Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

Food has become remarkably inefficient, and the pill-promoting futurists of the 1960s would be astonished to see how wrong they were. People spend hours preparing it, eating it and watching television programmes about it. People cherish local ingredients, and willingly pay a premium for foods produced without chemical fertilisers. By contrast, when

guilds help to offset this problem. If it is costly and time-consuming to join one, the only people who enter are those with a serious commitment to a craft.

was for some reason thought that the purpose of food was to provide the necessary minerals, vitamins, protein and energy, and that the job of the food industry was to supply them in as efficient a form possible.

explains that we do not have full access to the reasons behind our decision-making because, in evolutionary terms, we are better off not knowing; we have evolved to deceive ourselves, in order that we are better at deceiving others.

The best insurance against blame is to use conventional logic in every decision.

In trying to encourage rational behaviour, don’t confine yourself to rational arguments.

what they have never asked, is whether people like efficiency as much as economic theory believes they do.