In a two-part BBC documentary aired last year, a classroom of seven-year-olds were asked who, out of the boys and girls, would perform best at the funfair game, Strongman. The aim of the game was to slam the mallet down, hitting the base hard enough to send the puck sky-high and the bell ringing. All the children recognised that this was a strength-based game, with the girls picking the boys and the boys picking themselves as the most likely winners.

The board game Monopoly® was originally invented by Elizabeth Magie, under the name “The Landlord’s Game”, as a means of demonstrating the evils of rentier capitalism. Originally, there were two sets of rules — essentially, socialism (where the rewards for development were shared by all) and capitalism (where the rewards accrue to the monopolist, who crushes all opponents) — the purpose being to show the moral superiority of the first set. Naturally, because the world is like that, the first

Who remembers the game Whac-A-Mole? Well, for those who don't, Whac-A-Mole is an amusement arcade game in which players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear at random, back into their holes. As one pops up, you try to hit it, but as you do, another one springs up somewhere else. You're probably wondering where I'm going with this, but actually this analogy works pretty well to describe the rise of populism and populist parties across the developed

It has long been recognised that some members of the animal kingdom are able to vary the fertility of their species depending on climatic temperature (if you're interested, look up 'temperature dependent sex determination'). This effect is typically thought to be evident only in reptiles and fish, but according to research published last month by Kasey Buckles, Daniel Hungerman and Steven Lugauer, it may be that humans have achieved something remarkably similar¹. Picked up by Monday's edition of the Financial

There's a law in logic, called the law of the excluded middle, that states, with reference to the proposition 'a': not (a and not a). That is to say, something is either the case or is not the case, never both. There's no 'middle'. Aside from wishing I could exclude a bit more of my middle, I would observe that real life isn't that simple. We use equivocal phrases like: "Well, it is and it isn't..." "Yes and no..." "On the

In Martin McDonagh's dark comedy classic, In Bruges, Ray, played by Colin Farrell, gets into a fight with a fellow customer who complains after his date lights a cigarette in the smoking section of a restaurant. Sensing a degree of New World in the puritan diner's accent, Ray runs through a list of anti-Vietnam War grievances, before punching him in the face, and shouting "That's for John Lennon!". The diner, for his part, is totally confused. The joke, we later

They say that as comedians get older, they stop making jokes about drugs, sex and hedonism, and start focusing on the price of childcare and mortgage approvals. As their fans are ageing with them, many become oblivious to the drudgery of another "kids say the funniest things" routine. It doesn't need to be original or edgy, it's just a relief to be out on a Saturday night without a baby monitor. (For evidence of this phenomenon, see Michael McIntyre gigs.)

For most of my adult life, my attitude to haircuts has been the following. Get them done as infrequently, as cheaply and as close to home as possible, show the hairdresser a picture of South African cricketer Dale Steyn and say: "Like that, but a little tidier, please. I have an office job." Most of the time this strategy has worked out quite well. But as I get older it's becoming increasingly clear that this laissez faire attitude to haircuts

A former colleague of mine once told me how, as a junior economist, he used to record economic data releases in pencil. Pencil, he told me, was the key so that data could be erased to make way for subsequent revisions! Nowadays, Fathom's economists can simply click refresh on their Datastream Excel add-in; economic research has come a long way... Last week we argued that economists currently have little to fear from artificial intelligence (AI). We argued that economists add

It’s fair to say that computers have come a long way. Wind the clock back 80 years and Colossus, one of the first electronic computers, whose name was fitting of its size, was built during the second world war to decrypt secret German codes. Almost inconceivably, it used vacuum tubes and paper tape to perform several basic Boolean (e.g. true/false) logical operations. But fast forward to 2018 and not only do we carry them around in our pockets, but computers