The latest story on the threat of superbug infections in UK hospitals highlights how risk-reducing technology, in this case antibiotics, shifts a problem over the long term and at the same time creates a behavioural change offsetting the benefits the technological innovation offers. It is the Volvo syndrome. The driver with a safer car, or who wears a seatbelt or crash helmet, drives faster or more dangerously reintroducing the risk his safety equipment has removed.

The reports today show how hygiene standards have fallen over the past generation. It seems that antibiotics may have played two roles in the superbug problem. They reduced the need in the short-term for old fashioned devotion to cleanliness (arduous, time consuming, and therefore expensive). At the same time, their widespread and often indiscriminate use over the long term has reduced both their overall effectiveness, while allowing for the creation of much stronger bacterial organisms.

The Volvo syndrome is nothing new. But in any discussions of risk, it should be invoked whenever we are encouraged to take our eye of the ball, because someone else, or some piece of technology is there to facilitate this. Very often, decisions are made on the basis of cost and backside covering, so are very short term.

In the past few weeks the US press has been full of talk that the real estate market is experiencing a bubble. Even Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (who no doubt caused it by keeping US interest rates so low for so long) has pronounced on it. If the UK experience is anything to go by, it could be said that the day before Greenspan spoke was the peak. House prices in the UK have been in effective retreat ever since Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned in the late spring last year that anyone buying a house should be prepared for prices to fall. The next day buyers went on holiday.

If one is looking for a truly disinterested expert, and one with the latest knowledge on bubbles, we recommend geophysicist Didier Sornette. The mathematics of Sornette’s discipline is well beyond the lay reader. The essence of it is to show how complex systems work. He is an expert in the study of earthquakes. Stock market and housing crashes are the financial equivalents.

When people think about housing they don’t tend to think of a complex system. They will first think about their own house, those in the neighbourhood, and then a national price index recently described in the press which provides a sense of overall direction. They will probably then invoke a sense of someone who made a killing on property, or whom they saw renovate and sell at a profit on some TV show. From this they will make decisions to buy or sell. There is a strong element of imitation in what motivates them.

These behaviours are definitely part of what makes up a market, but Sornette’s specialism is in analysing them mathematically through study of the price activity of markets. Sornette’s last paper on housing demonstrated that the UK housing market would peak late 2003 or mid 2004, and then be susceptible to a crash. At that time, he did not characterise the US market as a bubble, but in his latest paper he shows that, two years on, the US is in a bubble.

A bubble with a crash in the UK will be one thing, but a serious reversal in the US would be very damaging. It remains to be hoped that the pump priming that occurred in 2000-2001 has not created a greater problem from which the world economy will suffer a more severe hangover.

It is no doubt a symptom of our collective aversion and lack of understanding of mathematics that Sornette’s work is not major news.

Lucy Kellaway misses a trick today in the Financial Times in protesting about her female acquaintances who appear to be much more successful mothers than she feels she is. She meets a “successful” fund manager with seven children and refers to a book: “How she really does it–Secrets of successful stay-at-work moms.”

In fund management it has been well recorded by academic research that luck plays a huge part and past performance is no guide to future success. Fund management rankings suffer from what is known as survivorship bias. The unlucky failures disappear flattering the cohort of survivors.

So it is with self-help books that tell us how to be successful, citing the examples of those who have succeeded, with their various methods or secrets. What we don’t know is how many people might have followed identical strategies, be they investment, or lifestyle, only to find that in different circumstances those techniques did not work.

This is particularly true in lifestyle choices. What looks smart and clever today, can very quickly turn sour. For those to whom life has never thrown a curve ball, success strategies are all very well. Long-term success may owe more to learning how to deal with failure, and also to avoid it. Avoiding hubris is probably the first lesson, and this would argue against appearing in, let alone writing a breathlessly titled self-help book.

Both Arsenal and Liverpool won close contests in football this week wearing red shirts, confirming, if only anecdotally, the research referred to in the last post. That both were decided on penalties, with the winning sides having fallen behind (Liverpool by 3 goals in the first half and Arsenal in terms of overall possession), may offer some further behavioural clues about success and failure the longer a contest is played.

However, the more interesting update on the red issue, was the chance intervention by a biologist who informs us that to represent the vervet monkey as a possible detractor from the “red indicates potency theory” may be wrong, and a fault either of the BBC, or the quoted academic.

The reason, we think, is to do with information framing. Our cognitive biases are manipulated by the way in which information is framed. The same information can have different effects on us, depending on how it is presented.

So a former air stewardess informed us this week of a scam the “trolley dollies” used to operate to make money out of organge juice sales, because they were rewarded on those but not other drinks. By stressing the word “orange” when the drinks were offered, they generated more sales.

Classically, the marketing imperative “hurry, while stocks last” induces a fear of hypothetical loss of a purchase we had no intention of making.

So to cut a long story short, it may not be just the blueness of the vervet monkey’s testicles that indicate his potency, but how that information is framed. The framing, the biologist informs, is his red arse!