Ad libs
Sir: Rory Sutherland provides at least one reason why admen shouldn’t be allowed to run the show (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’, 12 April): they believe too strongly that all behaviour boils down to choice and not constraint. They work in contexts where the choices of people are flexible, trivial and differ little in terms of personal cost, such as buying a bag of oven chips. This is not the norm in policy questions. Most people cannot choose the time they go to work or drop their children off at school, so trying to persuade them to drive an hour later is rather naive. Economists are better at recognising that people make choices under constraints, so perhaps there is a role for them yet in policy-making.
Helen Jackson
Cambridge
Sir: Rory Sutherland recommends solving contemporary social problems by paying a few hundred thousand pounds to various ad agencies at regular intervals instead of spending vast amounts on personnel and infrastructure to actually do the job. He’s a bit late off the mark.
The Home Office long ago gave up on the notion of providing a police force that matched in any way the current volume of crime and petty disorder, the emergence of domestic terrorism, the decline in citizen participation in controlling bad behaviour in public places, and its own insatiable demands for statistics that devour police time with forms and with special departments to process them. Its Statutory Performance Indicators are heavily skewed in the direction of the public perception of the police, of confidence in the police, of satisfying the perceptions of minority groups of one kind or another, and of controlling the fear of crime, all to be monitored and processed at the expense of combating crime itself. ‘The percentage of police officer time spent on front-line duties’ gets a one-line mention and the actual number of constables no mention at all. Even the Home Office was a bit late in hitting upon this wonderful substitute for effective problem-solving in the public domain, though George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth was on to it 60 years ago.
Norman Dennis
Director of Community Studies, Civitas London SW1
Sir: Rory Sutherland argues that the government should hand the task of changing unwholesome behaviour over to advertising agencies. Well he might; yet government efforts to change behaviour through communications are notoriously and predictably hopeless, right around the world. There are many reasons for this failure, but one alone can account for most of it: the well attested ‘boomerang effect’ — overt attempts to change us simply compound our existing behaviour.
Two respected advertising thinkers recently won a prize for an honest paper called ‘Fifty years of the wrong model’, prompting one bigspending client to ask if the advertisers could expect a refund. There are ways to change behaviour; but do the Mad Men know them? John Bunyard
The Newcomen Group, London EC2
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