This is interesting for a number of reasons. It tells us what people are doing that makes them miserable and happy. So a couple of things: Try to avoid commuting. We spend a lot of time commuting and we hate it. Try to spend time with other people. The company of any person makes you happier, unless it’s your boss. One piece of advice that might not be surprising is that people enjoy having sex, but they spend very little time doing it. We don’t know what happens when you have sex while you are commuting, or what happens when you have sex with your boss. One final thing, people don’t particularly enjoy shopping. And they don’t particularly enjoy looking after their children. But they do enjoy spending time with their parents. So, a lot of surprises.
I stopped wearing socks because I used to keep losing one part of the pair. Why do socks disappear?
Socks disappear. So forget the socks. The problem is when you lose a sock, you basically lose two socks, because they are matching pairs. We need to look at the Industrial Revolution here. One of the main advantages of the Industrial Revolution was something called interchangeable parts. So when a part of the machine breaks down you throw out the broken part, you slot in the new part and the machine starts working again. You don’t have to throw away the whole machine. So you need to apply the theory of interchangeable parts to your socks. And make sure all your socks are the same. So if you lose one sock, fine you lose one sock, but you haven’t got all this problem of matching odd socks. And when you lose a sock, you only lose one sock, and you don’t lose a pair of socks. So that is my advice. You need to just go out there and buy two dozen pairs of identical black socks. And look (points towards his identical black socks). In my suitcase, there are four more identical black socks. At home I have another twenty identical black socks. Every now on then I go and buy more socks from the same shop. I am frightened that one day they will stop making these socks. But, so far, so good.
A friend of mine is trying to have a child. Should she pray for a boy or girl?
Probably a boy. I have two girls and I am delighted that I have two girls. But there is this rather strange piece of research done by a couple of economists who discovered that married couples with girls were more likely to split up, unmarried couples with girls were less likely to get married, and single mothers with daughters were less likely to remarry. There seems to be something going on there. Are girls disrupting marriages? I think probably not. There is an interesting evolutionary explanation for why this might be, which is that we men are extremely fragile creatures. Women are more robust. So the idea is that men’s evolutionary success is very sensitive and a women’s is not. If that is true, when you have a boy, you need to do everything you can to protect him. You don’t want to split up the family. You don’t want to damage the family income, you got to stay together and make sure that this boy gets the best start in life. If you have a girl, she is going to be fine. And so you are happy to split up, if that’s what the couple wants. Very interesting. I don’t know if the explanation is true, but whatever the explanation is, the data is pretty compelling. But let me say, in case my wife ever reads this, I am very happy with my two girls. I didn’t want boys. So I just saw the research and thought: doesn’t apply to me.
My editor swears that my salary is in line with my performance. Is that an economic reality?
It is. But it’s quite rare. There is a very famous economic study of window fitters done by Edward Lazear, who was a very senior advisor to US president (George) Bush junior. What they found is that when they enforced performance pay, they massively increased productivity and reliability. They penalised people for making mistakes. What happened was, there was a ‘selection effect’ —- all the lazy workers resigned and the hardworking ones joined. There was also the ‘intentive effect’, where the hardworking workers worked even harder. It was very, very effective and quite influenced the idea of performance pay. But here is the trouble: It is very hard to measure performance. When your editor measures your performance, what is he going to measure? The number of words you type? With investment bankers, they appear to be about making profits, but then we realise that actually they were just picking nickels in front of the steamroller. And then they wipe out the whole bank. But they have already collected their bonuses. In many, many other cases, its hard to pay for performance. It is a good idea if you can do it. The trouble is, many people will admit that they don’t know how to measure performance, but they will still have performance pay. It makes no sense.
Should men leave the lavatory seat down as women demand?
There is a narrow technocratic answer and there is a big answer. The narrow answer is that you should leave it the way you have found it under most plausible assumptions. The reason is that the seat should be moved only when necessary —just before someone uses the lavatory. If a man visits the lavatory twice in a row, the ‘status quo’ rule saves the cost of lowering the seat when leaving only to raise it when returning. That’s the narrow answer. This was addressed by male economist and a male mathematician. I think they got it wrong. You have to consider the bigger game. And the bigger game is: putting the lavatory seat down is a very easy way of showing that you are a thoughtful man, and the guys who don’t bother to put it down or wipe up, if I may say so, they are the guys who don’t think. I always put the lavatory seat down, and you know what? My wife thanks me for it, roughly twice a year. I think I am winning there, forget what the mathematics says.
Why is your latest book Dear Undercover Economist priced at £12.99 and not £13?
There are a couple of different theories. But they haven’t been properly tested, I think. One is that people misperceive it. They misperceive twelve pounds and ninetynine pennies as twelve pounds something, as being importantly less than thirteen pounds. So that’s the theory. We economists don’t actually believe this. The other explanation is that it forces shop assistants to make change. If it’s a thirteen-pound book and you pay thirteen pounds, the shop assistant can take thirteen pounds, doesn’t have to make any change, can give you the book, and where does the thirteen pound go? Into his pocket. And you shoplifted the book without knowing. As far as the owner is concerned, the book disappeared and nobody paid for it. Very few people hand over twelve pounds and ninety nine pennies. They give thirteen pounds. Then the shop assistant has to hand back a penny change. Then he has to open the till and ring up a transaction and that’s a very effective of the transaction to be rung up.
How do I get hold of the shortest queue in the supermarket?
What I suggest is that unless you have the time to really specialise in studying supermarket queues and trying to be smarter than someone else, just get into the queue and don’t worry. And, by the way, probably it won’t be the fastest one, because you have one queue on this side, one queue on that side, so two to one, you will have a queue next to you that is faster. But that’s life. Sometimes we economists have to take a Zen attitude and that’s one of those times.
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