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Most people don't make very much of their bread toasters. These small but hardy metal boxes often come at low prices (from $7) and are not terribly difficult to operate. All in all, this is not the best example of a sophisticated, complicated or inventive home appliance.
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Enter Thomas Thwaites, an art student who made it his mission to re-create the basic bread toaster. Called 'The Toaster Project', Thwaites set out to build a common toaster from scratch, using only 15th century "pre-industrial tools and techniques". This would include mining for iron ore, smelting it to derive the toaster's metal parts and sourcing for other components like copper and mica.
Commendable as his ambitions might have been, Thwaites soon found himself cheating. He would use the internet throughout the project as his source of reference. When good old 15th century fire didn't work, he used a microwave to smelt iron. He also used hair dryers and leaf blowers throughout the process – tools that are arguably more complex than the basic toaster.
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At the end, the final product was "half-baked". When connected to a car battery, the machine could purportedly warm bread but not produce toast. Hopeless as this result was, Thwaites' experiences in wanting to be the ultimate toast expert is not dissimilar to how people tend to view real-life issues.
For Tim Harford, author of popular books such as The Undercover Economist, Adapt and The Logic of Life, it is this over-simplification of the innately complex that perpetuates some of the most pressing social, economic and political problems that confronts us today: We think we know the toaster but we do not.
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Speaking at a Foreign Correspondents Association talk at Singapore Management University (SMU), Harford joked that while there is no single person in the world who knows how to make metaphorical toasters from start to finish, people seem to expect leaders, experts and gurus to be our toaster messiahs.
Dear CEO, please fix the toaster.
People and societies have always traditionally looked to their leaders for answers. "We think if we find the right leader; a new political leader, a new CEO, head of department, editor, etc, that this leader will solve all our problems for us." These kinds of expectations were certainly present when Barack Obama was elected US President, said Harford.
People expected that everything will change and all of the problems left behind by the previous administration would be fixed by this new president – almost as if an "almost religious leader has come to solve America's problems and the world's problems". This "logic" has been applied on many a political leader who will, at the end, fall short of expectations.
"This isn't because we keep electing the wrong leaders. It is because we have an inflated sense of what leadership can achieve in the modern world," Harford wrote in Adapt. One might argue, however, that presidents and leaders do not operate on their own; that they have access to resources, to teams of expert advisers, etc; that this makes failure less acceptable.
Harford's response to such arguments is to cite the seminal work of Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of leadership at the University of California Berkeley. In a study where, over time, hundreds of expert predictions were held up against actual data, Tetlock found these so-called forecasts to be largely inaccurate. This was true across the domains of economics, politics, and the social sciences.
Expert forecasts may be more accurate in the areas of hard sciences, Harford argued, but when it comes to social, economic or political problems, "the experts can't do it". Because these systems are far too large and complex, it is unrealistic to expect full comprehension to the extent where accurate predictions can be made.
While Harford does not discount the value of expert advice, he finds it amusing that people and institutions seem eager to attach significant weight to what are essentially guesswork and premonitions. "You know you won't get a good answer, but it's strange we keeping asking the questions and asking for forecasts when these forecasts are always terrible."
Learning from failed toasters
