doing the thing properly.

I understand the reason behind this: it’s the fear of discouraging children. The thinking is that if a child tries something, and they’re reprimanded for low effort, they will just stop trying in the future. But the underlying assumption here is that it’s better to do something badly than to not do it at all. Is this really true? I am not so sure. I think it’s important to teach children to apply themselves — even if this means causing them minor upset and discomfort at times. Children are much more capable than you think, and they can tolerate gentle pushing. We can teach them to value good work, and to disdain low effort.

Incentives

Finally, incentives. There’s a lot of debate on whether it’s a good idea to bribe children to do things that are good for them. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done it — I much prefer to rely on the previous two approaches to encourage (what I consider to be) good work and effort. I think they are more reliable in the long term.

I’m also lucky in that my children enjoy the kinds of things I’d want to incentivise them to do, such as doing sports or reading books. But in principle, I have no objection at all to incentives: if all else fails, and you can’t get your child to put real effort in something you think is beneficial for them, try setting a price for it. As long as they learn to apply themselves, I reckon it’s worth it. The one exception here is things that children have a duty to do — e.g. help around the house.

So there we are. I think it’s silly to draw a distinction between children and adults when it comes to most character traits; but I think there’s a lot we can do as parents to encourage positive traits and control the impact of negative ones.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy…

• Don’t ban social media for kids

• What makes a good parent

• Contra chattel childhood

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I am against social media bans for three reasons. The first is the traditional classic liberal argument is that in general, we shouldn’t be banning things unless they really are causing serious harm. I know most people have an instinctive dislike of kids using social media, and I know many are convinced that social media use leads to irreparable harm, even death, but the data does not support this. Here are GPT’s, Gemini’s, and Claude’s summaries of studies on the impact of social media on children, which are pretty much unanimous: most studies do find a statistically significant correlation between social media use and negative mental health outcomes, but the magnitude of the impact is small, and there is ongoing debate on whether the link between the two is causal.

I know it’s customary to point to charts showing mental health deterioration among teenagers, and to attribute that to social media:

But this attribution is too glib. Many other factors could explain this rise: there is ever-increasing academic pressure and higher economic insecurity; there is technology more generally, rather than social media specifically, which in turns means children are spending less time outside or socialising in person with their friends; there is safetyism, with more parents never letting their kids out of their sight — we complain that our children are cooped up inside, but what else can they do if we don’t let them go out?; and there is less stigma attached to mental health (which is good), as well as increasing pathologisation of normal feelings (which is bad), leading to more reports of poor mental health. My view is that of these, the largest factor is technology and short-form content in general. You might think I’m splitting hairs, but the distinction is worth making as I’ll explain further on.

(By the by, as Eli Stark-Elster points out, school has a far, far worse impact on children than social media: suicide rate among children is up to 25% lower during summer months, when school is out, than it is the rest of the year; children themselves say that school is pretty much the most stressful thing in their lives, with 88% attributing stress to academic pressure, and only 28% to social pressures. So, improving the school experience would do far more for children’s welfare than banning them from opening YouTube accounts.)

The second argument against the ban is that social media can be good for children. My son has been creating stop-motion videos with his cousin since he was five; I have no objection whatsoever to his creating a YouTube account to upload them and share them with the world, and I find it insulting that my choice as a parent gets arbitrarily overridden by the state. If my daughter gets into coding when she’s 12, why shouldn’t she be able to discuss her projects on Reddit, or find collaborators online? If my children decide they want to write reviews on Goodreads or Substack, why should they not be allowed to do so until they are 16? Like everything else, social media are tools that can be used well, or can be used badly; and like everything else, most people use them badly, that’s true, but the benefits of good use far outweigh the harms of bad use. Good use of social media can give us our future poets, authors, journalists, film-makers, engineers, founders, scientists. Taking this away from children is doing us all a disservice.

But the third and main reason I object so strongly to the bans is moral. Plutarch wrote over 2,000 years ago that

the politician, after gaining power and trust, must then attempt to train the character of the citizens.

Which is to say, politicians ought to aim to make better citizens, if not better people, out of their voters. One of the most important aspects of bettering your character is to assume personal (in this case parental) responsibility.

I get why people want to steer children away from social media, even if they do have positive impacts. But if your child spends more time on their phone than talking to you, or playing outside, why not start by asking whether there’s anything you can do differently instead of asking the government to step in? And do you think that governement intervention would magically fix things? It’d turn your child to an eager reader? They’d suddenly start going out with their friends? They’d join you for dinner and make good conversation with you?

More likely, they’d switch to something else to do on their phone. Play Candycrush or watch Netflix, or whatever it is teenagers do now. The problem isn’t that your kids are addicted to social media, it is that you did not teach them to do and enjoy other things. You could have chosen not to give your children a tablet and unrestricted screen time before they could crawl. You could have chosen to enforce parental controls. You could have spent more time doing activities with them. You could have played board games with them. You could have taught them to appreciate nature. You could have taken them to museums and galleries.

If you didn’t do these things, if you’re still not doing them, that’s on you. If you turn to the government to fix what you think is the cause of your child’s unhappiness, you will never confront your own mistakes, and you will therefore not address the true underlying causes of children’s unhappiness.

In other words: you, the parent, are responsible for raising your child. Own that accountability. Don’t delegate it to the government.

Now, I know, you have several objections to my argument. Let’s go through them:

I do all the things you mention above, and my kids still want their tablets and TikTok

Yes, this will happen! Even if you do everything right, your kids will still face peer pressure, and even if they grew up reading books, they’ll still be drawn to short-form content. Most adults I know get addicted to doomscrolling, regardless of how well-adjusted they are. I lose myself doomscrolling.

But again, it’s your responsibility as a parent to stand firm: insist on good habits, enforce simple rules such as no phones at school, the dinner table, when watching a film together, or before bed. This really isn’t hard, especially if you’ve been enforcing these rules from a young age, which most people don’t.

It’s a coordination problem! I can’t unilaterally stop my child from using social media if all their friends are on them

You can unilaterally stop your child from using social media. You’d have to weigh whether the harms from social media use are higher or lower than the harm from social exclusion, and if you think they’re higher, you’ll have to accept the trade-off.

But you don’t have to cut off social media entirely anyway! You can just teach your children to use them responsibly, and to not be glued to their phones, which is after all a better outcome: bans are always crude tools. Teaching responsibility, moderation, and resilience are better. And this is why the distinction on whether it’s technology in general vs social media in particular that’s the cause of malaise is important: if it is technology rather than social media, there is less reason to enforce an absolute ban on the latter, and to focus on simply reducing screen time, which is much easier and doesn’t come with social exclusion.

Besides, a ban would actually magnify social exclusion effects in two ways: first, what you’ll end up with is that the children who are more likely to follow rules will be excluded by the children who will find ways around the ban. Second, you’re punishing the kids who are facing exclusion already, and who find refuge in online communities.

Check your privilege — easy for you to moderate your kids’ use of technology, it’s much harder for [a single mother / someone on benefits / insert other underprivileged group]

Even overlooking the snobbery of suggesting that lack of privilege results in bad parenting, middle class professionals support the social media bans just as much if not more than everyone else. It’s not lack of privilege that is making parents make bad choices when it comes to technology.

There is no better proof on this than observing families during flights or train journeys. This is time where you, the parent, have nothing else to do: you can choose to see it as constructive one-on-one time with your children. You can read books together, draw, talk, write stories, play. Yet what do 99% of parents do? They give a tablet to their child before the plane even takes off. And why? So they can turn to their own tablet instead.

Now tell me, how can you defend that? The vast majority of parents choose to get their kids addicted to screens from the age of one, even when they themselves have nothing else to do, just because it’s convenient. Think for a moment what this is saying: parents prefer to spend 3 hours looking at a screen themselves, rather than interacting with their child.

So, as long as parents are choosing to get kids addicted to technology to avoid interacting with them, I think we should blame them for any subsequent malaise, and not TikTok.

Even if we accept social media (and more generally, screen) addiction is the parents’ fault, we expect the government to intervene when parents make bad choices. We don’t let parents give alcohol or tobacco to children, for instance.

Actually we do, at least in the UK. Parents are allowed to give alcohol to children in their home from age 5. Still, I accept there are cases where we let the government step in if parents are negligent. However, there are three distinctions worth noting: first, there’s the question of magnitude discussed earlier. Smoking causes cancer; alcohol can cause poisoning; social media causes a barely perceptible negative impact on some proxy metrics for mental health.

Second, it’s much easier for a parent to restrict social media use than substance intake — and when I say ‘easy’ I don’t mean in the psychological sense but the purely logistical one: if it were legal for a child to consume alcohol, a parent wouldn’t be able to prevent their child from drinking if the child wanted to. They’d just do it every time they’re out with their friends. Whereas with social media, it’s easy to limit use — if nothing else, at least while the child is in the house.

Third, and most crucial, in cases other than social media, we hold parents accountable for their bad choices. If you boarded a flight and saw a parent handing a tumbler of whisky to their two year old, you’d intervene. But you don’t blink an eye when you see a parent handing over a tablet — yet you are prepared to draw an analogy between the two to justify a social media ban.

A parent that got their child addicted to drugs, or who got them habitually drunk, would lose custody pretty quickly, and they’d be told they’re a bad parent. With the social media ban, we’re absolving parents from all responsibility.

The bottom line is we are too quick and increasingly willing to grant lack of agency in our society. We have developed a very bad habit, especially in Europe: whenever something goes wrong, instead of thinking of what we can do about it, we ask what our governments should do. This, by the way, betrays a dreadful lack of curiosity: we don’t stop to question why things are not as we’d like them, we don’t try to understand the underlying causes, and we certainly don’t make any effort to address them.

The consequences of this habit are dire. If we tell people they are powerless over something, and if this helps them convince themselves that when things go wrong it’s through no fault of their own, they will believe us — they will want to believe us. And things will become still worse for them, because next time something breaks, instead of confronting the problem, they will disclaim agency over it as well.

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Introduction to PWAs

I’ll focus on building Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. These are basically websites that look and work almost exactly like traditional iOS or Android apps, but they are better because they work cross-platform, and can be downloaded directly, without going through the app stores. The latter is a huge benefit, because deploying apps to the app stores is a massive pain.

Getting started: Github

Go to Github and create an account.

Go to Repositories (Github’s name for projects (though confusingly, Github uses ‘project’ in a different way — let’s not get into nomenclature right now)) and create a new project. Alternatively, you can copy the PWA Template I’ve created. Fork it (Github’s way of saying copy it) by tapping on Fork → Create a new fork at the top right-hand corner. Give a new name and description for your repo.

Set up Vercel

Go to Vercel and login using your Github account. Vercel is a service that deploys your github projects to the web.

Tap Add New… to create a new project:

And choose the new Github repo you created by copying the PWA Template:

That should do it — you should see something like this:

Tapping the Domain link will launch your app, which for now, will look just like the template app I created. Try it on your phone, you should see this:

Vibecode

Time to make your own app.

You’ll need to download an AI-powered IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is a fancy name for a code editor. You’ve probably heard of Cursor, so you can try that; I use Google’s Antigravity, because it has a more generous free tier. Google is also more likely to offer you steep discounts on its Gemini plans, which give you access to Antigravity’s pro tier.

Once you’ve set up your account, ask the AI assistant (usually at the right) to help you get started: tell it you want to connect your Github account and work on your project. As part of the prompt, give it your Github user name and email, and the name of the repo you’ve created.

Once that’s done, you’re ready to go: describe what you want your app to do, and the AI will start doing it for you. Happy vibe-coding.

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1. Essential: a book everyone has to read at least once in their life,

2. Standout: a great book within its genre, worth prioritising for fans of the category,

3. OK: a decent time-filler, but nothing remarkable,

4. Letdown: you’ll regret spending time on this book.

I’ve not sorted books by genre, or even fiction vs non-fiction, because I believe in serendipity: maybe, if you read this through, a book that you’d normally overlook will capture your interest. If it does, consider ordering it from an independent bookshop using Bertie.

Christmas Pudding, by Nancy Mitford

Standout

Biting comedy of manners set at Christmas in the Cotswolds.

Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

OK

An overly long and detailed biography of Elon Musk. It was written prematurely (it’d be much more interesting would it have been had it been written now), and it doesn’t succeed in articulating what Musk truly believes in and why, and how his philosophy has evolved over time.

It does a better job explaining why Musk has been so successful: it’s a combination of extremely hard work, a strong bias to action (e.g.: he famously started migrating servers from a server farm himself, using standard tools, after being told by Twitter execs that the migration would take months and cost $$$), and a habit of questioning everything. This has led him to challenge things that most people take for granted, the downside being that he sometimes knocks down Chesterton’s fences, and has to scramble to re-erect them (as he did in his short stint in government). But, he argues (correctly in my view) that backpedaling is much easier than most people assume.

How to be a Leader, by Plutarch

OK

A collection of thoughts on leadership by the ancient Greek historian and philosopher (which for some reason my mum thought would make a good Christmas gift for me). It suffers from an issue common to many self-help books: their advice is either superfluous or useless. You should be a leader for the right reasons, says Plutarch. But if you seek power to make things better, the advice is unneeded; and if you seek it because you’re power-hungry, vain, and ambitious, it’s not like you’re going to change because you read a 2,000-old essay.

Still, there are several nuggets of gold, including the reminder that a leader’s job is not to pander to their followers, but to educate them and improve them: that’s what true leadership means. It brings to mind that clip where a woman in a townhall tried to slander Obama, and John McCain interrupted her to defend him. An interesting thought that arises here is that populists don’t ever have true power: they can only exercise the will of the people who supported them, they cannot really direct it, except in small ways. See the review of Fountainhead further down.

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang

Standout

Excellent satire about an author who steals and publishes her much more successful friend’s manuscript after she (the friend) dies. It’s a very funny (albeit as subtle as igniting fireworks in a gunpowder store room) takedown of the publishing world, (the dumbing-down of) literary fiction, and (the dumb) contemporary portrayal of race.

The Debt to Pleasure, by John Lancaster

OK

Hard to give a review of this book without spoiling it. Let’s say it’s a sinister, epicurean memoir / recipe book that is entertaining, quotable, evocative, well-written, but ultimately forgettable.

It is also, I think, a good parody of that genre of art that elevates some practice to a guide to life: think of Chocolat, or The Karate Kid, or (more obscurely) Take the Lead, or a thousand other books or films that suggest that mastering baking or a martial art or music leads to enlightenment. In fact, there are life lessons in these pursuits, not because they are somehow special, but because they are part of life, and as we’d expect, there are life lessons in life.

A Void, by Georges Perec

OK / Standout

A Void is an Oulipo tradition book. Oulipo authors apply constraints to writing, thus forcing innovation: in particular, A Void omits our ABC’s fifth symbol. It’s an astonishing stunt of skill, not only of Void’s author, but also of G. Adair, who brought A Void to anglophonic crowds.

That said, though I was in constant admiration of author and translator’s linguistic facility, I found this book hard-going and tiring. Turns out innovation can turn grating, and wordplay contours may astonish, but can also form syntactic constructs that don’t flow all that smoothly.

Apropos, I took half an hour to draft two paragraphs without that symbol… I’m curious how long I’d toil for a full book.

Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue, by Joel Slemrod and Michael James Keen

OK (barely)

Waaaay too long book on the history of taxation. There are a few fun anecdotes on different kinds of tax people have devised in the past, but they don’t merit hundreds of pages.

Still, the concept of tax incidence is extremely important to understand: it refers to understanding who ultimately pays for the cost of a tax. This, and the distorted incentives introduced by poorly thought out tax policies, are worth reading about.

Still. The entire book could have been an essay.

From Bauhaus to Our House & The Painted Word, by Tom Wolfe

Standout

From Bauhaus to Our House is Tom Wolfe’s critique of modernist architecture, and The Painted Word is his takedown of modern art (ACX has an extensive review of the former). What I’ll say here is that both books are lots of fun, like all of Wolfe’s writing is, but:

First, one can enjoy his brutal takes a little too much. Reading these books because you enjoy the schadenfreude from the humiliation of the pretentious cultural elite is somewhat ignoble in my view. Tom Wolfe is mean, and though, yes, he is punching up, not down, we shouldn’t celebrate meanness.

Second, here’s a funny thing: Tom Wolfe and Ayn Rand (see below) despise leftwing intellectuals: pompous people who pontificate but can’t execute, people who care about status games and not work (see On Seriousness). This is the common theme in both of Wolfe’s books: that modern art has turned too much towards theory instead of practice. Paintings and architectural styles are celebrated because of what they mean, not because they are beautiful — in fact, beauty is looked down upon: too shallow, too bourgeois.

Yet Wolfe’s dislike of faux intellectualism leads him to mock modern architecture, whereas Ayn Rand’s causes her to make her protagonist… a modern architect. What are we to make of this?

I think that in damning an entire movement, Wolfe fails to notice beauty in what he criticises. Some brutalist buildings really are elegant; some modern art really is captivating. Some of the theory behind modern architecture happens to be right and interesting. Ultimately, and ironically, Wolfe ends up conflating theory and practice, so that in his mind, an artist can’t possibly create good art because their art belongs to a canon favoured by the intelligentsia. He himself ends up evaluating a work of art (negatively) because of its association with some theory.

Going Solo, by Roald Dahl

Standout

This is the second volume of Roald Dahl’s autobiography, and it’s a great read. Dahl belonged to the last Victorian generation. He attended Repton, before joining Shell to sell oil in Tanzania, and fighting in WWII as a RAF pilot. What a life people lived back then! Anecdotes from the book include his witnessing an elderly couple taking their morning exercise aboard a ship in the nude, the capturing of a black mamba, seeing a lion snatching a cook, surviving a plane crash, and, very movingly, his capture of Germans in Africa when he himself was barely a man rather than a boy.

Cork Dork, by Bianca Bosker

OK / Standout

Last year, I wrote about Bianca Bosker’s immersion in the art world. Before she became an art expert, she became a wine connoisseur. This is her journey, which takes her from the cellar of NYC restaurants to vineyards and tasting courses. It’s a good read, the main lesson of which is the same as in Get the Picture: pay attention to the world around you. You will find it rewarding.

The Money Trap, by Alok Sama

Extreme Letdown

This is one of the worst books I’ve ever read in my life. It’s marketed as a behind-the-scenes account of the author’s time at Softbank, but honestly, it’s nothing more than a few hundred pages of artless name-dropping and showing off the author’s supposed erudition (through shoe-horned references to Dostoyevsky), taste in wine, and jet-setting lifestyle. A single article from the WSJ sheds more light on what happened at Softbank.

Single & Single, by John Le Carre

Letdown

Extremely forgettable story about a corrupt financing house.

The Middle Sea, by Julius Norwich

Standout

Good history of the countries around the Mediterranean, from Ancient Egypt to WWI. Two things I found particularly interesting: the first is that there were few truly consequential moments in history: the development of the Greek city states, the Persian wars, the Roman empire, the advent of Islam. And then, there are entire centuries where even though there is war and conquest, nothing really changes. Most of the crusades achieved nothing; vast territories changed hands multiple times with no real impact.

The second is that historians waaay underestimate the importance of economics and technology. There is scant mention of these forces in the book; instead, Norwich focuses on military and civilian leaders, and armies, and sieges, and naval battles. All very dramatic, but with little effect on the daily lives of civilians. I venture to say that changes in taxation, or innovations in architecture and transport, had a much bigger impact on people, yet these are overlooked.

Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories, by Bram Stoker

Standout

A collection of short stories by the author of Dracula. I’m rating this as standout for lovers of horror fiction, and I’m not including the final story in the collection in this rating. That story is The Lair of the White Worm, which has got to be the trippiest thing written in English: the premise is that a 3,000-year old dragon has evolved to look like a female human aristocrat (Stoker clearly misunderstood Darwin), who is destitute and is trying to find a buyer for her country seat, while also attempting to murder that buyer (??!).

The other stories include that of a young mathematician haunted by a judge’s ghost, a traveller braving bandits, a cat extracting gruesome revenge for the killing of her kitten, and a couple of others. Most are gripping and atmospheric, and a good read for fans of the genre.

Kane and Abel, by Jeffrey Archer

OK

I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager, but it’s objectively pretty badly written, mostly because of its over-reliance on cliches (linguistic and plotwise). It’s the interwoven story of two men from very different walks in life — a Boston Brahmin and the illegitimate son of a Polish baron — and, like most Jeffrey Archers, it has good pace and helps pass the time. It is, however, entirely predictable.

The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Standout

A poignant tale of decline and social change, inspired by the history of the author’s own aristocratic, Sicilian family. It’s an excellent insight into the cause of decline, which applies to institutions as much as it applies to families: the Salinas are reduced to irrelevance over two short generations, not so much because of inexorable external forces, but because of the Prince’s surrender to them. It’s not a case of lack of ability, but of lack of dynamism and ambition. Salina is too eager to lean on tradition, to rest on the past, to take comfort in his visible superiority over the nouveau-riche upstarts —

— in short, too complacent (even if self-aware) to change:

Murder in a Heatwave (various authors)

Letdown

Indifferent collection of short crime stories set in summer months.

Original Copies, by Bianca Bosker

OK

Here Bosker contemplates the phenomenon of the Chinese copying Western architecture wholesale: you can find entire cities modelled after Paris or Venice in China, as well as towns that have replicated whole villages.

She doesn’t succeed in explaining this, mainly because she doesn’t focus on a crucial difference between Chinese and Western thinking: originality just isn’t particularly valuable in China. I remember once visiting a temple in Beijing, which was described as dating back hundreds of years; but then we noticed a small plaque explaining that the temple had been demolished (presumably during the cultural revolution), and rebuilt sometime in the past few decades. In Chinese thinking, that discontinuity was of no consequence: a temple had existed on that spot hundreds of years ago, and how it was rebuilt exactly as it was back then. So… it’s clearly the same temple, with the same long history. In the West, this would be awkward. If we rebuilt the Colossus of Rhodes, we wouldn’t claim it dates back 2,000 years: we’d call it a replica or an homage.

Well. It’s fair to say we know that the Chinese would be baffled by the idea that the Ship of Theseus is a paradox.

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

OK

A roadtrip from Nebraska to NYC, set in the same universe as The Rules of Civility. Not particularly memorable, too stylised.

The Royal Game, by Stefan Zweig

Standout

Short novella about a chess game aboard a passenger liner, between the world champion and a former prisoner of war who learnt how to play chess from a handbook as escapism from his crushing isolation.

It’s hard to say why I liked this book so much. There isn’t much point to it, but it’s very engrossing, and does a great job of describing the challenger’s psychology and his unravelling.

An Experiment in Criticism, by C.S. Lewis

Essential

C.S. Lewis attempts to define good art by observing the habits of good consumers of art. Long review here.

Our Share of the Night, by Mariana Enriquez

Letdown (sorry Manu!)

A horror story, gripping and moving at times, but very badly written (or at least badly translated in English). Much too long.

Numbers in the Dark, by Italo Calvino

OK / Standout

Uneven collection of surreal short stories: some very forgettable, some only relevant to those with an understanding of the politics of the period in which Calvino wrote, but some truly hilarious in their originality. As in, laugh out loud hilarious.

‘I ate it, right? to check if it was still raw, right?’ / ‘you know who’s going to go and pick the oregano, don’t you? You’re going, I’m telling you, you’re going for the oregano, yes you are’. Come on. This is great stuff.

A Closed Book, by Gilbert Adair

OK

Forgettable though at times suspenseful and tense. Can’t really tell much about it without handing out spoilers; you’ll like it if you enjoy tightly-wound psychological thrillers.

Fortress Besieged, by Qian Zhongshu

OK

Think of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline & Fall set in China, but not as good. Qian Zhongshu mocks the pretentiousness of Chinese wannabe intellectuals who study abroad and come back home pompous and full of themselves, but he himself cannot resist quoting various authors and philosophers. Still. Quite funny.

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Tokyo Express, by Seichō Matsumoto

OK

Japanese whodunnit, or rather, howtheydunnit: we know who’s committed the crime early in the novel, which then follows the police’s investigation on how (and why) they did it. Not particularly thrilling, no big twists, no ingenuous plots, but a fun, calm read, which is interesting to contrast to the more suspenseful western murder mysteries.

The Long Wait, by Mickey Spillane

OK / Essential

I don’t think any single Spillane book can be rated as anything above ‘OK’, but his writing as a whole is probably the best example of fast-paced, hard-hitting, action-packed pulp fiction you can read; so I’d say it’s essential to read a Spillaine book at least once. His novels are sexist, the prose so over-the-top sensationalist that it hurts (‘she punched me in the gut and hurt her fingers’), yet the writing is careful, and the plots gripping. The moral worldview of the books alone (cynical nihilism coupled with inviolable moral codes) is worth a full essay.

Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer (Nevill Coghill translation)

Essential

You can find everything you might be looking for in Chaucer: life lessons & morals, character studies, human psychology, good prose, humour, action, knights, love affairs, pranks. Reading stories written from the 14th century, which could equally well take place in the year 2025, drives home how little human nature (and what makes for a good story) has changed.

I particularly enjoy the raunchy tale of the Miller (what can I say, it’s funny), and above all, the moralistic tale of the Wife of Bath, which includes these gems:

The Summons, by John Grisham

Letdown

One of Grisham’s weakest efforts, about the son of a judge who discovers a secret pile of cash in his deceased father’s house. Meh.

Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie

Standout / Essential

One of Christie’s best Poirots.

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

Standout / Essential

I was re-reading this, sitting in Potter’s Fields, when a random man next to me started quizzing me: ‘what are you reading? what is it about? why do you like it’?

Answer to question one, The Blind Assassin. Answer to question three, among others, for sentimental reasons (one of which is that my wife gave it to me very early in our relationship). The answer to question two is a bit harder — plot-wise, it is about a love story and an unhappy marriage and a tragedy and a book within the book, but what is it about? I think it’s about the choices we make, and how most bad decisions come from lack of courage — primarily the courage to be honest with ourselves.

I think it is far and away the best book by Margaret Atwood.

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

Essential

A paean to creativity, originality, and individuality, told through the story of an iconoclastic architect. As I’ve said before, critics often unfairly dismiss Rand’s work as ‘rich people porn’, but in fact Rand doesn’t idealise the rich: she idealises the original thinkers, the builders, the people who get things done; and, like Tom Wolfe, she despises the talkers and armchair theorists.

The Fountainhead’s protagonist, Howard Roark, is a modern architect. Unlike the villains in Tom Wolfe’s telling, Roark doesn’t turn to modern architecture because he’s incapable of mastering the difficult styles of the past, but because he’s tired of rehashing cliches of the past. Unlike the modern architects criticised by Wolfe, Roark builds houses beloved by their occupants — houses that are modern, and shorn of superfluous ornamentation, but still beautiful and functional.

The thesis of the book is that it’s a vice to live your life through others — being a second-hander, in Rand’s words. These are people whose sense of value comes from the opinion of others; and the worst example of this is people who feel important because of the power they exercise over others — except, unless this power comes from a standalone source (e.g. excellence, creation of value), it is illusionary. Someone who attains power by channeling the voice of others — which is what populists do — doesn’t have real power, they only have the semblance of control. The moment they try to channel their power towards a direction other than the one it follows naturally, they will lose it.

Like all theories, it is not absolutely true. No-one is an island. No-one is impervious to the opinion of the crowds, or at least, of their loved ones — nor should they be: being deaf and blind to feedback, to contrary opinion, isn’t a mark of strength of character, but of stupid stubbornness. Nevertheless, it’s a theory worth engaging with seriously; besides, the book is a page-turner.

When the Going was Good, by Graydon Carter

OK

Fun memoir from Vanity Fair’s former editor, but it doesn’t do much beyond induce envy at the lush lifestyle that working at Conde Nast used to afford.

Banking on it, by Anne Boyden

Letdown

I had high hopes for this: I was looking forward to learning how one goes about creating a new bank from scratch (Anne Boyden founded Starling). Sadly, Boyden glosses over a lot of the details (which were given to consultants to work out), and gives a one-sided, elliptic view of her fallout with Tom Blomfield and the rest of Monzo’s founders. And she frequently laments how difficult it is for a woman to make it in male-dominated industries — never mind that she got high-priced consultants to work for her for free. Come on: you can’t portray yourself as the outsider, the underdog, the unlikely champion, when you’re a senior banking executive, when people are offering their services to you for deferred payment, when you can get meetings with billionaires without any difficulty.

William Pitt the Younger, by William Hague

OK / Standout

Too long and overly detailed (hence the OK) biography of the UK’s youngest ever prime minster, who took office aged only 24, yet stabilised England’s economy, maintained order in time of massive transition in the Continent, led the country in the Napoleonic wars, and helped pave the road towards the abolition of the slave trade (though he didn’t accomplish it during his lifetime).

Are there any lessons for hyper-ambitious politicians? To what can we attribute Pitt’s extraordinary success (both in terms of rapid ascension to power, and length of service)? To summarise a 800 tome in a few bullet points, Pitt was

• Exceptionally intelligent, and a mesmerising orator — this was the foundation of his domination of politics; his father (a prime minister himself) specifically trained him for office from an early age. (I have to say though, the excerpts of his speeches that are included in the book seem long-winded, at least to a modern audience.)

• Pragmatic and not overly beholden to principle: for example, though he believed in electoral reform, he opposed it when he felt the situation in England was too volatile to push for drastic changes.

• Absolute when it came to his exercise of power: he centralised power more than any PM before him, and he refused to serve when he felt his power would be curtailed by the King (and in fact, when he left office briefly, it was precisely because he felt undermined by the King).

• Exceptionally lucky, but adept at recognising this luck: he was at the right place and the right time, but he also took the opportunities offered to him, and played the cards dealt to him masterfully.

The contrast between the two middle points above is interesting: Pitt would make compromises on his principles, but never on his independence.

The Singapore Grip, by J.G. Farrell

Standout

Winner of the lost Booker prize (Got muddled up — Farrell won the lost Booker for Troubles, not The Singapore Grip). The Singapore Grip tells the story of the fall of Singapore, primarily as experienced by one of the city’s merchant families. It’s a poignant critique of colonialism and capitalism, without the sanctimoniousness and shallowness of similar modern criticism. Perhaps a bit too long.

The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne

Standout

Probably the best non-Agatha Christie murder mystery I’ve read. Perhaps a little too cutesy with its Sherlock-and-Watson references, but fair to the reader — it gives you everything you need to guess who did it (and unlike Japanese murder mysteries that claim to do the same, it doesn’t rely on some overly-elaborate murder plan).

Almost as good as the story itself is the author’s introduction:

Power Failure, by William D. Cohan

Standout

The history of General Electric’s rise and decline, focused much more on the latter than the former. Very well researched and written, though (like several of the history books reviewed this year), too long.

There’s a good review of it here, according to which the key takeaway from the book is that GE failed because of intellectual laziness: its executives bought their own false grand narratives, instead of focusing on fixing actual problems facing the business. This seems to be true to a large extent, especially under Jeff Immelt, who fostered a culture of ‘success theatre’ and who did not tolerate any dissent or pushback: unlike Jack Welch, who encouraged straight talk and debate, Immelt fired executives who did not toe the line. But I don’t think it’s the whole story: for one thing, most of GE’s core businesses were well-run, which is hard to explain if intellectual laziness were pervasive.

I think there are several factors that contributed to GE’s downfall (as far as I can tell from this book), many of which came down to really bad luck:

• The aforementioned cultural change under Immelt, which rewarded artificial gains instead of substantial and sustainable improvements (for instance, selling billions in infrastructure to developing countries on credit, just to make the numbers).

• The blow up in its insurance businesses, which were hit by the increase in their insured customers’ life spans and increased healthcare costs.

• The financial crisis that caused liquidity in the commercial paper market to dry up and almost bankrupted GE Capital.

• The cyclical nature of many of GE’s businesses, especially its power business.

• Poor M&A — GE bought high (Alstom) and sold low (NBCUniversal).

• Changes in investor sentiment and preferences (away from conglomerates and towards more focused businesses).

GE did not handle these well: for example, its executives did not see the boom in the power industry cycle as a peak in a cyclical market — they considered it a permanent plateau. Or, they did not have a plan B in case demand for their commercial paper dropped; or, they did not get rid of all insurance businesses when they sold some of their subsidiaries. But it’s easy to make these judgements with hindsight, just like it’s easy for critics to blame Jack Welch for massaging earnings to deliver consistency growth, when what he was doing was exactly what investors and markets demanded, without breaking the law (if someone is to blame here, it’s investors, not GE, for confusing consistency in earnings with genuine operational consistency).

And that’s a wrap! If you enjoyed these reviews, or looking for more suggestions, here are the entries for 2023 and 2024. And here’s my evergreen business & management reading list.

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For example, in The Entire History of You, a man’s relationship falls apart after he views his wife’s recorded memories of an affair; Nosedive shows a woman’s life spiralling out of control in a world where daily interactions are rated, with the rating determining a person’s social standing; Hated in the Nation is about a hacker using robotic bees to murder online hate mobs; and Smithereens features a man who blames a social network for the car collision that killed his wife. The characters in these episodes often explicitly blame technology: The Entire History of You ends with the protagonist cutting open his neck to remove his memory-recording device, and in Smithereens the protagonist says

I heard that you make these things that way. Addictive. So that you can't take you eyes off them. Well, job done. Bit of user feedback for you there. Maybe factor that into your next update.

Bojack Horseman’s titular character was raised by unloving, distant, and cruel parents. He’s an alcoholic who lives on his past fame (at the beginning of the show at least) and who’s tormented by guilt. But while the show’s creators explore the sources of his destructive behaviour, they do not use them to excuse it: one of the most memorable scenes in the series is the dialogue between Bojack and his friend Todd, who tells him

You can't keep doing this! You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay! You need to be better! BoJack, just stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. It's not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career, or when you were a kid. It's you. Okay? It's you. Fuck, man, what else is there to say?

The contrasting philosophy between the two series is, I think, at the heart of the difference between conservatives and progressives. For example, it explains differing attitudes towards

• Wealth re-distribution: if your fundamental premise is that individuals are in control of their destiny, it follows that you believe the fortunate deserve their fortune, and the unfortunate their lack thereof; and if you disagree with that premise, it’s normal that you should believe in equity of outcome.

• Wokeism: wokeism is predicated on power imbalances that are impossible to counteract, and it waves away individuals’ agency: trigger warnings, concern over micro-aggression, and aversion to uninhibited free speech assume, to a large extent, that individuals exposed to unwelcome messaging or behaviour lack the resilience to cope with these, and so they need to be protected from them.

• Regulation: progressives think consumers need to be protected — they cannot be trusted to make informed choices. They distrust the market because they think individuals are powerless compared to corporations.

• Robert Jenrick’s stunt on the Tube: no-one on the Left has denied that people dodge fares on the tube; but plenty of people have commented that it’s absurd to care about insignificant things like this (even if addressing them is within the British government’s control) when there are children dying in Gaza (even though that’s outside the government’s control).

Progressives’ discomfort with personal responsibility stems from two sources: first, the aforementioned belief that societal forces are too strong for an individual to counteract; and second, that given the magnitude of the crises facing humanity (climate change, wars, inequality), caring about one’s own sphere of influence is petty and ultimately pointless: ‘why should I care about tidying my room, when climate change will kill me’.

I am a conservative, so I agree with Bojack’s philosophy much more than I do with Black Mirror’s. Not necessarily because it’s correct: after all, progressives are right about a great many things. Societal forces are immensely powerful, and, as Black Mirror suggests, individuals can hardly resist technological advances (with the exception of the Amish:

). The universe may well be deterministic, and everyone’s path may be inalterable. The first issue I take with progressivism is that the solutions it offers invalidate its own premise: if societal forces are inexorable, what’s the point of trying to counteract them? Progressives sense this paradox: it’s no accident that Black Mirror is bleak and rarely offers happy endings and glimmers of hope; and when it does, as is the case with Nosedive, it is when individuals affect change. In that episode, society at large doesn’t revolt and do away with its social credit rating mechanism. The protagonist begins to find peace by rejecting the system and her fake, wishy-washy persona. So, in my view, we cannot grant progressivism’s core assumption that individuals cannot control their destiny. If we do, we may as well do nothing. Instead, we should choose to believe that individuals have the power to change the world around them. Not necessarily alone, but by beginning movements that do. And if we grant that, then we should also expect of people the flipside of power: responsibility.

(One does not have to treat the question of individual agency as a case of absolutes: one can accept that individuals exercise some control over the destiny, but that there are forces that are much more powerful. No-one can possibly deny that a white boy born in England has better prospects than a baby born to a family without access to water or medicine. But it’s a question of degree: once you allow there is room for agency, you need to demand at least some exercise of that agency.

(Ancient Greeks reconciled agency with destiny with the saying ‘σύν Ἀθηνᾷ καί χεῖρας κίνει’ — 'move your hands along with Athena’, also rendered as ‘God helps those who help themselves’.))

Now, a progressive might counter-argue that an individual is powerless, unless they join a movement: this is why they might not care about getting their private life in order, but that there is still a point in engaging in politics, because there is strength in numbers. In other words, progressives do not necessarily think anything an individual does is pointless: it’s only pointless if their action has a limited scope. The standard conservative response to this counter-argument (‘why should anyone trust you with public matters if you can’t get your private life in order’) is compelling but not as strong as you might think: plenty of people who are a mess in private life do well in other spheres (William Pitt the Younger was extremely successful in managing the English economy, but died with debts of £2m in today’s money (can you imagine a modern PM with £2m in debt??)).

My response (which collectively forms my second objection to the progressive philosophy) is a bit more nuanced. First, do not underestimate the impact of small things. If you live your life well, if you’re kind, polite, considerate, honest, hard-working, and conscientious, you can have a bigger impact on other people than you might think. Even small acts of kindness — helping someone with their luggage in the Tube — can make someone’s day. Plus, this compounds when you start a family — if you have your act together, it’s more likely your children will do. Conversely, if you’re being irresponsible, because you think what you do in your private life doesn’t matter, the impact you have on the world around you is more harmful than you believe. If you throw rubbish out of your car window, you’re encouraging others to do the same. The reason high-trust societies work isn’t just that the government enforces the law: it’s that their citizens hold each other to account through their private behaviour.

(That said, state enforcement does matter, because if even a small minority believes they can get away with bad behaviour, that behaviour will spread — exactly because people imitate what they see. And so, if people see others shoplifting with impunity, at some point they will start wondering why they have to be the shmucks who pay (especially given that the prices they’re charged reflect the sales lost through theft).)

In short: virtue begets virtue and vice begets vice. So be virtuous.

Second, leave changing the world aside for a minute. Believing in agency and personal responsibility are good for personal wellbeing. All the policies and legislation and external interventions in the world won’t make a person happy if that person does not assume responsibility over their behaviour. This is at message at the heart of Bojack Horseman: there is no way to undo all the damage and hurt Bojack has experienced. His pain, however, explains but does not excuse his selfishness and weaknesses, and the harm these do to his friends. As Todd tells him, Bojack needs to stop feeling sorry for himself because of all the bad things that have happened to him (even though they are very real) and has to just be better. This is a hard message to give, and it does not help when it’s someone like me (that is, someone who’s never experienced hardship) giving it. But as I tell my children, you cannot control other people’s behaviour, and you cannot change everything that has already happened to you; you can control your own response and your own future actions.

Note also that when people talk about feelings of despair and powerlessness, they are misattributing them to big things like inequality and climate change and AI (it’s not technology that’s to blame for the protagonist’s failed marriage in The Entire History of You: technology is what makes him find out his wife was unfaithful, but not the cause of the lack of trust and communication between him and her). No doubt, these are big and scary enough to induce despair in everyone; so why don’t they? Because not everyone is equally susceptible to despair. As per that old prayer,

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Taking this to heart, and getting your own life in order will make you happier. You’ll find it easier building bonds with people. If you are dependable and kind, people will want to spend time with you; and conversely, if you’re not, you’ll find you won’t have many real friends. (I find that people tend to cluster: happy, functional people hang out with happy, functional people, and unhappy, dysfunctional people hang out with unhappy, dysfunctional people. I’m sure a lot of this is because of confounders, but surely there are causal relationships here too: happy people uplift those around them, and the effect becomes reinforced; and, sadly, even the kindest person in the world will at some point stop hanging out with someone who is destructive — so, destructive people end up being segregated out of positive circles.)

And as I wrote before, a lot of people turn to big ideas (religion, politics, other crusades) in an attempt to find meaning, but I think you can create meaning for yourself by trying to be better. Goodness becomes its own meaning and its own reward. It’s a bulwark against insecurity and feelings of being lost. You might think that helping someone carry a buggy down the steps in the tube is immaterial when AI might kill us all in five years; but, you can accomplish the former, whereas you can’t do much about the latter. And you’ll put a smile on someone’s face. That’s something.

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There is a resurgence of interest and goodwill towards Christianity, which is strange to witness after what seemed a near-total atheist victory in the early 2000s. This renewed affection for religion takes two flavours: that converts, who convert to some branch of christianity and start attending church, and that of self-described cultural christians, who do not necessarily believe in God, but who appreciate christianity’s ethos, traditions, and aesthetics.

Both types of new-age christians irk me, because I believe their appreciation of christianity is insincere and/or misguided. To be fair, I am sure there are people who are true converts; but I believe these are extremely few in number, because to be a true convert, one must meet all three of these criteria:

• They must start believing that God is real

• Not only that, but they must also believe that the Christian God is real, and His instructions to humanity, as imparted through Jesus, are true and inviolable

• They must feel touched and inspired by the rituals and traditions of the particular branch of Christianity they convert to — but not because of their standalone aesthetic value, but because they are a way of bringing one closer to the divine, as defined by Christianity.

Which is to say, if you convert to Orthodox Christianity because it ‘appeals to the masculine soul’ or because it is of a more conservative bend, you’re missing the point. Christianity isn’t about being macho: it’s about being humble. It isn’t about being tough: it’s about being forgiving. The difficult practices of Christianity, such as fasting, or standing in church, aren’t shows of strength and resilience, they are acts of respect, of humbling and purifying one’s self before God. And as one of the commentators in the NYT article above put it, ‘the true hard work of faith is to love your neighbor, feed the hungry, care for the sick, and welcome the stranger’.

But fine. One could argue that many people who convert to Christianity do not really internalise or accept its basic tenets, but that’s still a good path for them: the argument made by cultural christians is that you don’t need the theology of Christianity to benefit from it — the discipline it imposes, its conservatism, and its aesthetics1 are all valuable in their own right, even if they are divorced from their original intentions (which are, it bears repeating, humility and kindness). A lot of people in today’s world feel lost, and cannot find meaning in their life: a practice and a framework that lends structure can help find this missing meaning.

I can see why one might think this. After all, most Christians find value in their religion, without really internalising its message: most Christians aren’t humble, and kind, and forgiving. Most Christians don’t really believe everything the church preaches, and do not follow its traditions because they are a means of approaching God. I don’t practice everything the church preaches, so why did I get married in an Orthodox ceremony, had my children baptised, and take them to church? Why is it that I take issue with converts to Christianity, and not all Christians?

Because it’s not the discipline and structure of Christianity that’s good, it’s discipline and structure and stability of any kind. The reason I am practicing and passing on Orthodox traditions is they are among the many customs and folkways of my family that I actively seek to preserve. I believe rituals and ceremonies are the strongest way of building a culture, and I think a strong culture is the best way of transmitting values to my children, values that I believe are conducive to a happy and fulfilling life. (A lot of people don’t believe this: they think you can pass on values without adhering to traditions — which are, after all, often restrictive, old-fashioned, and sometimes, downright unpleasant (my niece didn’t particularly enjoy her baptism last week).) But I think these people are wrong; and besides, even if traditions themselves do not help pass on values, they still do create a sense of shared history, community, and belonging: all of which are comforting and meaningful in themselves.

And so, someone looking from the outside might well see all this and say ‘I also want a sense of shared history, community, and belonging’, and decide that converting to Christianity is a shortcut to these things. But it’s not: tradition is a way of strengthening existing ties, not creating new ones. In fact, it’s downright contradictory to espouse a religion like Orthodox Christianity because of its emphasis on conservatism and tradition: there is nothing less conservative than abandoning your own religion and community for a new one. The Orthodox christians I know do not follow the traditions they do because those particular traditions are intrinsically better than others: they follow them because they are traditions.

So my advice to people who feel lost is, don’t get drawn to an exotic new thing — be it Orthodoxy, or Islam, or Buddhism: the risk is you might slip from religiosity to dogmatism and fanaticism, or, at best, that you will espouse something you do not quite understand.

Instead, practice those things that pretty much anyone with an iota of common sense will tell you are good for you: be kind; meet and spend time with friends and family in person; extend goodwill to people; eat healthily (but without obsessing over calories); exercise; don’t spend too much time on social media; go outside; walk whenever you can; be honest (and especially with yourself). These are all better and easier steps than joining a new church.

(Though the preceding paragraph is a great place to close, I do need to add an addendum: while I look upon religious conversion with a lot of suspicion in the abstract, I avoid judging any individual I meet who’s converted to a new religion. I do think there are many sincere converts, and I have nothing against conversion in principle. It’s just that in practice, I think most people who convert are doing it for the wrong reasons, and will not find what they’re looking for.)

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Case in point: I consider myself a conservative (more specifically, I’m a conservative as far as my personal morals are concerned, and libertarian when it comes to organising society), but I am driven mad by some of the fixations of right-wing politicians and pundits. In particular, I’m irked by…

The performative emphasis on ‘merit’

People on the right like to say the best candidate should get the job or university admission. They then say this means that demographic characteristics, most notably race and gender, should not be considered as factors when selecting candidates.

This is an overcorrection. Before positive discrimination (aka affirmative action) went too far (because it did go so far, to the point that people who do not belong to some minority group are ineligible to even apply for some positions), it was based on the idea that some candidates have faced hardships that lowered their performance on whatever metric is being used as a filter.

This is a perfectly reasonable argument, and one also rooted in belief in merit: it simply takes a broader lens, to consider one’s potential as opposed to one’s past performance when assessing merit. A teenager from a single-parent household, attending state school, who needs to work to support their family, and who has scored AAA in their A-levels has more merit than a middle-class kid who went to the most expensive independent school in the country, and who has had private tutoring since aged five, and who therefore scored A*A*A*. To ignore this, and to suggest that test scores alone should be taken into consideration, is narrow-minded and silly.

Of course, the correct approach is to evaluate candidates holistically, not to make allowances or give extra credit for superficial characteristics. That said, I do think there are times when blunt approaches such as quotas make sense, because they force hiring panels to make the effort to find people with merit from under-represented backgrounds.

The people on the right who talk about ‘merit’ these days don’t really care about merit. They, like the woke before them, are simply virtue signalling.

(As an aside, the discussion on DEI in American college application drives me crazy. You read about all these parents complaining about how their children are denied places despite perfect scores because they are white, yet they rarely consider applying for uni in other countries, despite many European universities being very highly ranked. Don’t be so parochial, Americans!)

The discourse on private school VAT

Still on the subject of education, there was an uproar in the UK when the Labour government decided to abolish the VAT exemption for independent schools. It was called a tax on ambition, class warfare, politics of envy, and a penalty on success.

I haven’t looked into whether abolishing the exemption was sensible policy or not, but the answer to that question is a matter of fact: one can (in theory) measure whether the revenue raised from the tax was offset by the cost of more children attending state school; one can measure whether the net level of education went up or down; one can assess whether the government had accounted for the number of kids that would need to be accommodated in state schools, and whether or not there were enough places on offer.

But the moral outrage is completely misplaced. Private education is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population; all this did is make it unaffordable to one more thin sliver. It feels very bizarre to me to argue that it’s ok for private education to only be affordable to 6.5% of children, but a total outrage for this to drop to 6.4% (real figures, according to GPT).

When I’ve made this argument to friends, they countered that it’s the symbolism of the matter that’s the issue: it signals that the government is penalising aspiration and self-reliance; plus, it’s unfair that people are basically taxed twice on education: once through their funding of state schooling (which their kids don’t even attend), and once through the VAT on their school fees. But how is the taxing of school fees more punitive to aspiration than progressive taxation in general? And how is this double taxation any different from all other kinds of taxes, including all VAT and inheritance tax? I get being anti-tax in general; I don’t get being upset about school fees VAT in particular. And finally, even if it’s the symbolism that bothers you, consider: you are outraged that they you can no longer afford private schooling — but that’s the same outrage felt by parents who couldn’t afford good schools before the increase! So why are you surprised that such outrage can result in what feels to you like a a punitive policy?

Equating crime with police violence

A common right-wing diversion tactic whenever the topic of police violence comes up is to argue that most violent deaths are caused by criminals, not the police. This is particularly relevant when race dynamics are involved: when extremists organisations call for defunding the police, rightwing pundits respond that most black people are killed by other black people, and less policing will result in more deaths.

The fact that abolishing the police would lead to more deaths is true, but it’s a low bar, isn’t it? Of course criminals kill more people than the police, and of course abolishing the police will result in more crime, and of course the most vulnerable in society will be hurt disproportionately. But the fact that some extremists are calling for the abolition of policing does not mean that their anger is unjustified. On the contrary, they are correct in believing that a wrongful death caused by a police offer is far, far worse than a murder committed by a criminal.

This is an argument than any small-state conservative or libertarian ought to agree with: governments have a near-monopoly on lethal violence; this comes with a huge responsibility to inflict such violence as rarely as possible, and only in situations where there is no alternative cause of action. Failure to live up to this responsibility, or at the very least to severely punish those officers who do fail, erodes trust in government and society more generally, and marks the start of a slide towards tyranny. If members of minorities feel that police does not only not protect them, but actively harms them (even if this happens less frequently than normal crime), how do you expect them to react?

The pedantic dismissal of institutional racism

If we interpret ‘institutional racism’ pedantically, it becomes hard to argue that institutional racism exists (at least in the UK). Western institutions are not racist — if anything, they often advantage under-represented groups. In a pedantic interpretation, institutional racism is when members of certain races are explicitly discriminated against: for example, one could talk of institutional racism in a world where non-whites are not eligible for admission to universities, or cannot serve in parliament, or in the military. Certainly we’ve had institutional racism in the past; it’s hard to argue we do now.

I myself dislike the term ‘institutional racism’ because I think it’s important to be specific and accurate in political discussions. But refusing to engage with the actual sentiment behind the term is to approach the discussion in bad faith. What most people who talk about ‘institutional racism’ mean is that those belonging to certain ethnic or racial groups experience racism in their everyday lives. Admittedly this can range from unequivocal racism (e.g. people being they don’t belong to a country because of the colour of their skin, even if they and their parents and their grandparents were born there) to actions where there is no racist intent but that can nevertheless be perceived as offensive (e.g. asking people where they’re from, on which I’ve written before:

The argument is that asking people where they’re really from suggests that they don’t belong in the UK, which in my view misses the point: the magnificent thing about this country is that you do belong but can still be proud of your foreign heritage. My children are English through-and-through, but they have an obviously foreign surname: I think it’s sad if others don’t feel comfortable questioning them about it, just as much as it’d be sad if my children felt in any way uncomfortable about their name. (And to anyone who, like me, is of obviously (because of their name or religion or skin colour or whatever) of foreign extraction (no matter how many generations back) and is (or is about to become) British, can I just say: if people ask you where you’re really from, try not to give a sanctimonious, pointed, annoying, and pedantic answer (Manchester); you know what they’re asking. Tell them about your family history, be proud of it, and be proud of the fact that the UK has welcomed you or your ancestors; most other countries wouldn’t have done.)

) to micro-aggressions where there is not only no racist intent, but where it’s a stretch to claim the action can be perceived as racist at all (e.g. some people have argued that the terms ‘whitelist’ or ‘master branch’ in software engineering are racist).

But again, right-wing reactionaries latch on to the most ambiguous claims of racism and use those to prove that there is no racism at all, or to argue that the impact of such racism as does exist isn’t all that big. The fact that racism isn’t enshrined in law, or that it’s not as limiting a force as it was a few generations ago, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

The focus on corporate tax & small businesses

Conservatives love to talk about how taxes and red tape have brought small businesses to their knees. In the UK, they have a point on the latter, but not so much on the former.

As per GPT, the UK has lower taxes that other countries — e.g. here’s London compared to other major cities:

And this overlooks the fact that the UK has absurdly low salaries (I took a 50% pay cut when I moved from Geneva to London, for the same job). The problem in the UK is low productivity, and frankly, a company that has to fold because of an increase in employer contributions is not very productive and profitable in the first place. We don’t need more small businesses that just trudge along: we need innovative, productive enterprises.

The obsession with small businesses is misguided. It’s not small businesses that lead to boosts in productivity: it’s large enterprises that can afford to invest in automation, technology, and know-how. It’s large companies that train their people and create ecosystems and lead to the foundation of offshoots and networks.

Red tape is an issue because it contributes to low productivity. Lest we forget, productivity is about producing more or better goods and services with fewer resources. Good regulation contributes to that by improving goods and services at lower cost than the free market would deliver (because of externalities, coordination costs, etc). But bad regulation, of which we have too much in Europe, imposes disproportionate costs and impedes innovation and the production of better products: it forces entrepreneurs and companies to focus on ticking boxes instead of making things. One hears of people in jobs ranging from teaching to farming spending their time filling forms, instead of providing the service they’re employed to provide. And, it’s red tape, not taxes, that makes it harder to start a company. You need a license to do pretty much anything these days.

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But the fact that tickets are underpriced is obvious, given that most tickets can fetch multiples of their value in the secondary market. The issue here is that most people think underpriced means the same as cheap; it doesn’t, in exactly the same way that overpriced doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. Underpriced, in the context used by Ticketmaster’s CEO, means that concert tickets could go for a far higher price without causing a big drop in demand — at least, not such a large drop that raising prices would become unprofitable. In other words, at current prices, concert venues, artists, and Ticketmaster are leaving money on the table.

I don’t think anyone who’s upset with Ticketmaster would dispute that tickets are underpriced under this definition; and even if they did, well, the argument made by Ticketmaster is easily falsifiable. If Ticketmaster increases prices and its revenue goes down as a result (or more accurately, profit), then critics will have been proven correct, and Ticketmaster will quickly decrease prices again. So there’d be nothing to be upset about.

The real problem these critics have is that they believe prices ought to be lower. I understand why people might feel this way: we all would like to pay less for things we like. But I want to investigate here to what extent critics can develop a coherent worldview around their emotive response. So let’s look at some assumptions that can underpin a rational argument that prices are too high.

(I am going to overlook arguments stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of demand and supply. But it is worth reminding everyone that when a lot of people want something that is in short supply, that thing’s price will be high. Artificially restricting price will cause shortages, because too many people will want the thing, but there won’t be enough of it. Indeed, this is what does happen with concert (and theatre) tickets: they sell out immediately, and even people willing to pay far higher prices cannot get one.1)

First, some people argue that the market is not competitive: prices are too high because Ticketmaster is a monopoly. In a way, these critics are partly right, but not in the way they think. Ticketmaster itself isn’t a natural monopoly (at least, not in any way I can think of). Other companies could easily imitate its business model, set up a website, and sell tickets at a lower price. There’s nothing to stop entrepreneurs from doing this, especially in a world flush with VC dollars. What is in limited supply is the number of superstar artists. There is only one Taylor Swift, and only a handful of other stars in her league. No matter which platform markets her tickets, these tickets will always command a ridiculously high price.

This leads to a second line of reasoning, which is that tickets can be said to be overpriced relative to their intrinsic value. Is it worth paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to see Taylor Swift perform? I mean… clearly yes, to some people. This is a pretty fundamental difference between those who believe in free markets and those who believe in socialism. The former believe there is no intrinsic value to anything beyond what someone is willing to pay for it. The latter think there are objective ways of determining value (e.g. labour theories of value, or simply the opinion of a more educated, smarter elite (if you think concert ticket prices are too high, and ought to be capped, or Ticketmaster ought to be broken up, etc, what do you think is a reasonable ticket price? How do you arrive at that figure, and why should I agree with it?)). This is hard to adjudicate in a short blogpost, but I have a very strong aversion to people thinking they know better than someone how much that someone should value something. I do understand the inclination to do so: I too see many people make bad choices in their lives, and there are countless examples of widespread idiocy (Fyre Festival). But I also think that if we start pulling on this thread, it’s not only capitalism that will unravel but also democracy. Best not go there: in our current system, some people will make bad choices, but that’s infinitely better than not letting people make their own good choices.

The third, and most defensible argument I can think of (and one to which I myself subscribe to an extent), is a blend of two bad arguments we’ve reviewed already, the misunderstanding of supply and demand and intrinsic value. Much like some blended whiskies are better than the single malts that comprise them, this blend is more cohesive than the two underlying arguments. To understand why, start with the free market rejoinder to the bad arguments I’ve outlined: ‘who are you to say what ticket prices should be worth to someone? If I’m willing to pay £1,000 to see Taylor Swift, who are you to tell me the ticket isn’t worth that much intrinsically? And, how can you even claim the ticket isn’t worth all that much, since you’re also arguing that attending concerts is almost a human right that deserves government intervention to protect? No, no. The only intrinsic value of a ticket is the amount someone is willing to pay for it, and ironically, it’s capping prices (which is what you’re suggesting) that will result in unfair pricing: some people will get a ticket for less than it’s actually worth to them (e.g. they will pay £500 and they would have been happy to pay £1,000); and, conversely, some people will end up not getting a ticket even though it’s worth more to them.’ The weakness here though is that free marketers equate willingness to pay with intrinsic value, ignoring ability to pay. A Taylor Swift ticket might be worth £1,000 to me, in the sense that if I had £1,000 I would absolutely pay it. But I don’t, and it’s unfair to say that someone who is richer than me values the tickets more than me. Taking this into consideration, we can agree that price caps can lead to the misallocation that free marketers are talking about, but that they also give the opportunity to poorer people to buy something they’ll enjoy more than a richer person.

Like I said, I am sympathetic to this argument. The problem with it is that, pragmatically, it’s impossible to know what people’s intrinsic values are, and how much they’d pay for tickets if they were richer. (Although there are some ways around this: artists and ticket sellers could give discounts people willing to prove their desire for a ticket in some way, e.g. through competitions, etc). And I think there are many downsides with price capping: it’s not just the misallocation of value among concert-goers; there’s also misallocation among artists. It’s hard enough for a newcomer singer to compete with Taylor Swift; it becomes even harder if Taylor Swift tickets are kept artificially cheap. Ditto re music venues, theatres, and all other kinds of entertainments.

In conclusion, I think that people complaining about high ticket prices are mostly misguided, and are responding emotionally, not rationally. The fundamental issue is there are too many people wishing to see too few artists perform. Capping prices does harm to the music ecosystem (after all, most artists are earning too little!). But free marketers are also too quick to dismiss the legitimate concern that someone rich can afford to pay a high price for something they really don’t value as much as someone less well off. As always, a little more goodwill on both sides would help us all understand the world a bit better.

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However, I have a nit-picky point to make here: economists overstate the amount of shortages caused by price caps. Looking at the demand-and-supply chart below, standard economic theory is that introducing a price cap of pc causes shortages of q2-q1: there is a demand for q2 units of a good, but only a supply of q1. But! The free market would have settled at a price of p and q. So, in my view, the ‘real’ shortage, is only q2-q1: the difference between the demand at the restricted price minus the supply that a free market would have produced.

Well, duh. Good ideas and grounded business plans don’t matter when it comes to investing. The former are a dime a dozen, and anyone with above moderate intelligence and with access to a computer can put together a business plan; and as I’ve written before, even executing a bad business plan well can be immensely profitable.

No, what matters far more is the character, the ability, and the drive of the person pitching the idea. Do you know the best predictor of whether someone will click on an online ad? It’s not the relevance of the ad, or the gender of the viewer, or the platform on which they see it — it’s whether that person has clicked on an ad before [citation needed]. Similarly, a track record of doing amazing things (or even just getting things done) is a much stronger predictor of success than a well-written pitch deck. This explains why VCs are willing to throw so much money at second-time founders, even before they’ve written a single line of code for their new venture.

(Good investors and bankers don’t even require a track record: their strength is their ability to spot talent and drive.)

All this is well-known in tech circles. But the notion that character matters more than ideas is more contentious in politics, contra that verse in Hamilton:

I have never agreed with Jefferson once
We have fought on like 75 different fronts
But when all said and all is done
Jefferson has beliefs; Burr has none

Or perhaps I’m not quite right. People care about character when it can be used as a cudgel against their political opponents, yet when their own preferred candidates’ character comes into question, the standard response is either to dismiss such attacks as ad hominem, or to say ‘I don’t care about their personal life, I don’t have to like them, I care about their policies’.

The problem here is that this feeds populism: when a politician says the things we want to hear, we’ll cheer for them, even when we admit they are weak, incompetent, corrupt, or duplicitous. The effect of this is that we elect people who, because of these defects, will probably not deliver on their promises, but who will do damage in other ways: people who are weak or incompetent will be unable to get things done, while those who are corrupt or duplicitous will choose not to if it’s inconvenient.

Investors’ and bankers’ faith in people over ideas works well. We ought to follow their example as voters, but we run into two problems. The first is that in business, there is broad consensus on what constitutes success: profit and material progress (judged by improvements in technology, consumer benefit, &c); it is acknowledged that anyone who embarks on a business venture is aiming for the same things. In politics, people have wildly different objectives, not just different ideas on how to achieve the same purpose. So a voter might prefer an incompetent idealist over someone who will effectively pursue an objective the voter believes to be evil.

At least, this is what we’d conclude initially. But on deeper reflection, we ought to realise that even if voters have radically different ideals, there is a lot of common ground on the path to these ideals:

For example: you may be a libertarian who believes people ought to keep the vast majority of the wealth they generate; and your friend might be on the Left and think there is no justification for inequality. But I imagine you’d both agree it’s absurd that young people cannot afford to buy a house, or that it’s unsafe to walk in London holding your phone. Given that no government can plausibly change a country like the UK to a libertarian utopia or to a communist collective overnight, you should be willing to support a government that can address these issues, regardless of its ostensible philosophy.

So this first problem is not that hard to overcome: all it takes is a dose of pragmatism, and the realisation that it does not make sense to stop progress if it falls even a little short of your ideal state (though so many people fail to realise that — witness NIMBYs who block housing development because the proposals do not promise sufficient affordable housing, ignoring that blocking development results in no affordable houses at all).

The second problem though is much more despair-inducing: it is that if we were to vote for character and ability, we wouldn’t have anyone to vote for (in the UK at least).

• Labour have proven themselves to be utterly incompetent: they perform more pirouettes than ballerinas (winter fuel, grooming gangs inquiry, welfare bill, Mandelson’s sacking, definition of the word ‘woman’, planning reform, and I’m probably missing a few). There’s no point in voting for Labour because of the policies they advocate, because they are incapable of carrying out any policies whatsoever.

• The Tories had fourteen years in power, throughout which period they enjoyed solid majorities in parliament, and what do they have to show for it? Sleaze, in-fighting, backstabbings, constant reshuffles, the tragicomedy of the mini-budget, record immigration, crumbling infrastructure… there is no reason to believe they will do any better under Kemi’s leadership, especially because the waves of purges following leadership changes has robbed the party of its most talented and competent politicians.

• Farage has a track record of making outlandish promises and predictions, but no experience in running anything other than political campaigns (he does that well, I’ll give him that). Here’s the thing: it’s not racist to claim immigration is too high, and that the British government ought to priorise the welfare of British people instead that of asylum seekers and foreigners. But Reform and many of their supporters are racists, and they are ghouls: you can wish to cut immigration without being callous and cruel. And not only they’re ghouls, they’re incompetent ghouls: they managed to get five MPs elected in 2024, only for one of them to defect barely a year later, and another to resign the whip after being accused of securing COVID loans for dormant companies (having also been convicted for assaulting his girlfriend). Their chairman resigned and then rescinded his resignation a day later. They removed more than 100 candidates from their ballot. With all the problems facing the UK, they are banging on about banning halal meat. They are deeply unserious people, who will prove incapable of governing should they be given the chance (as they have been in the councils they’ve won).

• The Greens are a protest party of hypocrites, who claim to believe in renewable energy, but block new renewable energy projects. Their leader is a former hypnotist who claimed he could help women grow their breast size. … . Really??

• Your Party have splintered before they even came up with a real name. If they can’t manage a group of like 10 people, how can we trust them to run a country?

• The Libdems are the Libdems. They’re non-entities. They stand for nothing, they don’t have any politicians of consequence and ability as far as I know. The best that can be said about them is that they’re not as awful as the rest, if only because they haven’t been given the chance to prove they are (though in their defence, they acquitted themselves well in the coalition; I know most people dispute that, and believe that the coalition is when they proved to be useless, but I think this is unfair — the coalition was probably the UK’s last competent government, in that it achieved its objective of stabilising the British economy (and managed to run a whole term without in-fighting and political drama)).

The thing is, modern politics do not reward competence and virtue, nor do they always penalise their absence. Besides the fact that competence is hard to observe in a domain like politics (and even more so when ministers seem to be playing musical chairs, changing portfolios every year or so), many voters like to dismiss competent politicians as ‘technocrats’. A politician who hunkers down to get things done is seen as lacking flare and charisma.

As for virtue, it is trite but true to say that honesty is penalised because voters don’t like to hear bad news. A politician who tells the truth (like the fact that the triple lock is not a sustainable policy) is unlikely to get elected.

Then there’s the fact that voters care much more about what politicians say than what they do, and so they do not decry bad behaviour as much as they should. Any principled leftwinger should be outraged at the improbity of Angela Rayner’s mortgage shenanigans; but Rayner’s fans care about what Rayner says, not what Rayner does. Similarly, conservatives ought to hate Trump, a serial philanderer whose behaviour is a far cry from toned-down, conservative ideals. But he says he advocates conservative values (even if he doesn’t embody them), so people vote for him. In Greece, SYRIZA, the radical left-wing party, elected as its leader a golden boy who had worked for Goldman Sachs and made a fortune flipping ships (which he bought with a mysterious ‘personal guarantee’ loan). All he had to do to secure the vote of the radical left was to declare himself leftwing. Granted, all the above did receive flak from ‘their side’; but they all still had (or still have) many more supporters than they ought to have had if voters really cared about how one acts instead of what one says.

Unless this changes, unless we start holding people to account for what they do, not what they promise, we are unlikely to see good leadership. So what can we (as individuals) do differently?

First, since all parties are awful anyway, we should stop voting for people based on which party they belong to, and start evaluating them as individuals. If someone is decent, hard working, and honest, vote for them, even if they belong to a party you despise.

Second, we should criticise our side when they get things wrong. Don’t mistake defending an individual for defending their purported ideology. You’ll only end up hurting the ideology anyway. Don’t engage in whataboutism. If someone on your side has got it wrong, first sort out your house, then talk about others.

Third, and conversely, we ought to start applauding people who get things right, even if they belong to the other side. Perhaps if more people (including Tories and Reform) had voiced their support for Starmer when he tried to make tough choices (tough choices with which they agree! the Tories and Reform agree benefits need to be reduced, but they’d rather score points than work with Labour to get it done) he would have stuck the course.

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Let’s be clear: no argument in politics is really about principles. People on the Right have piled on Angela Rayner because what she did was so easy to attack. They invoke hypocrisy because it’s expedient and because it works, not because they really stand for something. Witness how both the Left and the Right accuse each other of censorship and free speech violations, while each bans books and news organisations they dislike when they are in power.

But the fact that principles are used so cynically doesn’t mean the arguments made are specious. An argument can be right even if the motivation for making it is ignoble. In this case, Angela Rayner underpaid tax. The facts that she has a northern accent or that Farage is doing the same thing as her have nothing to do with it: even if it were true someone with a home county accent would get away with it does not mean she should do so too. Whataboutism is extremely corrosive: if two people are treated differently, we should hold them both to the higher standard, not the lower.

In this particular case, however, it’s not even the case that Farage and Rayner are comparable. Farage calling for Rayner’s resignation for doing the same thing as him is not hypocritical. Rayner believes in higher taxes; Farage does not: the Reform manifesto explicitly advocates cutting stamp duty. Farage is minimising his tax in accordance to his stated beliefs; Rayner is doing so in contrast to hers. People did not call on Rayner to resign because she paid less tax than she owed, they did it because she did something she argues people shouldn’t be doing. That’s the hypocrisy.

As to whether the underpayment was an honest mistake, I take issue with that too. My objection isn’t the common one (‘she ought to have sought expert advice’): it’s that someone who claims to believe in a particular law ought to adhere to the law’s spirit, not its letter, and Rayner did not do that. Stamp duty is lower for people buying their primary residence, so the question here is, regardless of legal technicalities about trusts and so on, which is Rayner’s primary residence? Well, she’s the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. She still lives in that house to care for her children. It’s where she’s registered for most aspects of her daily life. It is pretty clear that her house there is still her residence. The claim that a seafront flat almost 300 miles away from her constituency is her home is simply not true (and if it is, she should resign as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne).

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It has resonated with many of my friends and colleagues, who often send it as a GIF whenever they observe a lapse in seriousness.

But what does it mean to be serious? I’ve asked a few people, and they all gave a similarish answer; my brother’s was almost word-for-word identical to the one I had formulated myself: seriousness is treating situations with the solemnity, gravity, and consideration they require. Though this definition is quite satisfying at first glance, there are two issues with it. First, it’s more subjective than I’d like: who determines the appropriate level of gravity for a particular situation? Is it just a case of societal consensus? Granted, all judgements on behaviour will be subjective to an extent, but I think this is too much so. Second, it conflates seriousness with the appearance of seriousness (a fault of the English language. Greek has two different words for these two different notions). Who is more serious? A deeply pious but shabbily dressed church-goer, or someone in the correct attire who appears at mass because they treat it as a social occasion?

Let’s see whether we can do better by surveying a few examples of what I (and I think most people) would agree is not serious behaviour, and see if we can find a common thread.

In a personal context, it’s not serious to…

• agonise (or pretend to agonise) over a decision you’ve already made in your mind

• do what you think you should want, or what you want to want, instead of what you actually want

• make decisions without questioning your motivations

In a professional context, it’s not serious to…

• care more about adhering to a process, than trying to accomplish what the process was actually designed to do

• spend a lot of effort on analysis to justify a decision that you’ve already made in your mind

• knowingly make a wrong decision because you believe it’s what your superiors/peers want

• knowingly waste time on things that don’t matter because it’s somehow expected in your organisation

• constantly flip-flop on decisions without there being new data

• use jargon

In politics, it’s not serious to…

• oppose a policy because of who’s suggesting it, rather than because you disagree with it

• knowingly make wrong decisions because of popular pressure

What all these have in common is doing things for the wrong reasons, but doing so knowingly rather than by mistake: they’re all cases of performative activity, and of elevating appearance above substance.

It’s true that a few of these examples (e.g. making decisions without questioning one’s motivations) are more akin to mistakes than deliberate pretence. And even in the most blatant cases of adhering to form rather than substance (e.g. ticking boxes vs producing results) people can delude themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing for the right reasons. But I think these kinds of mistakes are so preventable with a little introspection, or so obvious when pointed out, that making them is unserious in a way that other kinds of mistakes — the ones we’d aptly call honest mistakes — are not.

In contrast then, seriousness means being earnest and diligent in understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. Which does not mean you have to be dour; on the contrary, my own experience is that the least serious people are often also the most humourless.

I wrote to four such people to ask how they do it. Three of them, Tyler Cowen, Matt Levine, and Bryan Caplan, responded within three minutes to an hour (Tyler was the fastest:

)

They all said (or their response suggested) the same thing: they just do it. Two of them agreed with Tom that they receive too many messages: one said that he ignores email that does not seem worthwhile (and suggested he’s good at spotting worthwhile messages), while the other said that he goes through as much as he can, but if he doesn’t clear a batch of emails in a day, they’ll go forever unanswered.

Their responses had two things in common: first, obviously, they were unreasonably fast — I get slower responses from many of my friends (my family follow the same pattern as my three correspondents: they either respond within minutes, or they ignore me. Usually the latter). Second, their responses were very brief. So let me expand a bit on what I think is going on, and on what I think makes some people so fast (I’ve written about this before, but making it more succinct here):

0. An obvious point made by my wife is that all three correspondents are primarily office-based. Presumably, Tom spends more time away from his desk, meeting people, going to events, etc, than they do. So that helps. But it’s definitely not the full story — most office workers are far slower to respond, despite receiving fewer emails.

1. Let’s take the three at their word — there’s a lot to be said for just doing things. Too many people spend too much time planning and overthinking. To quote another nugget of wisdom from my wife (you’d all be better-served if she were writing a Substack), this is linked to confidence: some people are good at jumping to doing things because they don’t second-guess themselves.

2. These three are writers. They have spent decades writing (and therefore thinking) about many different things, which means they can respond quickly because they’ve probably encountered the same questions before. Experience and maintaining a well-thought out model of the world make it easier to respond on the fly: you don’t need to formulate an answer from scratch.

It’s interesting that in my professional experience, there is a very strong correlation between speed of response and general ability. Most people who respond quickly are very good at their jobs; and conversely, very few people who are slow are good. (I think the second effect is the stronger: there are some people who respond quickly but aren’t very good. It’s much rarer to find someone who is slow at responding but still good at their work.)

I’d love to invite thoughts on this in the comments. Have you also noticed a correlation between speed and ability? Do you think there are other factors that make some people faster?

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When the folks at the New Yorker take a break from publishing stories about how spending thousands of dollars on watches is a legitimate form of therapy for Trump-election-induced depression, they feature some good stuff. Case in point, a short piece on "Hahaha vs. Hehehe", in which the author is baffled by, and trying to explore, the emergence of "hehe" as an alternative to "haha".

I will offer my personal interpretation of the different representations of laughter in text in a minute. But first, consider something so obvious that the author of the article does not even question: why do all representations of laughter (besides acronyms) include the letter 'h'? And not just in Germanic languages, but also in Greek, Chinese and, according to my mother-in-law, Arabic (where laughter is apparently represented as just "hhhhhhhh", without any vowels)? (Though different languages obviously use different letters to represent "h"; for example, the Spanish write "jajaja!" - which to me sounds like an overexcited German Shepherd responding to "do you want a cookie?")

The answer is obvious, but fascinating nevertheless: all humans use the same sounds when laughing, and the predominant sound in laughter is that of drawing a breath - which we all instinctively code as an "h". But although all languages (that I know of) have tried to standardise the orthography of laughter in a strikingly similar manner, laughter in real life varies by individual: a professor at Tulane claims that he could transcribe and then read back his friends' laughter with such accuracy that everyone could guess whose laughter he was reciting. That is not to say that individuals' laughter is invariable: it does change, to convey different levels of amusement or other emotions. Nevertheless, it seems that an individual's laughing patterns are quite unique. This observation in itself is moderately interesting, but hardly breakthrough: upon reflection, we'd all realise that we can recognise our friends by the sound they make when they laugh. But I find it amazing that linguists can actually transcribe laughter in such a way that it becomes recognisable.

Unfortunately, it is too much to expect every person to be able to accurately transcribe their laughter, which is why we resort to a common laughter-vocabulary consisting of the exclamations ha, haha (with "ha" potentially repeated a few more times; the reason I called out the single "ha" separately is that it can have a markedly different meaning, as I will discuss below), hehe, heh, hihi, hee hee, tee hee, ho ho, the prefixes mwah, bwah &c, the acronyms lol, rofl, lmao &c and various emoticons.

Of these, ‘hehe’ is the most popular from around 2016 onwards (according to Google Ngrams); before then, ‘ha ha’ was the most common.

Do note, however, that Google Ngrams tracks the appearances of a word in books, and writing online can vary significantly. Furthermore, the results above are not perfectly accurate, as some writers do not inject spaces between consecutive "ha"s or "he"s; I chose to ignore this in order to eliminate noise from "haha" or "hehe" being used in different contexts (I discovered that the Hehes are a tribe in Tanzania, for instance). Finally, some noise still remains - for example, "lol" also stands for "lots of love".

I therefore tried to validate these results by searching for these various words in my whatsapp chat history. Sadly, the search function doesn't give the number of hits, but eyeballing the data, I'd say that "haha" is the most common, followed by "heh" - although the latter seems to be used almost exclusively by me. There are a few "lol"s, "hehe"s and various emoticons, but no "hee"s, "lmao"s or "rofl"s. Let's now look into these exclamations/acronyms/emoticons in more detail:

Ha

The author of the New Yorker article writes that "ha" is the basic unit of written laughter; that's true, inasmuch as the syllable "ha" is a constituent of "haha", but it's misleading: "ha" on its own is not actually used to express laughter or even amusement so much as surprise, suspicion, triumph &c (according to Oxford Dictionary). The word has its origins in Middle English apparently, though the dictionary doesn't give any sources.

That said, it's true that "ha" is also used for laughter. Well, sort of. I think most people use it as an acknowledgment that something intended to be amusing was said. The prankster who has so far tricked the CEO of Barclays and the Governor of the Bank of England uses it (in character) to applaud his own humour/cunning:

If you ask for the crystal glasses you’ll be able to admire [the waitresses'] enchanting dexterity. I keep those glasses low down, ha! You don’t reach my age without knowing all the tricks.

and

What else would Mack the Knife do but support those he can trust in!
Begs the question, who should we seek to silence next!?
Onward, to bigger, and better things.
I may have already had a stiff one, it’s been a long day, and I get no younger.
Clapton has nothing on me ha!

(To me, this usage seems so idiosyncratic that I am surprised that it by itself didn't give away the fact that the emails were a prank.)

Haha (& so on)

"Haha"'s eminence is confirmed by Oxford Dictionary, which redirects queries for "hehe" to it. According to the dictionary, "haha" is first recorded in Old English, though again, there are no examples (apparently it appears in Hamlet, though it seems that it's actually meant to express surprise instead of laughter). Also, note that Garner says "ha-ha" is the correct spelling.

In accordance with both the Ngrams results and the OED, most of the people who responded to my question on facebook on what words they use to express laughter said that "haha" or "hahaha" is their preferred choice. In their words, "hahaha is more expressive, whereas the other ones are too descriptive", and "the number of consecutive 'ha's is proportional to the volume of laughter".

(One exception: one friend said he uses "hahaha" when laughing at people, and generally seems to attribute a mocking tone to "haha".)

Personally, I use "haha" when only mildly amused, and "hahaha" when I find something genuinely funny. A quick search of the term in my family's whatsapp group (aptly named "Bantercats") reveals that "hahaha" is the most common variant, followed by the standard "haha". There was also a "hahahahaha" from my brother in response to this picture of a hotel room in Tianjin:

(I was put up at that hotel after my flight was cancelled due to bad pollution (that's a thing that happens here) - I pulled the curtains to look outside and found out the room had no window. I don't think they understand the function of curtains in that hotel.)

Heh

Urban Dictionary defines "heh" as "half-laugh, semi-cynical connotation, used on IRC by those too cool to say lol or roflmao". (Here's the word's self-proclaimed inventor.)

I use "heh" to indicate a drier sort of amusement than "haha"; a more detached kind, perhaps, or even slightly patronising (for example, I used "heh" in response to being told that the Chinese call Plato "Bolatu").

At other times it serves as a neutral response. In these cases, it serves to let my interlocutor know that I've seen their message, and that I am well-mannered enough to respond, without actually putting any effort into my response.

Interestingly, the New Yorker writer says that "heh" may have some down-home vulgarity undertones. I had never interpreted it this way, but David Foster Wallace does use "heh" in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men to transcribe the conspiratorial and sleazy banter between two men, one of whom has taken advantage of a vulnerable woman's grief to sleep with her. So I suppose there is something in this view.

Finally, "heh" is used to represent sinister laughter in some comic books, e.g.:

Hehe

Again according the UD, "hehe" refers to muffled laughter, with a sneaky aspect to it. Indeed, everyone seems to attribute similar characteristics to it - my facebook friends assigned "tongue-in-cheek" or "snigger" tones to it, and this academic article says that "hehehe" is a "cynical variant of hahaha".

(Searching for "hehe" in my whatsapp messages yields 13 hits. Of these, 11 "hehe"s come from the same person. I wonder what that says about him.)

Unlike the New Yorker writer then, I do not see "hehe" as an alternative to "haha": they serve different purposes. One interesting question though: do the people who use this variant do it consciously every single time? Do they intend to communicate this "nudge-nudge", "wink-wink" attitude? What I mean is, do people think "okay, I want to show I am being cheeky, so I will specifically write 'hehe'", or do they subconsciously write "hehe" because they are feeling cheeky?

It'd be quite something if the latter - it would show that our intuitive understanding of the various undertones in laughter exclamations has been ingrained in us.

Hihi, hee hee, tee hee, ho ho

All of these are far less common variants. I agree with the New Yorker writer that the first three are cutesy, possibly too cute, as she puts it. To me, they look a bit artificial - they give the impression one specifically chose to use them instead of their flowing naturally, and so they can be a bit jarring. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen "tee hee" anywhere except this famous bash.org quote.

(Note that "hihi" is increasingly being used as a greeting instead of as a stand-in for laughter - and that's the definition given by the Urban Dictionary.

As for "ho ho", its most notable variant is Santa Claus's "ho ho ho". It, along with all previous variants, also appears in comic books when the artists want to show that different characters have different laughter:

Prefixes: bwah, mwah

The former of these is used to express explosive or hysterical laughter, but it's not very common in text speak.

The latter is interesting though: it is universally recognised as evil laughter. Up to this point, all variants have been abstractions, or the greatest common denominators, of individuals' laughter. Though simplified, they have been representations of the ways people actually laugh - earnest laughter, cheeky laughter, cool and detached laughter, mocking laughter - these are all real.

But evil laughter? This is the only one that is an invention. No-one is evil in their own narrative; no-one actually says "mwahaha, I will destroy earth and kill billions of people!". Granted, some people are deranged and may laugh while plotting atrocities - but the thing is, "mwah haha" does not have a mad quality to it. So out of all the exclamations we have discussed up to now, this one is the only one that is purely fictitious.

Acronyms

I am going to put this out there: I consider "lol" and its kin to be signs of intellect deficiency. Though I have at times used them myself, they seem to me a less refined version of "heh" (a view shared by the Urban Dictionary, as mentioned earlier).

I dislike them for several reasons. First, they have lost their meaning: "lol" is supposed to mean "laugh out loud", but no-one interprets it this way - as a frequent user of "lol" wrote on facebook, "[if I actually laugh out loud] I say 'literal laugh out loud'". And no-one literally rolls on the floor laughing, and I am not sure what "laughing my ass off" is even supposed to mean. So it seems to me that using "heh" is more sincere.

Second, "heh" is easier to read, process and interpret than "lmao", "rofl" and even "lol", with which older people are unfamiliar:

Third, "lol" especially is often used a neutral filler - for example, "I am not sure what to have for dinner lol". Fillers such as "like" are bad enough in speech; we shouldn't be introducing them into prose. They serve no function that cannot be served more elegantly, and more considerately for the reader, by other means.

For one thing, "lol" makes the writer come across like a prepubescent boy; for another, sentences like the one above (which are sadly quite common) are hard to parse: the reader expects the sentence to end at "dinner" but is then confronted by an unexpected word, without any punctuation. This is taxing and unnecessary. Writing badly due may be excusable; doing so on purpose is not.

Emoticons/Emojis

First of all, I must confess I did not know the difference between emoticons and emoji. Apparently, the former are textual representations of smiley faces (or other things) - e.g. :). Emojis are actual pictures.

Given the plethora of different emoticons/emoji, it is easy to find one that perfectly fits the writer's intended purpose, and so there is less ambiguity than there is in, say, using "haha" vs "hehe".

My personal take on this increasingly popular form of prose is that emoticons are, generally speaking, good and emojis bad. Emoticons are useful: they are a quirky way of efficient, speedy communication. If you have dinner plans with a friend, and they cancel because they caught a cold, you can send a sad face - :(. This expresses your sadness that they are ill and that you won't see them more efficiently, and perhaps more kindly, than a "oh man, bummer" - which may come across as having slightly accusing undertones.

They also slightly enrich language. When someone at work thanks you for something, or compliments you, you can respond with :D, instead of writing "no problem" (boring), "you're making me blush" (silly) or "oh I'm not that great" (falsely modest).

Emojis serve the exact same purposes, but they are, in their vast majority, unbearably ugly. Look at gtalk's latest crop of smiling faces:

Look at them! They look like melted blobs of cheddar. They are horrible. Facebook's aren't much better either. Furthermore, they are jarring when inserted in text. Emoticons are way less invasive and annoying. What really bugs me is that most apps now automatically translate emoticons into emoji. Meh.

Usage guide

To recap, use:

• "ha!" for surprise or for pranking British bank CEOs.

• "haha" for laughter, and add more "ha"s in proportion to the hilarity of the thing you are responding to. If what you are responding to something unexpectedly hilarious, you can add a "bwah" at the beginning;

• "hehe" when you're being cheeky;

• "heh" when you want to acknowledge receipt of a slightly amusing message or if you're a comic book villain;

• "hihi"/"hee hee"/&c when you're intentionally being cute, but bear in mind that it may come across as artificial and overdone.

• "ho ho ho" if you're Santa Claus/writing a Santa Claus story (and are not feeling adventurous enough to change his laughter);

• "mwah ha ha" if you're drawing a comic book villain. But bear in mind this'd imply a simplistic view of good and evil.

• A combination of the above if you're a comic book artist drawing several characters laughing at the same time;

• emoticons to enrich your prose - but do not overuse. It's good to be able to express yourself in a variety of ways; over-relying on emoticons may cause a decline in your ability to do so.

Do not use:

• "lol" and other acronyms;

• Emojis.

I hope this helps!

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What’s funny though is that the same people who have no compunction about lying are affronted if they’re being lied to. Look at Musk: he has no qualms bending the truth, often just for lols:

But this does not stop him from using claims of dishonesty as a cudgel to beat down legacy media: they are liars and slanderers and report fake news to further their agendas.

Having double-standards is not unique or special; when I mentioned the contradiction in people’s attitudes towards lying (‘it’s fine to lie when it’s expedient’ / ‘lying to me is wrong’) my wife said it’s the same as when people complain that others cut in front of them in traffic, even though they themselves do it.

But lying feels different, because unlike other, more nuanced concepts like justice and fairness, honesty is an absolute principle: someone has either lied or they have not, and whether or not they have is not a function of the specific situation. Whether lying is justified or not is a different question, and I’ll return to it in a moment; but the point is that if you claim honesty is a virtue in itself, and dishonesty is a vice, then it’s strange to happily lie yourself, but beat down others when they do it. In contrast, other double-standards can be rationalised away: I’m justified in cutting in front of other drivers, because I drive faster and better and if I go in front of them, I’m easing traffic; if they cut in front of me, I’ll just be stuck behind them. Cutting traffic isn’t inherently wrong, it’s only wrong when bad drivers do it. More generally, fairness can only really be judged on a case by case basis: what’s fair in one scenario is unfair in another (for example, it’s fair to ask my older and stronger son to do more chores than his little sister; it’d be unfair to do the same if they were the same age (of course, your sense of justice might be that there should be an equal allocation of responsibilities regardless of ability — which is fine, but that also requires you to net justice on a case by case basis to determine levels of ability and difficulty of task)). And so, it’s easy to twist a situation so that fairness happens to coincide with your interests (which is why I always say you should be particularly introspective when your interests and your alleged principles of justice happen to align).

But again, honesty is not like that. Musk isn’t saying ‘the NYT lies, and they lie in support of a bad cause, and that’s what makes them bad’; he doesn’t argue that it’d be fine if they lied in pursuit of nobler means. His argument is that lying is bad in itself. And so it’s bewildering that he’ll openly lie (and at times admit to doing so) when it suits his needs.

I’m only using Musk as a high-profile example of a behaviour I’ve noticed in everyday situations. Many people I know have admitted to lying to recruiters when asked their current salaries; but presumably, they’d be extremely upset if prospective employers lied to them in return (imagine if a recruiter approaches you promising a £200k salary, but after you go 6 rounds of interviews, you’re offered £100k; or if your manager dangled a promotion which is never given). Or, many parents often lie about the age of their children to secure cheaper tickets, but they will also complain when airlines use deceptive pricing (adding taxes and tons of extra fees at checkout, for instance). I think the attitude to lying is the purest form of double-standards in the world.

As I mentioned above, you could argue that lying isn’t inherently bad, and can be justified as a means to an end. So, what ends rank above honesty as a good in itself?

I think that honesty with one’s self is the highest virtue, because without it it is impossible to hold any principles. If you are not honest with yourself, you cannot judge whether your actions are motivated by justice or self-interest.

Beyond that, there are clearly cases where lying is justified: I think everyone would agree that you should lie to save a life. To put it in more general terms, you could argue that pursuing one’s sense of justice is more important than honesty. However, I believe that one cannot pursue justice by lying consistently: lying is ultimately corrosive to any justice system. In any society of more than a handful of people, disagreements on fairness are bound to arise, and if everyone in that society accepts that it’s OK to lie to pursue their own ideals, this will result in low trust, corruption, and chaos. So, with the exception of truly gross injustices (murderous or blatantly corrupt regimes, for instance), even the pursuit of justice does not justify dishonesty. If you think it’s OK to lie because you’re operating in an unfair system, and lying is a way to correct injustices (which is how you might rationalise exaggerating your salary when negotiating with a new prospective employer), you should also accept that others will do the same; and you should have a hard think about whether that is a good thing.

(People often seem to think it’s fine to do bad things until they attain power, the idea being that they’ll then switch to being good and benevolent for the benefit of all. For instance, no-one likes politics, yet a lot of people have told me ‘play the game until you’re the decision maker, then run things they way you think is best’. But if you reach the top by playing politics, you can’t then flip a switch to reinstate honesty and transparency. First, your embrace of politics will have changed you; you won’t find it easy having hard conversations just because you have more power. Second, in playing politics for so long, you’ll have reinforced a political culture that you won’t be able to reverse.)

What about lying to be kind? Again, I think the bar for this needs to be really high. Many people say white lies are fine because they make people feel better, but the reality is that we don’t tell white lies out of genuine kindness, but out of fear of a difficult conversation. If I ask someone to review this blog post and they tell me ‘it’s great!’ when they don’t really believe it, they’re not doing me a favour; they are not doing it for my benefit; they are not helping me improve. They just want to avoid the awkwardness of disappointing me. Their alleged kindness is motivated by selfishness.

The most disappointing thing is when parents lie to their children, or instruct their children to lie, for extremely petty reasons. Here is a list of actual lies I’ve seen parents tell:

• ‘The park/fair/store is closed’ when it’s not, to stop their kids from asking to go

• ‘The iPad is broken’ to stop them asking to watch stuff

• ‘It’s been 10 minutes’ when it’s only been five to get them to go

• ‘Say you’re under four years old’ to get free admission

• ‘Say you’ve been ill’ to go away for a long weekend without school complaining that the child missed class.

This is incredibly harmful, more so than it seems at first glance (even though it sounds awful from the get-go when you articulate it fully). Despite everything I’ve written so far, despite the fact people lie habitually and openly, honesty is very much still praised as a virtue. So what message are you giving a child when you show them that it’s fine to practice vice when it suits you? You are not just teaching them that it’s ok to tell (what you may think are) minor and inconsequential lies, but that grown up morality in general is a facade, something to which we pay lip service, but which we drop at the first inconvenience. What you are doing is killing their belief in virtue altogether.

And for what? To avoid a tough discussion or a tantrum when they ask to watch Paw Patrol? Is that really worth your child’s morality? And beyond grand concepts of virtue and vice, how will you explain to them that lying to you is wrong, when it suits them? On what high ground will you stand when they lie to you about having brushed their teeth or done their homework?

Ultimately, as my wife puts it, lying to someone is (beyond being inherently wrong) a sign of disrespect. It’s the same as being late: the underlying belief is that your convenience or your purpose is more important than other people’s. I think the cornerstone of good parenting is treating your children with respect. Not as your equals: but as people who deserve to be taken seriously. Don’t lie to them.

Candour is not the same as honesty. I don’t lie, but I don’t always offer my opinion. Confronting people about their lying is an example of this; perhaps I should: perhaps when I hear parents lying to their children I should ask them how they justify it to themselves, and whether they’ve thought about the consequences down the road. It’s hard asking that question without being sanctimonious (this post is very sanctimonious!). But if you have lied in the past for what’s primarily a selfish reason, I would genuinely like to understand your justification. Am I wrong when I think that honesty is widely considered a virtue? Is that just not true, is it more like etiquette than a case of morality? Is it a case of the ends justifying the means, and if so, have you considered that other people will also apply the same principle?

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This silly prejudice is far from idiosyncratic: I was discussing old films with colleagues, and most of them have never watched a black and white film (one’s definition of ‘old film’ was one made in the 90s). But it’s strange, because while the young generally have a tendency to sneer at art that predates them, this dislike is particularly intense when it comes to film: scores of theatre-goers still flock to The Mousetrap, bibliophiles read Jane Austen, and people listen to the Beatles (although sadly I have come across people who didn’t know the Rolling Stones).

Perhaps the reason is that people instinctively consider visual effects a core aspect of enjoying a film. I say instinctively because if you query them, most will agree that other aspects are far more important: cinematography (which includes composition, lighting, and colour), plot, character development, and dialogue. I’m not going to be an old fogy and claim old-schools films were better than modern cinema, but I will point to the Lindy effect and to selection bias and say that highly-rated and well-known classics are much more likely to be enjoyable than a randomly-picked modern film.

And though I cannot claim that old films are superior to modern films in a general sense, I think there are two aspects in which the best classics outshine contemporary ones: first, they have much snappier and memorable dialogue. Modern dialogue is far too expositional and dumbed-down; screenwriters seem to think the audience cannot work out anything for themselves, everything has to be spelled out. It’s not a coincidence that the most recent quote in AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movie Quotes top 10 is from 1983.

Second, and this is more subjective, I feel that the stars of yesteryear had more charisma than their modern counterparts. Don’t get me wrong, there are many brilliant actors around, but I don’t think there are many who can match the on-screen presence and magnetism of Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, or Bette Davies. And also, I think the chemistry between actors in old films is much more palpable than that between most modern pairs.

(Actually, the absence of chemistry and collaboration is, I think, much more noticeable in American cinema and television, compared to British. This is true across the board, but it’s especially obvious on comedy and panel shows. Watch a British production, such as Would I lie to you, QI, or 8 out of 10 Cats and you’ll see comedians bouncing off each other, building on each other’s jokes, interacting; in contrast, American comedians just do their bits, one at a time, with little partnership. It’s not that the Americans are any less talented than their British colleagues; they just seem to be pursuing their art very individualistically.)

If any of this has convinced you to give the classics a go, you can start with one of my favourites, in no particular order:

• His Girl Friday: a manipulative editor tries to get his star reporter to cover one last story before her wedding. It’s an adaptation of the play The Front Page, and a great example of snappy dialogue and on-screen chemistry (between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell). It’s one of my favourite films, though the first half is much better than the second. The Front Page was remade in 1974 by Billy Wilder, with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and it’s also worth watching.

• Casablanca: everyone knows this film, so I don’t need to say much, except that it’s much funnier and engaging than people often assume.

• Out of the Past: my favourite film noir, about a man whose past catches up with him. It features the standard tropes of the genre — private investigators, a femme fatale, betrayals, and twists.

• Philadelphia Story: a love story featuring some of the best actors of their generation — Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn.

• All about Eve: the story of an aging actress threatened by her ambitious protege. Very moving, with an excellent performance by Bette Davies. Features Marilyn Monroe in an early (very secondary) role.

• Sunset Boulevard: another story about an actress past her glory days, very dark and disturbing.

• Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: even more dark and disturbing story about a woman holding her sister prisoner in their mansion.

• Mr Smith Goes to Washington: one of the most uplifting films ever made, about a naive young man who finds himself a Senator, and sets to confront corruption in Washington. Worth watching, now more than ever.

• 12 Angry Men: I love films set in one location, and this is one of the most defining films in the genre. A sole juror votes to acquit a man accused of patricide, and tries to convince his fellow jurors to do the same.

• Some Like it Hot: two musicians on the run from the mob disguise themselves as women to join a female band. Hijinks ensue.

• Stagecoach: this is a Western, so don’t watch it if you’re not a fan of the genre; it is, however, excellent. Fun fact, the Lucky Luke album La Diligence is inspired by this film.

• Dial M for Murder: a man attempts to murder his wealthy wife — very clever Hitchcock film.

I will also note that old-time slapstick comedies are excellent for children. I’ve been watching the likes of Laurel and Hardie or Buster Keaton with my kids, and they’re rolling on the floor with laughter; and laughter being contagious, these are great films to watch as a family. Many are available for free on Youtube.

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