Behavioural economists have shown that we overestimate how much gym time we will use when signing up for monthly or annual health club membership; we’d be better off paying for individual sessions.

That’s certainly my experience. I was a member of a gym behind Fleet Street for a number of years, and never lifted a single weight. Membership was subsidised (modestly), but this was not complete profligacy, or an egregious triumph of hope over experience; the purpose of my membership was really to use the showers. My exercise regime involved riding a bike to work 130 miles a week in all weathers, so access to a shower was mandatory. I rode flat out, had no concept of rest and recovery, and would end up knackered, or — more scientifically — suffering from overtraining syndrome.

The idea of modulating effort and choosing to have rest days never crossed my mind — the mutant puritan gene at work. Progressively, after riding home from 12-hour days late in the evening following frequently pointless conference calls with New York head office, all the benefits of this excercise started to go into reverse. Continue reading ‘gym fees require heavy lifting’

If you are a parent of a state school pupil in the UK, it is sports day across the country this week. Even though it is already Wednesday, tardily I’ve decided that we’ll focus on sports this week; coming first is not important, it’s the taking part that counts.

Sports day itself presents a variety of hazards for the modern parent. On average you can expect to lose two afternoons of work. Worse still you may get caught in an on-again, off-again spiral caused by the British weather. There is also the obligation to join what can be the life-threatening race between parents that normally concludes proceedings.

It’s no joke. A friend of ours once broke an achilles tendon in the fathers’ sack race. As far as I can recall, it took a good year to heal properly. And there’s worse when you consider the headline on the front page of Peak Performance sports science newsletter that dropped through the mailbox this morning screaming “Why fit athletes suddenly drop dead, and how to stop it happening“. Continue reading ’42 and the meaning of life’

A lot of people have been getting worked up recently about income inequality. If you read the financial press you are regularly bombarded with advertisements for the management of what is being termed “sudden wealth”: more people are winning life’s lottery. But in English-speaking countries one source of emergent income inequality that needs to be watched arises from the difficulty of learning the English language, even for native speakers.

The Guardian today has a report on another experiment that is improving literacy rates using synthetic phonics, similar to the Direct Instruction or DISTAR method which has achieved controversial success in the US. Although not all literacy authorities accept the research demonstrating that synthetic phonics is a superior method of learning to read, it is now government policy to promote it. And it seems to be filtering through, albeit quite slowly.

The path-dependent nature of illiteracy should not be underestimated. The report highlights Continue reading ‘why the rich get richer – read all about it’

If you live in a competitive family and are a middle child, the news that first-born children are the cleverest is not good. A study conducted at the University of Oslo, and reported in the New Scientist, states that first-borns have an average 2.3 point IQ advantage over their dopey siblings.

I’ve never fancied IQ as a real measure of intelligence. And 2.3 points difference I could probably make up with better nutrition and all this flaxseed oil I’m consuming.

But then that is sort of the point that the Norwegian research is making. That some of the difference in intelligence within families is social, not genetic. It probably results from the fact that parents have more time for the first-born. The older children have been progressively more exposed to the sophisticated vocabulary of the parents. It suggests more powerfully that we should not overstate — as too many people prefer to these days — nature over the complex circumstances of individual nurture, which can produce heavily path-dependent outcomes.

The Knackered parenting experience would bear that out. Continue reading ‘curse of the second-born’