The writer, Rory Sutherland, is vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. He's a bit of a wonk. Also a bon vivant and raconteur extraordinaire. Interesting combination
From The Spectator, April 19:
Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you need to be seen to belong.
people from their cars and cramming them into mass transit
Such beliefs are hence closer to religious creeds than to any conventionally formed opinion. Consequently, any contradiction of such accepted beliefs in public, however intelligent, is treated as heretical: a social gaffe at best, a career-ender at worst.
I once had an idea to host a conference where the speakers and the attendees had all recently retired. The idea was that, freed from the obligation to repeat the usual approved platitudes, you could learn what experts really thought when they were free to speak their minds, rather than reciting a Davos-style litany of received opinion. (My cunning idea was not to pay the speakers, but to hold the event on a cruise ship, which are like catnip for the over-sixties.)
One of the speakers would have been David Metz, the author of Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy, a fabulous polemic written after the author had left his job as chief scientist at the Department for Transport.
The book is a revelation. What becomes clear is that, in policy circles, it is now impossible to express any opinion which is pro-car or in favour of roadbuilding. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into some form of mass transit. This is obvious nonsense. While trains and buses are fine for very specific journeys, for the overwhelming number of journeys we make day to day, the car is either irreplaceable, or else supreme. If it’s raining, if you have luggage, if you have children, if you want to transport anything heavier than a suitcase, if you want to travel at an unusual time or anywhere remotely rural, the car or van wins hands down. And I write this as someone who really likes trains.
New roads might be better than rail in countless ways. For one thing, you can build houses alongside them. Indeed, when you take land value into account, the case for road-building becomes stronger still. High-speed rail mostly connects places where land is already expensive with other places where land is also expensive. It is centripetal, funnelling people into areas which are already comparatively rich. Roads, by contrast, are centrifugal – they disperse people and their money, adding value to land that was cheap beforehand. If you can capture the increased value of newly accessible land (for instance by selling planning permission) it becomes possible for government to build roads for free while reducing the housing shortage.
But, Metz explains, expenditure on transport infrastructure is not based on land value. Instead, it is accounted for by a fatuous model of ‘time saving’. This has the unfortunate side-effect of valuing the time of rich people more highly than that of poorer people, which is why southern England receives disproportionately more funds than the north....
....MUCH MORE
- "Harris Tweed, the miracle fabric"
- Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland: "The Next Revolution Will Be Psychological Not Technological"
- Looking For A Last Minute Gift? Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland Has An Idea
- Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland Has Some Thoughts
- Behavioral Econ.:"Advertising and the Death of Don Draper"
- Ogilvy & Mather UK Vice-Chair Rory Sutherland on Driverless Showers
Well, it had a good run.
This story about a stock listing reminded me that Rory Sutherland had worked out the precise nexus of comfort and despair that we are seeing in the Great Metropolis....
Behavioral Science: "Designing Transport for Humans, Not Econs"
Our boilerplate introduction to one-half of this writing duo:
Readers who have been with us for a while know I get a kick out of Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland. He's a first rate marketer and enough of a behavioural scientist to be able to hold his own in conversation with Kahneman.
Additionally, he holds, along with Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger, that most nebulous* of corporate titles: Vice-Chairman.
And here is the mini-bio for the other half of the team:
Pete Dyson was a member of Ogilvy’s behavioral science practice from 2013 to 2020. In 2020, he joined the UK Department for Transport as principal behavioral scientist, tasked with the Covid-19 response, sustainable behavior change, and internal capability building. is also a semi-professional Ironman triathlete and in 2021 broke the record for the fastest non-stop cycle from Land’s End to London. He is the author of Transport for Humans (with Rory Sutherland).
From Behavioral Scientist, November 16, 2021:
When we move things, rather than people, around efficiently, no feelings need to be taken into account. Planning can be mathematically optimized without any consideration of psychology.
For centuries, transport has been a battle of ideologies: the utilitarians versus the romantics. One side strives to optimize journeys against quantifiable measures while the other nostalgically recounts the joys of travel.
We aim for a more balanced position. We argue that society’s present focus on utilitarian efficiency has run its course and that the romantic view of travel needs to be updated to make transport simpler, more inclusive, and sustainableIt’s common to hear that transport providers are “simply getting people from A to B”: a low-bar ambition that misses the real purpose of much travel. Imagine if other sectors adopted the same reductionism: if cafes were just about the efficient delivery of calories; if hotels focused solely on their number of beds per square meter; or if health care were solely about longevity, not the reduction of pain. Each of these sectors has certainly experimented with strategies based exclusively on speed and efficiency, and sometimes they’ve gained a short-term competitive advantage by doing so, but it rarely works out well in the long run. Establishing what this all means for transport involves thinking less like an economist and more like a real customer.
Introducing Homo transporticus
Homo economicus, a long-running academic joke, refers to an idealized species of beings who make decisions using rational cost-benefit analysis in an environment of perfect trust, fully aware of all the available options, acting purely in their own self-interest. Outside of academia these conditions exist rarely, if ever.
Look around you at any bus stop, on any train platform or in any traffic queue and you’ll quickly understand that Homo economicus would be a bad avatar for passengers, commuters, customers, drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. But, for many reasons, Homo economicus is often invoked when we design transportation.
More precisely, transport designers have fabricated a new species: Homo transporticus, a cousin of economic man. Homo transporticus is naturally selected to use modern transportation, with abilities that include a full awareness of the modes of travel available, an encyclopedic knowledge of routes and timetables, the ability to navigate them without hindrance, and the ability to compare two options and always choose between them in a way that a planner would consider to be rational. Homo transporticus has stable preferences, makes lightning-fast calculations about cost, convenience, and travel time, and always chooses better options when they are available.
Certainly, some avid transport enthusiasts aspire to this kind of mastery: memorizing timetables, seating configurations, traffic light timings, and countless more hacks and workarounds. That the system attracts and rewards such dedication reveals its shortcomings. It shouldn’t be this way. Transport is for all humans, not just the ones who are keen enough and foolish enough to spend hours researching, memorizing, and perfecting their trip.
Why we go beyond Homo transporticus
Homo transporticus is an idealized traveler—what economists would call a “representative agent.” Average in every way. These simplifications can simplify demand forecasting, price modeling, and cost-benefit analyses of new infrastructure, but they leave out much that is important. For instance, our physiology, psychology, and differences in mobility.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Behavioral Scientist: "Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge"
