As the Victorian era dawns, modernisation erodes the old ways of life and poverty rises. In the unrest, an unlikely hero emerges, capturing the imagination of the countryside’s working class. He claims to be the new Messiah, and promises a better future. Despite his unconventional appearance and strange claims, his message resonates with the people of Kent, many of whom are willing to follow him into bloody battle.

For this Cautionary Conversation, Ian Breckon – author of Mad Tom’s Rising: The Revolutionary Mystic Sir William Courtenay and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil (US) – joins Tim to discuss a  forgotten folk hero and the dangerous power of belief in desperate times.

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Further reading

Academics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business have been doing ethnographic research into how technology workers are using generative AI. Some will tell you that ethnographic business research is both the worst kind of business research and the worst kind of ethnography, but I admit to a soft spot for this stuff. What the researchers found was the opposite of Adams’ morose Vogon guard: the minutes are amazing but the hours are terrible.

“In micro moments of prompting, iterating and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability,” researcher Xingqi Maggie Ye explained. “But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect.”

These tech workers felt that generative AI was making them dramatically more productive and capable — but they were also trying to do more, voluntarily working longer hours, and hurtling towards burnout.

Are these ethnographic observations a glimpse of the future for the rest of us?

No doubt we shall find out, but while we wait, both economic theory and the history of technology have some things to teach us.

Theory first. Consider a freelance programmer, paid by results, who used to work 10 hours a day and suddenly finds that they can achieve the same results in two. Common sense might suggest that the coder will start to enjoy the pleasures of a two-hour workday, but economic theory is more ambiguous: the “income effect” suggests that the worker should work fewer hours because they can achieve so much by working so little. The “substitution effect” says that workers should work longer hours, as each extra hour yields bountiful rewards.

Then there is the question of what the new equilibrium will be once everyone masters the technology. As an analogy, imagine that a few alchemists discover how to turn lead into gold, but their method is rapidly being copied. They should make and sell as much gold as possible, as fast as possible, before the collapse in the gold market. Coders armed with brilliant AI agents may be in the same position: code as much as you can while you can still charge money to do so, because code may soon become as cheap as dust.

There is also a corporate dynamic to consider. It may be that nine out of 10 in-house programmers are about to be sacked, leaving a handful in charge to manage the coding agents. If so, the imperative is clear: to keep your job, demonstrate that you can out-code everyone else in the building. Winner-take-all dynamics are not a recipe for long lunch breaks and long weekends.

That’s the theory, but history has a few lessons for us, too. Visual aids were once produced by graphic designers and used on special occasions only; the invention of PowerPoint meant that highly paid and skilled professionals started wasting time making their own slides, badly. Email is vastly quicker and cheaper than a letter, but that simply means a profusion of low-quality, low-value messages bleeding into the evenings and weekends. The library photocopier allowed a generation of students to copy academic articles at a speed their parents could hardly have imagined — but it did not make reading, thinking or learning any faster.

In each case there was an astonishing increase in a narrow measure of productivity, but the overall effect was to distract from the real task at hand, to create a bloated pile of busywork, and to intensify the sense of productivity debt, with the list of tasks people felt guilty about not doing getting longer, not shorter.

What the UC Berkeley ethnographers found is strangely familiar. “Workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others,” they wrote. That’s the bad slide problem all over again.

“Because AI made beginning a task so easy . . . workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks.” Everybody who lived through the rise of smartphones will nod in recognition.

“More multitasking. AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once . . . This created cognitive load and a sense of always juggling.” Well, yes — how many browser tabs do you have open right now?

I don’t mean to suggest that AI is useless or trivial, but there is a long history of time-saving digital technologies that at best make us more productive yet overwhelmed — and at worst, just make us feel overwhelmed.

Digital tools don’t have to work this way. The Nobel laureate economist Claudia Goldin coined the phrase “greedy jobs” to describe roles such as those in corporate law or investment banking where disproportionate rewards are paid to those willing and able to work long hours and be on call whenever required. She contrasts these with well-paid positions in pharmacy, paediatrics, primary care and veterinary medicine, where the jobs and the IT systems that support them have been designed to allow highly qualified practitioners to work limited hours and then hand over to an equally qualified colleague.

It’s not impossible to imagine AI agents being used to facilitate this handover process, but the discourse at the moment is of brilliant, idiosyncratic human conductors overseeing a frenetic orchestra of AI agents. Handover protocols sound less fun but may be a lot more useful.

And what are the rest of us to do while we wait for the wizards of Silicon Valley to stoop to building such prosaic tools? Todd Brown, a performance consultant and managing partner at Next Action Associates, has long espoused keeping an “Agenda” list for colleagues and important clients — working through the list face-to-face rather than firing off emails whenever something pops up. Now he does the same for ChatGPT, “with ideas for prompts”.

It may sound like an odd practice, given that generative AI — unlike a colleague — is always available. But it makes sense. Just because you can turn to AI at a moment’s notice doesn’t mean you should. There is something to be said for planning ahead before interacting with the AI, and for blocking out time without it — leaving space for the human in the loop to stop, to reflect and to breathe.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 March 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

In November 1979, Flight 901 departs New Zealand on a sightseeing journey over Antarctica, heading directly towards a volcano. When the plane vanishes, investigators are left with a mystery: how could a seasoned pilot miss a 12,000-foot peak? As they try to piece together the incident, conflicting stories emerge, key evidence disappears, and a troubling picture takes shape – one defined by human error, deceptive illusions, and the hunt for someone to blame.

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Further reading

Many of the key documents are collated at the website https://www.erebus.co.nz, including the initial report of the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents and the findings of Peter Mahon’s Royal Commission. Mahon later wrote a book called Verdict on Erebus. Gordon Vette also wrote a book about the accident and his research into whiteout, called Impact Erebus.

In 2011, New Zealand journalist Paul Holmes worked with Jim Collins’ widow and daughters to write the book Daughters of Erebus. In 2019, Stuff and RNZ interviewed many of the surviving key figures for the podcast series White Silence. For a flavour of the debate that Erebus can still provoke, see forum threads such as this and this. James Reason comments on the Mahon report in his book Beyond Aviation Human Factors, co-authored with Daniel E. Maurino, Neil Johnston and Rob B Lee.

What happened is often known as the “conformity experiment”, but that is a misleading label for an oft-misunderstood study. Asch ran many variations on his experiment, and the most surprising and powerful lesson is not about the power of conformity, but about the power of disagreement.

Asch’s basic approach was to show two cards to a group of about eight people. One card had a single line on it: the reference line. The other card displayed three lines of different length. The task was a straightforward multiple choice, picking the line that was the same length as the reference line. This wasn’t hard; when people were asked to do this task on their own, they almost never made a mistake.

However, Asch was not asking people to do this task in isolation, but as a member of a group. Participants would be asked, one by one, to tell the rest of the group their answer. This made space for the possibility that experimental subjects would be guided not by their own eyes, but by the opinions of others.

The groups were asked to do this 18 times, but Solomon Asch had a trick to play. Everyone in each group was a confederate working for Asch, except a single unsuspecting experimental subject. This poor dupe would be sitting near the end of the line. The confederates had instructions to get the first two questions right and then unanimously agree on the wrong answer for most of the rest.

Imagine the jolt of surprise and anxiety as the experimental subject saw one person after another contradict the evidence of his own eyes. People felt real pressure to conform, with more than one-third of the answers matching the group’s delusion rather than the obvious truth.

Why? When debriefed, some people said they had changed their minds, figuring the group must be right. Others said they didn’t change their minds, but did change their answers, not wanting to spoil the experiment. Still others were staunchly independent, saying that they presumed the group was right and they were wrong, but felt a duty to call them as they saw them.

What fascinates me about Asch’s experiment is what happened when one of the confederates had been instructed to disagree with the group and give the correct answer instead. The answer: the spell of conformity was broken. People made only a quarter as many errors, with the error rate falling below 10 per cent. The pressure from the group had lost much of its power.

Even more brilliant was another variation in which Asch again instructed a confederate to disagree with the group. This time, however, the confederate was an “extremist dissenter”, giving an answer that was even more wrong than the majority consensus. The result? The experimental subjects generally gave the correct answer; their error rate was still below 10 per cent.

Asch had demonstrated three things. First, people will go against the evidence of their own eyes if contradicted by a unanimous group. Second, group pressure is much weaker if even a single person dares to disagree with the group. Third, and most remarkable: it does not matter if the dissenter is mistaken; dissent punctures group pressure either way. People are liberated to say what they believe, not because the dissenter speaks the truth but because the dissenter demonstrates that disagreement is possible.

I thought of Solomon Asch when I heard about a cookbook by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. It’s full of the classics, but there are two very different recipes for each dish — one by Julia and one by Jacques. In the margins, each offers a jovial explanation of what the other cook has done wrong, why they made different decisions and what effect those decisions have on the final meal. It is, writes philosopher C Thi Nguyen, “the record of an argument — a rowdy conversation between friends”.

This matters because, as with Solomon Asch’s duplicitous experiment, it shows us that disagreement is possible. The two cases seem very different, not least because while there is only one correct answer to Asch’s visual perception test, there is more than one way to sauté a fish. Yet the disagreement is valuable either way, because it gives us permission to think for ourselves.

Many years ago I was involved in scenario planning for the oil company Shell. It was always a fascinating exercise, but I now realise that one of the most important strengths of the process was rarely discussed: there were always at least two scenarios, and all the scenarios were given equal status. This was Cooking at Home meets corporate strategy: the fundamental assumption was that there was more than one plausible future, and a rowdy conversation about the different possibilities unlocked a treasure chest of fresh thinking.

Charlan Nemeth is a psychologist and the author of No! The Power of Disagreement in a World that Wants to Get Along. She cautions against “contrived” dissent — for example, the Catholic tradition of having a “devil’s advocate” to argue against the canonisation of a putative saint. This sort of thing sounds good in principle, she argues, but in practice there is a limited benefit in a rote play-acting of disagreement. For one thing, everyone knows the devil’s advocate is just pretending, so nobody feels much pressure to persuade them to change their mind. “Role-playing,” writes Nemeth, “does not have the stimulating effects of authentic dissent.”

Yet some contrivances are better than others. Nemeth writes approvingly of an investment firm only making decisions after considering serious arguments both for and against a position. What makes this different from playing devil’s advocate? Perhaps the sense that the contrary arguments are not a game, but made in all seriousness.

Another contrivance is the idea of “red teaming” an idea — giving a group the task of trying to rip a new idea apart before that idea is adopted. Is this an empty ritual, or a serious practice? Depending on people’s intent, it could be either.

Contrived dissent is better than nothing, especially if the contrivance itself is taken seriously. But the most valuable form of dissent is authentic, even stubborn and brave. There is no substitute for finding one of those people who feel a duty to call things as they see them.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 Feb 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Friedman’s argument was wide-ranging but the bottom line is easy to summarise: “Economic growth — meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens — more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.”

Friedman noted that a thriving economy might have a number of welcome side-effects, consequences which we might call moral progress. For example, if jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce, discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or religion “most often gives way to the sheer need to get the work done”.

Yet for Friedman, the key to unlocking the virtues he admired was not jobs but an increase in broad-based material living standards, which is measured — or at least proxied — by GDP per person. He argued that we naturally judge how things are going by making comparisons, and two types of comparison are readily available. The first is to compare ourselves with others. The second is to compare our current situation with our own past experiences. If living standards were briskly increasing, then we would notice that we were comfortably richer than we had been a decade ago. If living standards were stagnating or falling, then we would stop making contended comparisons with our former selves, and our envious gazes would turn to the lives of others.

Such zero-sum thinking is likely to be toxic and counter-productive. After all, as Friedman writes, “Nothing can enable the majority of the population to be better off than everyone else. But not only is it possible for most people to be better off than they used to be, that is precisely what economic growth means.”

At the time, Friedman was criticised from the left for being too reductive about what economic progress meant (what about inequality? What about environmental sustainability?) and from the libertarian right for confusing moral progress with centrist ideals such as an inclusive, redistributive welfare state (what about rewarding excellence? What about freedom?).

These critiques have lost their bite. The events of the past two decades have proved that on the big questions, Friedman was unnervingly, tragically correct. The 21st century has been an era of economic trauma, and the consequences for our attitudes and our politics have become all too obvious.

The US economy has certainly grown over the past 25 years, but the growth has been uneven, uncertain and repeatedly interrupted. The century began with the unnerving popping of the dotcom bubble, followed by the post-9/11 recession, which blurred into the “China shock”, an influx of Chinese imports that for a few years inflicted localised but traumatic damage on US communities dependent on manufacturing. All that was made to look tame by the banking crisis of 2007-08, which depressed growth rates for years afterwards, as well as draining the US economic system of legitimacy. The final one-two punch was the Covid-19 lockdown followed by the surge in inflation of the past few years.

What does all this drama look like in the economic data? Simple. Over the quarter-century beginning in 1950, real GDP per person grew almost 80 per cent. Over the following quarter-century, 1975-1999, real growth per person was again just under 80 per cent. But from 2000-2024, total real growth per person halved, to just under 40 per cent.

Or consider the experience of the finance-heavy UK economy, in which the banking crisis looms even larger. That crisis was followed by an anaemic recovery — not helped by the tax rises and spending cuts of the coalition government — and then, in 2016, the vote for Brexit. The data, again, tells the story: between the peak of 2007 and the last full year before the referendum, 2015, the UK’s real economic output per person grew by a grand total of 1 per cent. Since 2016 the average is still well short of 1 per cent a year. For context, in the 1990s, real per capita growth was more like 1 per cent every six months.

Friedman’s basic thesis was that robust, broad-based growth would encourage tolerance, social mobility, fairness and a commitment to democratic values. Should we be surprised that an economic slowdown has given us the opposite?

Since The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth was published, economists have investigated its thesis with a more quantitative lens. Lewis Davis and Matthew Knauss looked at more than 80 countries between 1989 and 2007. They found that people were more eager for governments to “take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for” where the growth rate had recently been rising and income inequality had recently been falling.

That’s an intriguing finding, particularly the counterintuitive proposition that people want more government provision in places where income inequality is falling. And not everyone would agree that there is anything “moral” about wanting government to take a bigger role as a provider. Still, it is striking that Davis and Knauss find that in economies that are misfiring, with falling growth and rising inequality, the typical response is: every man for himself.

In January, Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann and Sacha Dray published a study of “Growth Experiences and Trust in Government”, and concluded that individuals who had experienced higher GDP growth since they were born “are more prone to trust their governments”. Again, trusting your government is not quite the same thing as moral rectitude, but Besley and colleagues are pointing to some of the same fundamental issues as Friedman was: when economic growth sags, it doesn’t just change what we can afford — it changes what we value, what we believe and who we trust.

We shouldn’t be reductive about this link between material flourishing and moral flourishing. There are certainly moments, such as the Great Depression in the US, when both the government and the people seemed to rise to the challenge rather than sinking into infighting and recrimination. And the increasing power and attention given to unsavoury political characters around the democratic world is surely about more than merely low growth. Still: low growth matters, not just because it empties out our shopping bags, but because it hollows out our character.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 18 Feb 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Robert Propst is more than an inventor: he is a visionary, an innovator dreaming up how to make the perfect office workstation. When he reveals his bold design for a creative, flexible ‘cockpit of tomorrow’, he comes into conflict with the unyielding push for workplace efficiency. This clash of ideals will go on to shape our working lives forever. 

This episode was originally released to subscribers. For ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes, monthly behind-the-scenes conversations, our newsletter, and more, please consider joining the Cautionary Club.

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Further reading

The definitive sources on Robert Propst and the invention of the cubicle are Nikil Saval Cubed, and Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office.

Other sources on the history of the cubicle include Wired, Pinup, the Financial Times, Fortune, Whalebone, the New Yorker, the Harvard Business Review, the Henry Ford blog, and Herman Miller’s archives.

On surveillance systems we relied on reporting from the New York Times and the Guardian. The meta-analysis of productivity tracking systems was published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports.

Email is flawed, to be sure — many emails should have been a conversation. And if a message is either urgent or utterly disposable, then instant messaging is fine. But as a serious tool for important communication, email remains underrated.

First, it’s asynchronous. We don’t live in the 1990s any more, so email doesn’t beep for attention. The understanding is that if you send an email I will respond at a time that is convenient to me. Instant messages ping because — well, instant, right? And while I could switch off the needy noises from text or WhatsApp or almost anything, that would mean stripping the technology of a genuine use case in order to deflect some of the annoyance of people misusing it.

Second, email contains its own written record. You can check back, remind yourself of details and read old attachments. It is easy to file or to tag. Admittedly, some instant-message platforms have a way to search for old messages — if you can remember which platform they were sent on. But as a retrievable record of communication it’s hard to beat email.

(Reasons one and two explain why my wife and I will often send emails to each other across the room. It’s not sociopathy; sometimes it’s useful to provide notes and links for something we need to discuss, and it’s always considerate not to interrupt someone who is busy.)

Third, my computer has a keyboard and my phone doesn’t. Yes, I could install WhatsApp on a personal computer, but even if WhatsApp was well reviewed on Windows (it isn’t), I wouldn’t want to. It would be just another source of interruptions.

Fourth, it’s easy to organise email visually. When I check my email, I see four folders: an inbox, a “to do” list, a “to read” list and a “waiting for” list. When I check WhatsApp, I mostly see emojis. I am told that Snapchat is even worse.

Fifth, it’s much easier to customise the way email works — you can schedule future messages and set up filters, auto-replies and templates with chunks of text you regularly need to use. You can turn emails into calendar appointments with a click or two. Some instant-messaging apps offer some of this functionality, but all of it is commonplace on email, most of it for decades.

Finally, there is the enshittification problem: many instant-messaging platforms have an owner with market power and an ever-present temptation to degrade the user experience in pursuit of profit. If you don’t like WhatsApp and would rather use Signal, you need to persuade your friends to embrace the new platform. This co-ordination problem gives WhatsApp’s owner Meta considerable leeway to make your life worse before you get round to leaving.

In contrast, nobody owns email: it’s an open standard. You may be relying on Big Tech to provide your Outlook or Gmail account, but you can switch easily if you don’t like it any more. Nothing stops you sending messages from one email provider to another, so when you switch you don’t need to persuade your friends to switch with you. This power of exit is easy to take for granted — until you need it.

Of course, there are sometimes good reasons to use instant-messaging platforms. Their encryption is usually better than email; they handle photographs better; they can be fun for quick, disposable sharing of jokes or co-ordinating where to meet for a drink.

But that’s not why so many people are sending texts that should have been emails. The attraction of instant messaging is selfish. Messages are designed to interrupt the person to whom they are sent. HEY, STOP! LOOK AT THIS! If your message demands that sort of immediate attention, fine. That is why they call it “instant”. But many instant messages don’t — they’re just inconsiderate interruptions. And because instant-messaging apps don’t have a proper inbox, they’re inconsiderate interruptions that can easily slip out of sight.

When the message is important but not urgent (that is, when the message should have been an email), then you’re implicitly requiring the recipient to set aside their priorities immediately to respond to yours — at the very least, making a note to themselves to deal with your interruption later.

Cory Doctorow — the author of Enshittification and an email power user, captured how this feels in a recent essay: “getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who’s working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball and a machete, and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, ‘Hey, catch this!’”

I find this watermelon toss infuriating. Life presents us with enough incoming watermelons already; we don’t need people throwing them at us out of simple thoughtlessness. In examining my own rage, I think I’ve come to understand why I find this behaviour so upsetting. I object to being dragged into a mess of other people’s making.

The digital world is full of what are euphemistically termed “walled gardens”, a term which conjures an image of a sheltered oasis, but in reality means a cross between a doggy toilet and a prison camp. That would be fine if I could stay outside on the open internet, but my friends and colleagues keep insisting that they’re having a picnic in the garden and they would be so delighted if I’d show up.

Whenever I receive an instant message that should have been an email, I assume the worst: the person who sent it did so because they lost control of their email. Their inbox is overflowing; the searchable, fileable history of communications is no longer an asset but a guilty burden; they don’t trust themselves to reliably deal with an email, and so they don’t trust me either.

In other words, their email game is so weak that they might as well be flinging WhatsApps. And that drags me into their chaotic, goldfish-memory world. Did I say that all these instant messages were like asking me to pick up your discarded chocolate wrappers? Let me change the simile. Your instant messages are like you eating the cheeseburger, while I have the heart attack.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 Feb 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

This episode is available exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club, and Pushkin+ subscribers.

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Further Reading

Ali. A Life Jonathan Eig. 2017

Henry Cooper: A Hero For All Time Norman Giller. 2012 

Ali in Britain Michael Tanner 1995

Time “Prizefighting: Murder on the BBC.” Friday, June 28, 1963

Guardian “Observer picture archive: Cassius Clay in London, 30 May 1963” Sat, 1 June, 2019

The Long Win: The search for a better way to succeed. Catherine Bishop. 2020.

In 1999, a series of bombs explode in Russian apartments, killing hundreds and spreading panic. No one knows who is behind it. But when one device is spotted before it detonates, troubling questions emerge. Why is the FSB changing its story? Was it really a bomb? And why are the people who probe too closely turning up dead?

Tim Harford is joined by Helena Merriman, host of new BBC podcast The History Bureau: Putin and the Apartment Bombs, which charts the mysterious events surrounding the rise of Vladimir Putin, and asks why the real story sometimes gets missed. 

For ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes, monthly behind-the-scenes conversations, our newsletter, and more, please consider joining the Cautionary Club.

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What an eye-opening delight, then, to pick up C Thi Nguyen’s book The Score. Nguyen is a philosopher and, more importantly, an enthusiast for all sorts of playful activity from rock-climbing to yo-yo tricks to role-playing games. He argues that the contradiction I found in my fitness watch is part of a much bigger story about the way we have allowed quantified metrics to seep into so many parts of life.

The tyranny of targets is familiar stuff to social scientists, even if it seems to be a source of endless unpleasant surprises for policymakers and corporate executives. Charles Goodhart, an economist, and Donald Campbell, a psychologist, each famously explained that perfectly decent quantitative metrics become corrupted once they’re pressed into service as targets.

Nguyen agrees, but wants to go further. The problem is not just that we contort our behaviour to hit the target in the service of some bureaucratic incentive; it’s that we cease to realise that we are contorting our behaviour at all. The metrics, which are inevitably reductive, begin to seep into our own judgment of what matters. Nguyen calls this value capture: we abandon our rich and subtle personal values in favour of the simplified, quantified values we are being so conveniently offered.

Why does this happen? A simple answer is “because of computers”, but there is more to it than that. The rise of quantification isn’t the result of some tech-bro conspiracy. It’s been happening for a long time and for some good reasons.

First, quantified evaluations — of a student essay, a surgeon’s safety record or a bottle of wine — can be added up, averaged, analysed and compared across contexts. They become portable: you can compare one school class to another, one hospital to another, one wine producer to another. Everything can be analysed from a distance.

Second, quantification is often the result of algorithmic rules. Take the inputs, crank the algorithmic handle and out come the outputs. If you’re a university president wanting your institution to rise up the rankings, there are levers to pull: persuade more candidates to apply so that you can be more selective, spend money on the library and help your graduates find jobs. These rules are accessible: you don’t need deep expertise to apply them or to interpret them.

Third, these algorithmic procedures tend to make people interchangeable. Rather than relying on the ineffable intuitions of a teacher or a doctor or a coach, you have an objective, consistent process: any qualified person can follow the quantified process and so all qualified people are substitutes for each other.

Fourth, all these quantified metrics allow a centralised authority to co-ordinate and control what would otherwise be a mess of idiosyncratic decisions.

Portability, accessibility, interchangeability and co-ordination are often huge advantages. It is no exaggeration to suggest that modern life, including modern science, modern technology, modern politics and the modern economy, depends on these four key features of quantification.

But each of the four has a downside. While quantification allows us to make comparisons across different contexts, it also strips away those contexts. Rules-based decisions are intelligible and accessible to non-experts, but they are also rigid, failing to adapt to the subtleties of circumstance. Making people interchangeable does away with unwelcome inconsistencies, but also robs decision-making of individual judgment and sensitivity. And the downside of co-ordination is the loss of autonomy.

There are good metrics and bad ones, of course. Some are corrupt, counter-productive and riddled with perverse incentives. Others impose method on madness, identifying more effective medicines, more productive manufacturing techniques or more profitable trades.

Still, even the best metrics are inevitably reductive, stripping away context, discretion and judgment. These metrics also strip away diversity, forcing everyone to agree on what is best, even when we should let a thousand flowers bloom. In the pre-metric era, a university might have had a distinctive outlook, aiming to serve a particular kind of student in a particular way. Once each university wants to rise up the rankings they will need to embrace whatever values the rankings enshrine. If the metrics are good ones, then quality might rise, but the range of offerings will shrink. If the metrics are bad ones, then both quality and diversity will suffer.

There may be little point in trying to turn the tide of quantification in business and policy, but we can at least try to prevent it seeping into our souls. Yet why is it so easy to let the data rule the way we sleep, the way we move, the way we eat and even the way we interact our friends? Yes, digital devices have been designed to twiddle our dials. But the world is also a confusing place and we are hungry for simple, accessible guidance. Rely too much on the metrics, however, and we risk outsourcing our judgment and replacing it with thin, globalised values that do not really reflect who we are.

Like Nguyen, I love games, and games have rules and a score. Why do they feel so different from the gamified world in which we chase streaks on our language-learning apps, try to move the VO2 needle on our fitness watches and, at work, crank away at some corporate performance metric with one eye on promotion?

Perhaps the secret to a good game or sport is that the goals are both tantalisingly challenging and utterly unimportant: that’s true of my marathon, Nguyen’s rock-climbing, a game of football or a game of chess. What makes the game fun is that it’s so hard to succeed — and that whether you succeed or fail, you can always play another game.

In a fun game, the rules are a scaffolding for playful mastery. And in a gamified life? The rules may be a scaffolding for productivity — but all too often, they are a cage for us poor players.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 Feb 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.