Predicted a 24% boost, but clocked a 19% drag

Artificial intelligence coding tools are supposed to make software development faster, but researchers who tested these tools in a randomized, controlled trial found the opposite.…

Mozilla's management is a bug, not a feature

Opinion  Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users.…

Czech researcher lays out a business case for reducing reliance on Redmond

Comment  A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations – a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers.…

How should we debate immigration? Here's my advice: don't.

Debates don't work, at least not as they should. They don't favour the truth, but plausible liars and for those who can best appeal to prejudice and cognitive bias. Jonathan Portes, who is doing great work in trying to bring facts and rationality to the issue, describes his opponents' strategy: "Flood the zone with a mixture of lies, half-truths, misleading claims and statistics taken out of context." Against this, rational discussion is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

We needn't look far for a parallel here. It's now obvious that Brexit was a bad idea: only 31% of voters say it was the right decision. But have Brexiteers retired in shame? No. Dan Hannan - who gave us the most absurdly cretinous fantasies - still has a seat in the House Of Lords and a newspaper column. The marketplace in ideas is broken; peddlars of crap do not exit as they would in a well-functioning market. Even if immigration scaremongerers could be proven wrong, they'd not shut up. And why would they when they have much of the media on their side? As the old(ish) saying goes, "never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel."

Put it this way. Imagine that net immigration were to fall to (say) under 200,000 by the next election, a drop of three-quarters from its 2023 peak. Would Reform 2025 Ltd then say "Labour's making great progress; we'll therefore give up"? Of course they wouldn't.

Or to put it another way, the UK has been receiving immigrants for decades - be it Jews in the late 1800s, Pakistanis and the Windrush generation in the 40s and 50s, Ugandan Asians in the 70s and so on: as one who remembers the latter, talk about immigration seems as relevant as Slade or power cuts. If the "debate" about immigration hasn't been resolved by now it's not going to be, because the evidence isn't decisive.

A second reason not to debate immigration (or at least to be very careful about doing so) lies in a distinction between two types of politics - that based on lived experience versus that based on abstractions often gleaned from the media. Some us us think of immigrants as our friends, uncles or the local shopkeeper. The right by contrast invites us to see them as an abstract threat. Hence the fact excellently described by Ben Ansell; people who live in areas with more non-UK born residents tend to be more likely to think immigration is a good thing. One reason, I suspect, why support for Trump's immigration policies has declined is that "immigrants" are changing from the demons mythologized by Fox News into actual real people.

Unless we're careful, debating immigration risks us being like a therapist who indulges his patient's fantasy thus threatening to make the psychosis worse. If we must do so, we must speak in concrete terms, about real people not abstractions.

So, what should we do instead?

Matt Goodwin inadvertently gave us the answer recently on Twitter. "London is over —it’s so over" he said, pointing to unreliable and overpriced trains, homelessness, crime, and struggling restaurants.

Which blurts out the truth. Immigration is not merely about immigration. "Concerns" about immigration are linked to a wider sense of national decline, of economic stagnation and government failure.

Sure, Goodwin might be seeing what he wants. But we now have abundant evidence that economic stagnation fuels the far right. Back in 2006, Ben Friedman showed that, historically, slower economic growth led to increased racism and intolerance. Markus Brueckner and Hans Peter Gruener have found that, across Europe "lower growth rates are associated with a significant increase in right-wing extremism." Thiemo Fetzer showed how areas hardest hit by austerity were more likely to vote for Brexit. He and his colleagues have shown that shop closures are correlated with support for rightist parties. And Diane Bolet has found that areas seeing more pub closures are more likely to support Ukip (as was).

A place in decline invites the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: "since the immigrants arrived, this place has gone to the dogs". We could reverse this: if the cost of living were declining and places thriving, it would be harder for people to see immigrants as a problem - unless of course they were mere racists.

Which points to the way to fight the immigration battle: stop places going to the dogs. We should be saying to voters: "we get that many areas seem in decline, but this isn't because of immigration: here's what we should be doing instead." The better Labour MPs see this. Jeevun Sandher recently wrote:

If we want to win the next election, we need to make life affordable for our voters. Investing to get energy and housing costs down while creating good non-graduate jobs for Reform-curious voters will put more money in these voters’ pockets. If we get cash in peoples’ pockets, we win the next election. If we don’t, we lose.

This is easier said than done. One problem is that these aims are undermined by the government's plan to raise military spending; doing so requires lower spending than would otherwise be the case elsewhere - on either public services or private consumption. And cuts in the latter would exacerbate the pub and shop closures which fuel the far right.

A second obstacle is the large number of vested interests blocking growth. I'm thinking not just of nimbys opposed to infrastructure spending and housebuilding but: incumbent companies opposing tougher competition policy; lawyers, accountants and financiers opposed to simpler taxes; landlords opposing a shift from taxing incomes to taxing land; utility companies opposed to fairer prices; Brexiteers opposed to rejoining the single market; and a financial system generally that likes the low real interest rates that accompany stagnation.

A further problem is the quality of British management. It has become so accustomed to rent-seeking and bullying that it has largely lost the ability to raise productivity.

And all this is before we mention the possibility that capitalism itself might be a barrier to growth. The problem isn't just that low profitability deters investment-enhancing growth: why do so many industries from steel to nuclear require government subsidies? It's also that some investments don't happen because capitalists fear that they will get only a "minuscule fraction" (William Nordhaus's words) of the payoffs from them, whilst others are undertaken out of misplaced optimism rather than a rational assessment of their returns.

Perhaps my pessimism is misplaced. But that's the debate we should be having. And the right don't want it because they don't want to discuss the failure of British capitalism. If they do, they only show the vacuity of their own thinking, be it about Brexit or "Britannia cards". They'd prefer that we demonized migrants than looked at the root causes of stagnation - and certainly prefer that we divide people along ethnic rather than class lines.

We should ask Reform: "why should we talk about your hobby horse when we know that your last pet obsession (Brexit) was a failure, and when we have more important things to think about?"

You might object that we should stand up for the rights of migrants and indeed - given that immigration controls also reduce their liberty - the rights of citizens too. Morally yes, but we have to choose our battles. When we discuss immigration, we are fighting the battle the right wants to have. That ignores Sun Tzu's advice: "he will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight." Setting the agenda matters, and we should not concede this to the right but rather set our own.

Discussing immigration steals cognitive bandwidth. The opportunity cost of doing so is that we don't discuss more important matters - matters that, if we could at least partly resolve them, would boost economic growth and so defeat the far right.

Rachel Reeves is reportedly considering changes to the rules around “non-doms” – people who declare themselves to be “non-domiciled” in the UK in order to pay less tax – in response to a protracted media campaign against the policy. On a daily basis, newspapers from the Telegraph to the Independent are warning that the abolition of the non-dom regime is causing an exodus of millionaires. This week, estate agents have protested that the top end of the London property market is now in freefall. The mansions stand empty!

Questions to ask about these reports include: are they bullshit? And why should I care? Does it matter if the non-doms are leaving? New research suggests a surprising answer.

Firstly, these claims have at least a whiff of the farmyard in that they are being made by people who have a clear financial interest in the matter. If I was selling prime central London property, I would definitely use the media to push the narrative that the wildly overpriced houses I was pushing were in fact going for a song.

That’s not to say they’re lies, but they are claims made in the absence of the actual data on non-doms (which will be released by HMRC next month). Fortunately, there is other data that does tell us a verifiable story about what happens when you change the non-dom rules, because these rules have been changed before – by George Osborne, in 2017. The changes Osborne announced in his 2015 Budget amounted to a £1.5bn tax hike on non-doms. Last month, a study was published which shows what happened next.

Immediately after the 2015 Budget, the emigration rate of non-doms rose, peaking in 2018 – but by 2019, it was lower than it had been before the change was announced. So the policy was announced and an “exodus” appeared to follow, but it wasn’t an exodus. It was people bringing forward a change they had been planning to make anyway.

The second conclusion was even more important: the people who paid the least tax were the most likely to leave. The millionaires who left were the fiscally useless, the do-nothing rich.

A common misconception is that rich people are economically similar. But there are two very different species: people who earn loads of money and people who have loads of money. People who earn lots of money typically pay a lot of tax. A banker in London on £600,000 a year should pay about £245,000 in income tax and National Insurance (assuming maximum pension contributions), contributing as much to the state in three years as the average Brit contributes over their whole working life. This makes them very important from a fiscal point of view. But it also means they’re less likely to leave when there’s a tax change, because they have a great job that it would be hard to get elsewhere, and because they demonstrably already tolerate a high level of taxation. And after the 2015 Budget, this is what they did: they stayed.

The other species are different. They are simply parking their wealth here, paying little tax, and leaving when the rules change. Arun Advani, the economist who led this research, told me that under the non-dom regime, the UK had effectively been a tax haven for people who had money here but didn’t earn money here: “Everyone thinks, because they’re very wealthy, that means they must be paying a lot of tax,” he said, but the people who left after 2015 were recognisable as being “not very well connected” to the economy by income  – “but that’s also why they weren’t paying very much tax. So the cost of losing them is much lower.”

It’s very possible that this is what’s happening now: we are losing people whose connection to the economy was fleeting and low in value.

The stateless rich will be missed in some parts of London. Showrooms for ugly, dangerous cars will fall quiet; gaudy clothes with someone else’s name written all over them will go unsold; bad Mayfair restaurants and galleries for gaudy, laughable art will have to reconsider their value propositions. But the rest of us might benefit, thanks to the property market.

Expensive London property drags the rest of the housing market upward, imposing trickle-down inflation on homeowners. It also eats into our housebuilding capacity. When I walked through London’s wealthiest constituency with its MP, Joe Powell, recently we had to raise our voices over the sound of drills: every other property was a building site, an investment being serviced. The UK currently spends around £3bn a month on repair and maintenance of existing housing, more than six times what it spends on building new public housing. If the non-doms leave, housing might become both more affordable, and easier to build, for people who want to live here for reasons beyond their tax bill.

It’s also worth noting that leaving the country – any country – is something the stateless rich do constantly. In a normal year, with no tax changes announced, around a quarter of non-doms who have arrived recently (within the last two years) will leave anyway, and even among long-stayers (up to 15 years), one in 25 will leave each year. Maybe shopping in Harrods and driving a Lamborghini leaves you feeling empty and bored, and forces you to roam the planet seeking a fulfilment money can never buy? Who cares. They’re off to Dubai. Before the government performs another U-turn, it should ask whether anyone will miss them.

[See also: Has Rachel Reeves given in to the non-doms?]

A good columnist is never unintentionally tedious, but this week’s effort is about obsolete telephone directories, binary counter overflow, and the alternating current waveform. The boredom is the point.

Start with alternating current. As most of us once learnt and have since half-forgotten, mains electricity is supplied by an oscillating current whose direction changes rapidly. In the UK, for example, the current flips back and forth 50 times a second.

This system is highly efficient but suffers from a serious downside: if the frequency slips outside a tightly defined target range, both the system and many of the appliances plugged into it can be damaged. That almost sounds interesting, but of course it is boring after all, because electricity is generated by power stations that all but guarantee a stable, reliable waveform: heavy, rapidly spinning hunks of metal powered by steam heated by burning hydrocarbons or a nuclear reaction. Or so it used to be, but thermal generation is rapidly going out of style in favour of wind turbines that do not spin at a predictable rate, and solar panels, which produce direct current instead.

“Thermal electricity generation provided system stability so effectively and so transparently that we forgot it did that,” says Paul Domjan, one of the founders of Enoda, an electricity grid technology company. We are going to have to remember again, and quickly, because we are rapidly moving to grids that are far more prone to wobble off the target frequency, as recently happened in Spain, with dramatic consequences.

We are all familiar with renewable energy’s problem that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, but only the real nerds worry about the stability of the AC waveform. This is a problem that can be solved, but not if it is overlooked.

Just in case alternating current starts to seem too interesting, let’s move on to obsolete telephone directories, or more precisely to the diocesan directories published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. An up-to-date directory is useful, if hardly riveting. A decade-old directory describing the former addresses and positions of priests seems good only for the recycling bin.

Yet in 2001, investigative reporters at the Boston Globe suspected that the sexual abuse of children by priests was widespread, and realised that the apparently useless old directories provided a vital clue. In the 1990s, after the church had begun to quietly remove offending priests, there was a sharp increase in the number of priests listed as on “sick leave”, “awaiting assignment” or at the “clergy personnel office”.

Carefully combing through the old directories, the Globe’s reporters assembled a list of priests with unexplained movements through the Archdiocese organisation. That list closely matched their growing list of accused priests, strongly suggesting the church’s complicity.

Because outdated directories turn out to be Pulitzer-prize-winning levels of not-boring, we should turn to binary counter overflows, surely a reliably tedious topic. A computer armed with a three-digit binary counter can count from zero to seven: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111 — and then the counter overflows back to zero. A 32-digit binary counter will get you to nearly 4.3bn before overflowing — 4,294,967,295 to be precise.

This is fairly boring stuff, unless you are working at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center and your radio system simultaneously disconnects from each of the 800 aircraft flying over southern California. This happened on September 14 2004, and whatever adjectives sprang to the minds of the air traffic controllers and the pilots, “boring” was not one of them.

The culprit? A binary counter overflow in the traffic control computer clock: it was counting down milliseconds from 4.3 billion, which takes just under 50 days to do. When it hit zero the system shut down. Standard procedure was to forestall any problem by rebooting every 30 days, but in the summer of 2004 that evidently did not happen.

As Matt Parker explains in his book Humble Pi, this wasn’t a one-off error. Windows 95 computers would crash for the same reason, while the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had a similar issue and would lose all electronics if somebody left the computers running for more than 248 days.

The boring things in life will shut down your electricity grid, identify paedophiles in the priesthood and crash your computer — or maybe even your aeroplane. Might we attempt a grand unified theory of boring things?

Perhaps. Here it is: smooth, successful operations are uninteresting, and uninteresting matters tend to be neglected. Eventually they stop working well, at which point they become interesting again.

This is certainly true of the AC waveform. It seems boring because it has felt like a solved problem. Yet, as with low inflation or herd immunity from measles, if we allow the foundations of a success story to be eaten away, we find that the problem isn’t quite as thoroughly solved as we assumed.

This is true also of archives. Even celebratory accounts of the Boston Globe team’s use of diocesan directories usually neglect to mention that if those directories hadn’t been available in library archives, the investigation would have hit a dead end.

Archives have a particular problem. If an archive fails — fails to save the right things, fails to preserve old documents or fails to maintain digital information in a format modern computers can interpret — then the fact of that failure may take years or even decades to emerge.

Success leads to boredom. Boredom leads to neglect. Neglect leads to failure. Failure is no longer boring. But if we don’t show more interest in the successful systems we have built, they may suddenly become far too interesting for comfort. By the time these boring topics start seeming interesting, it’s too late.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 May 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.