July 25, 2025 • 32 mins
It's been five years since Cautionary Tales ran a mini-series about the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring the lessons we were learning in real time as the crisis unfolded. 'Fire at The Beverly Hills Supper Club' tells the story of a deadly blaze in a Cincinnati hotel and Tim's own experience reacting to new information about the virus. After the episode, Tim reflects on the anniversary, the cautionary tales the pandemic still had to teach us, and whether we've learned enough to deal with the next one.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello and welcome to Cautionary Tales. This week we're
on our summer holidays, but we've got something from the
archives I hope you'll like. This year, of course, marks
the anniversary we would all rather forget five years since
COVID and the COVID lockdowns. During the summer of twenty twenty,
(00:38):
when I and everyone else were shut indoors, I wrote
some mini episodes about what we were learning in real
time over the pandemic. Five years on, Are those lessons
any different? Here is one of those episodes. It's called
Fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, and afterwards I
(00:58):
will be back for a talk with my producer, Georgia
Mills about whether we've really learned our lessons. Imagine the
seed a large ballroom. Twelve hundred people are seated around
the tables, enjoying the finest dining that nineteen seventy seven
(01:18):
has to offer, which admittedly isn't saying much, but everyone's
having a wonderful evening at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which,
naturally given the name, is just outside Cincinnati. There's a
comedy duo on stage and the headline performer is expected
very soon. The singer and TV personality John Davidson a
(01:40):
big star at the time. But what the audience here
doesn't know is that on the other side of this
scrawling complex of function rooms, something's gone wrong. A fire
has broken out and it's spreading fast. The fire department
has already been called, and the fire is still some
distance away from the crowded cabaret room. But the more
(02:03):
it spreads, the more fuel it finds, the hotter it gets,
and the faster it moves. Safety standards at the supper
club aren't what they should be. There isn't a fire alarm,
there isn't a sprinkler system, and there isn't a lot
of time, and nobody in that room knows that the
fire is on its way. One remarkable young man, Walter Bailey,
(02:28):
did his best. Bailey was barely more than a boy.
He was eighteen years old and he worked as an
assistant waiter. Bailey had seen the fire and he realized
that although it was a long way from the cabaret room,
somebody needed to tell all those people to start evacuating.
Walter Bailey found the supervisor in the cabaret room, explained
(02:50):
about the fire, and asked him to clear the room.
The supervisor looked confused. Bailey told him again. The supervisor
turned and walked off to clear the room, thought Bailey,
who found seventy people lining up to get into the
cabaret room. Bailey led them instead to safety. When he returned,
(03:12):
he found that nobody inside the cabaret room had moved.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This
(03:44):
Cautionary Tale is going to be a little different. I
hope that's okay. The world seems different these days, so
I've been writing some new stories for you to suit
the times we're in. They'll be a little shorter, a
little simpler, and perhaps a little more focused on the
challenges we face right now. And this episode is different
in another way too, because in a small way, it's
(04:06):
about me, about what I got wrong, and I hope
about what you can learn from my mistakes. We'll come
back to my mistakes and to the fire in the
Beverly Hills supper Club. But first I wanted to ask
you a question. Do you remember Captain Pastrengo Rugiati? You
must Cautionary Tales, Season one, Episode one, there was about
(04:30):
an oil tanker the size of the Chrysler building, a
ship with a name Tory Canyon. That ship was headed
for a sunken mass of rocks with a vicious reputation
called the Seven Stones, and Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati, Poor Pastrengo Rugiati,
steered his ship closer and closer and closer to disaster.
(04:59):
You can go and listen again if you like, I'll wait.
The mystery of Tory Canyon, you may remember, is that
while Captain Rugiati was steering his ship towards the rocks,
the weather was good, the visibility was good, Tory Kanyon
had radar, and the seven Stones were clearly marked both
(05:19):
on all the charts and by a lighthouse vessel warning
ships to keep away. There was still time to change course,
just as there was still time to evacuate the cabaret room.
And yet Tory Kanyon did not turn, just as the
people in the supper club cabaret room did not move.
(05:43):
Captain Rujati was a man in a hurry. He'd made
a plan to head straight for a harbor one hundred
and fifty miles beyond those rocks, But his original course
was charted safely through deep open water. That at least
was the plan. But now new information is coming in.
The ship has drifted off the expected course overnight, closer
(06:05):
to shore. He's now heading for a tight squeeze past
seven stones. Fishing boats have appeared blocking his way. The
current is pushing him towards the rocks. His plan is
getting riskier and riskier, but at no point does he
stop reflect and rethink everything. Instead, with each new piece
(06:28):
of bad news, he furrows his brow and rededicates himself
to his original plan. So here's my confession. In the
face of the growing coronavirus epidemic, I behaved in exactly
the same way. It took me far too long to
really think about the information that was coming my way.
(06:50):
It took me even longer to take action. I too,
am Captain Ruggiati. In our very first quretionary tale, I
discussed one reason why we don't change course. Psychologists call
(07:14):
it plan continuation bias. We focus on a particular goal.
When bad news comes in that should make us rethink,
our tunnel vision only narrows. The bad news makes us
redouble our focus on the initial plan. Now that we
know it's going to be difficult. Rugiati was racing against
the clock, and with each setback the tunnel vision must
(07:36):
have closed. In Further, he also made his fateful decisions
by himself. He was a captain who didn't inform his
crew of the details of his plans and didn't seek
their comments. As he acknowledged, I must answer for everything
for everyone. I must carry the cross along. If only
(07:58):
Ruggiati had been open to criticism and had sought the
views of his officers, they might have helped him to
regain his grasp of the risks and rethink his plans.
But having other people to guide you doesn't always help.
If they're in the same situation as you, with the
same assumptions, they can lull you into thinking that none
(08:19):
of you have a problem, when in fact, all of
you have a problem. There's a famous psychological study conducted
in the nineteen sixties by bib Latane and John Darley.
The scientists ask their subjects to sit quietly and fill
out a questionnaire. Sometimes the subject would be alone and
(08:39):
sometimes in a group of three. Gradually, the researchers pumped
smoke into the room. When the subject was sitting alone,
he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly
leave to report it. When the subjects were in a
group of three who were much less likely to react,
each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others.
(09:07):
Based on what we now know about the Beverly Hills
supper Club in nineteen seventy seven, that experiment seems darkly prophetic.
That incident is vividly described by Amanda Ripley in her
book The Unthinkable. Remember where We left off? Twelve hundred
people were in the cabaret room listening to the warm
(09:28):
up act crack jokes on stage. A fire was racing
towards them. Young Walter Bailey's supervisor had shrugged and ignored
the problem. Like Pastrengo Ugiati, the supervisor had a plan
and didn't seem able to fully appreciate that the plan
would have to change. So Walter Bailey did something big,
something he assumed would cost him his job. But someone
(09:50):
had to act. He decided that it was going to
be him. Although he was just a teenager, and although
he suffered from stage fright, Bailey strode down the middle
of the room, climbed up on stage, grabbed a microphone.
I want everyone to look to my right, there's an
exit to the right corner of the room. And look
to my left, there's an exit on the left. And
(10:11):
now look to the back. There's an exit at the back.
I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There is
a fire at the front of the building. And then
Walter Bailey left the stage. I wish I could tell
you that one two hundred people rose to their feet
and filed out of the room, But they didn't. Who
(10:35):
was this kid? They thought, was he part of the act?
Was the fire for real? Was it a problem? People
thought of the expense of their ticket, of how much
they were enjoying the food, they were looking forward to
hearing John Davidson sing. They didn't want to rush out
if they didn't have to. So did they have to?
(10:56):
It wasn't clear. Think about the last time you were
sitting around in a building and a fire alarm went off.
Did you spring to your feet and seek the nearest
fire exit? And oh I didn't. I looked around to
see what others were doing. The same thing happened in
the Beverly Hills supper Club. People did what people do.
They look to the left and to the right, as
(11:18):
Walter Bailey had told them to, but they weren't looking
for the exits. They were looking at what the people
next to them were doing. Was Susan to my left moving?
What about Fred to my right? With everyone taking cues
from everyone else, the group was slow to respond, and
they really didn't have a minute to spare. Because I'm
(11:48):
a journalist and frankly a nerd, I should have been
way ahead of the curve on coronavirus. Think back to
the thirteenth of February twenty twenty. I know it feels
a long time ago. Only three people outside of China
had died from the new virus, at least as far
as anyone knew at the time. Nobody in the US
(12:09):
thought to have died of it, nor had anyone in
my own country, the UK. The virus felt a very
distant threat, but it wasn't. More than a thousand people
had died in China, and that number was rising rapidly.
Twenty five countries had confirmed cases. Well respected epidemiologists had
(12:29):
already concluded that there was little chance of stamping out
these other cases quickly. The novel coronavirus was too contagious,
like the fire in the supper club. It was spreading
everywhere and rapidly gathering speed. And I know this because
I interviewed one of those well respected epidemiologists. On February thirteenth,
(12:53):
Dr Natalie MacDermott of King's College, London walked into a
studio at the BBC and told me the latest thinking
on the new coronavirus. The early data had suggested that
the virus killed more than one in ten of the
people it infected. Doctor MacDermott reassured me that no, it
probably wasn't quite that dangerous. The best guess at the
(13:15):
fatality rate was more like one in a hundred, may
be as low as one in two hundred. Nobody knew
for sure. Should I just assume that every one on
the planet would get it? I asked now. She said
that was too fatalistic, but if we couldn't contain it,
it was certainly infectious enough to infect a majority of
(13:35):
the planet's population. I nodded. I believed her. I even
did the mental arithmetic. There might be five billion cases,
and with a one in a hundred death rate, that
would be fifty million people around the world dying over
the course of a few months in the United States,
(13:55):
it would be two million deaths. What did I do
with the doctor's information.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I did what.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Pastrengo ROGALTI did. As his ship plowed on towards the rocks,
I anxiously furrowed my brow and I kept on going,
hoping the worst wouldn't happen. Now, I don't want to
exaggerate my failings. I didn't crash any oil tankers. Nobody
(14:23):
died because of my mistakes. But I could have done
better easily. I could have held off on booking my
summer vacation. I could have made sure I caught up
with my elderly father and stepmother, who were in high
risk groups. I could have sold all my shares, or
at least most of them, and waited for a couple
of months to see whether doctor Macdermott's grim scenario was
(14:44):
starting to become a reality. Instead, I took some money
out of savings to pay down some of my mortgage
because I had gigs firmly in the diary that would
top the savings back up again. Those gigs were canceled,
of course, which means I drained my savings at the
worst possible moment. If for goodness sake, I could at
(15:05):
least have bought some extra toilet paper. But none of
this went through my mind. It wasn't that I wasn't anxious.
I was anxious, just like Pastrengo VIGIATI was anxious. I
was aware there was a problem, and yet I didn't
step back, think things through, and turn my anxiety into action.
And perhaps you may recognize yourself in that description too.
(15:30):
Remember the experiment by psychologists bib Latane and John Darley.
They slowly pumped smoke into rooms containing people filling in questionnaires.
Solitary subjects didn't hesitate to leave and report the smoke,
but groups of people stayed and stayed as the smoke thickened,
(15:50):
reassured by each other's passivity. Those experimental subjects had done nothing.
Now a decade later, the customers of the Beverly Hill
supper Club were re enacting that experiment in the most
terrible way. Some people moved in reaction to young Walter
Bailey's warning he saved them, but many people were too
(16:15):
slow to react, lulled into complacency by the fact that
others were also too slow. Four minutes later, the power
failed and the lights went out in the ballroom, Toxic
smoke rolled in, and anyone still in that room faced
a dreadful challenge in getting out alive. Walter Bailey repeatedly
(16:35):
held his breath and headed back in to drag out
as many people as he could. One hundred and sixty
seven people died that night. If it hadn't been for
Walter Bailey, the death toll might have been many hundreds more.
Bailey also survived. He's a true hero. I'd like to
(17:02):
think that if disaster struck, I'd have the courage and
the presence of mind of Walter Bailey. But I'm more
like those poor, unsuspecting supper club patrons, enjoying their food
and looking forward to the music, then wondering what to
do and taking cues from everyone else. We're social animals,
we humans. We know instinctively that it's normally safer to
(17:26):
stay with the group than to do what the group does,
but not always. I hesitated too, And then when I
started reacting in earnest to the pandemic, I found that
the stock market was already plunging. The pasta and toilet
paper was already sold out, and there was no hope
of getting masks. Our governments found themselves in the same
(17:47):
situation for much the same reason. This series. I'll have
more to say about what our leaders have done and
failed to do, but for now, let's simply note that
many Western democracies found themselves in the same crazy scramble
for ventilators, for swab testing kits, for masks, and for gowns.
(18:07):
If everyone had started to taking action in January, while
the risk of a pandemic was still just a risk,
we'd all be in better shape now. But just as
in the supper club, before they acted, everyone wanted to
be a little more certain that there really was a problem.
Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, calls this
(18:29):
sort of problem an ambiguous threat. The warning signs aren't
completely straightforward, and the potential for harm is unclear as well.
Ambiguous threats might be serious or they might not. As
Professor Edmondson points out, that ambiguity is exactly what makes
these types of threats so dangerous. Because we're not sure
(18:51):
that they're serious, we easily find excuses not to take
them serious. Lee While leading epidemiologists were warning that the
virus might well become a pandemic. It wasn't obvious that
they were right. It wasn't obvious that it would spread
so quickly. It wasn't obvious that it would lead to
the complete shutdown of major economies around the world. But then,
(19:14):
for Captain Pastrengo Rugiati, it wasn't obvious that fishing boats
would appear to block his way. It wasn't obvious that
one of his officers would make a navigational error. It
wasn't obvious that his ship's maneuvering would be delayed by
confusion about whether the ship was on autopilot or not.
I didn't expect Rugiati to predict all these things, just
(19:35):
as I don't blame myself for failing to forecast every
detail of the pandemic. But what he should have done
was realize the risks and take action to reduce those risks.
And so should I. I should have thought through the implications.
What might it mean if a pandemic threatened to kill
two million Europeans and another two million Americans? How might
(19:57):
we all respond? And while I might not have realized
on February the thirteenth that almost half the world was
heading into Lockdown. It was surely a possibility that I
should have considered much sooner than I did. But no,
faced with the unthinkable, it's hard to think it. That
was never in my mind, never said Pastrengo Ruggiati. There
(20:23):
were a lot of things that were never in my
mind either. Perhaps they should have been. I hope that
I remember my own limitations in future. Anciosno il capitano Ruggiati.
I too, am Captain Ruggiati. Hello. Everyone, It is twenty
(20:49):
twenty five. Tim Harford back with you, and I am
joined in the studio by series producer Georgia Mills. Hello Georgia,
Hi Tim.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Listening to this episode and looking back at the Lockdown,
what was that time like for you, both as a
journalist and also just as a regular human.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, I don't think my experience is a regular human
were any different from anyone else's. I was thinking, Oh,
this must be particularly tough for people with young children
who could be going to nurse. Why. I was, Oh, no, actually,
maybe it's particularly tough for people with teenagers who were
studying for exams. I don't know. It must be really
tough for people who don't have any family and who
(21:27):
were all by themselves. Actually, no, maybe it's really tough
for older people who were most at risk. And then
I realized it's kind of tough for a lot of people.
I had the privilege of feeling useful while also staying safe,
so unlike the medics or essential workers, I didn't have
to go out and expose myself to the virus. But
(21:47):
at the same time, I was covering the story for
the Financial Times and particularly for the BBC. We had
an epic series of our numbers related radio series, more
or less trying to make sense of what was going on,
and I did all of that from home, so really
feeling that I was kind of I was doing something
(22:08):
useful and I had something to do, but at the
same time and absolutely no risks. So frankly a lot
easier for me than for many.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
And listening back to the pandemic series you made, what
thoughts do you have hearing that now?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Oh, it is fascinating the number of different issues that
have come up. So we were talking about unintended consequences,
we were talking about the failure to react, we were
talking about the importance of data. So I think a
lot of it still stands up. But at the same time,
there was certain things. Listening to the series, you just think, oh,
we had no idea what was coming. So it's an
(22:45):
interesting time capsule. One other thing I've found is that
some people listen to the podcast and go, oh, wow,
that was so prescient, and other people listen to the
podcast and go, wow, that's so embarrassing. You got everything wrong,
which is just a reminder that people are going to
adopt particular views of the world, and you're going to
seem very smart or very stupid, depending on whether what
(23:05):
you said happens to align with those views.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I mean, they were made in June twenty twenty, so
it already felt like probably a million years of COVID
by them, but there was so much of a wild
rollercoaster to come. So what other cautionary tales related to
COVID do you think have emerged since?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, there's obviously a whole slew of lessons to learn
about vaccines and vaccine communication and vaccine skepticism. The vaccine
obviously was a huge story in twenty twenty one, as
vaccines started to be rolled out and protect people from
the virus. I think another lesson is that how countries
(23:48):
did in the first wave does not necessarily predict much
about how well they did overall. So I remember very
clearly that summer of twenty twenty doing it and a
series for the BBC or an episode for the BBC
asking why had things gone so much worse in the
(24:08):
UK than in Germany? The number of people who died
in Germany was so much less about a quarter a
number of people who died in the UK. And then
actually roll forward a year and the Germans had caught up.
In the long run, it didn't really make any difference.
The virus was going to do what it was going
to do, so that I think, what was a surprise
We'd told ourselves the Germans had done so much better.
(24:29):
But maybe in the end, all the preparation you can
do doesn't make as much difference as you might think.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
What about looking back at lockdowns? They were they worth it?
Were they important? Do we even have answers today?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Well, we have some answers, but a lot of the
kind of data that we would want to have stopped
being collected during the lockdowns because of the lockdowns. So,
for example, children's exam performance, did children's academic performance suffer
did they regress. Actually quite hard to answer that question
(25:03):
because the very exams that you might use to answer
that question were discontinued or were changed. It's hard to
generalize because different parts of the world had very different
lockdown policies. But let me offer a couple of reflections.
One is that looking at the UK, which I have
done in some detail, we have quite good evidence that
(25:26):
a lot of kids bounced back academically. The academic impact
was really bad, but it was quite short lived and
a lot of kids had caught up surprisingly quickly. So
in the end you go, okay, fine, no harm done.
It turns out people can bounce back. The impact on
mental health I think less of a cheerful story. Mental
(25:48):
health definitely deteriorated a lot. There was a long term
decline of teenage mental health, possibly something to do with smartphones,
possibly something to do with something else. And then we
had COVID and we had the lockdowns, and that seemed
to make it all worse. Unclear whether it really made
a long term difference, And also unclear was the problem
(26:11):
of the lockdown, so was the problem of the virus,
because they're happening at the same time, so you know,
Are you suffering because you can't get out and see
your friends, or are you suffering because you're terrified that
you're going to lose your parents to this deadly virus?
Or is it both so hard to know. One final
point I think is worth making is when you look
at countries such as Sweden who had much more liberal
(26:34):
lockdown policies, actually, and you get a similar story in
certain US states. People still sort of lock themselves down.
So you had many of the same benefits of the
lockdowns in terms of controlling the virus, and you had
many of the same costs in terms of you know,
if you're running a restaurant or a bar. In Sweden,
(26:57):
it's legal for people to come and sit in your restaurant,
but they're not going to do it. So I understand
why when a government mandates something that's to be taken seriously,
and that is that is to be It's not a
trivial matter. But it's worth bearing in mind that if
governments had done nothing, I think a lot of the
impact on the virus, on the economy and on people's
(27:19):
mental health might not have been as different as all
the people shouting at each other about it. Would like
to think right.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
And you mentioned there that there's not enough data to
really establish quite a lot of things we'd like to establish.
So is there a cautionary tailer hear about the gathering
of data.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I think there is. It's easy to underestimate quite how
important data was, and ultimately, if you had enough data,
there's no pandemic. I mean that it may sound a
strange thing to claim, but imagine in the ideal case. Okay,
here's the data we've got. We've got data. The moment
somebody is infected, we immediately know they're infected, and we
(28:00):
know how infectious they are, how likely they are to
spread the disease to other people. And let's say that
everybody is wearing a smart watch, and that smart watch
just glows bright red as you're walking down the street.
If you're infectious and you just look around and you
can see anybody who's wearing a bright red smart watch,
you keep away from them. And in fact, those people
(28:21):
have to stay at home, and if they don't stay
at home, the police will come and have a word.
If you had that, if the data were that good,
the pandemic's over in a week, right, It's literally over.
When you realize that, you realize, oh, so much of
this is not actually about treatments or about vaccines. It's
about that we don't know who's infectious and who isn't,
(28:45):
and if we had better data, we make a real
contribution to preventing future pandemics. Now, of course, we're not
going to have that ultimate glowing smart watch in future,
well probably not, probably not, maybe not, who knows what
we'll have in the future. But what we might have
is much better testing, availability of really rapid tests, and
maybe some smarter algorithms to process the information. So you
(29:09):
you do a test you can't positive, and the computer
is better able to say, oh, well, you know, here
are the people you met after you got infected. Here
are the people you met before you got infected. They
might be infected, and just do a better job of
controlling the disease without these really widespread draconian lockdowns. So
(29:29):
there's a huge amount to be gained by having better data,
and I think it's very very easy to overlook. We
always overlook the power of data in my experience.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
So are you optimistic for whenever the next pandemic hits,
that we'll get the data right or at least better.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I think we've learned an awful lot. I think the
technology is going to get a lot better. I think
we're going to have a much faster development of vaccines,
you know, all things being equal, So you know, there's
a lot to be optimistic about. Clearly, what we've also
learned is there's an awful lot of politics, and the
politics is not necessarily helpful. But overall, I think COVID
(30:06):
could have been a much more serious illness. Just imagine
if it had been ten times more deadly than it was.
Just imagine if it had affected children instead of eighty
year olds. I mean, obviously it did affect some children,
but imagine if it had been more deadly for children
than for the very elderly. It could have been so
much worse. It could have been so much deadlier, it
could have been absolutely terrifying. So in a way, maybe
(30:29):
we should think of COVID not as this disaster, but
as a near miss that should give us lessons that
would help us avoid a much worse disaster in future.
And well, the lesson of cautionary tales is always you
should try to learn from past mistakes. But also we
(30:49):
don't always do so.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Nice we'll have to wait and see, so thank you, Tim.
I think we'll leave it there, but if you haven't
heard the rest of the Pandemic specials, I really recommend
going back. I listened to them for the first time
this year and they are both a really interesting time
capsule but also really relevant still, so lots of other
episodes to check out, and.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
We'll be back next week with another classic from the archive,
a tale about Peps's disastrous bottlecap promotion and a man
who bought more than a thousand chocolate puddings. See you them.
Three books that helped us research this episode are The
(31:31):
Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Conruther
and Robert Mayer, and Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andrew Tiltik.
As always, a full list of our sources is in
the show notes on Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
written and presented by me Tim Harford, with help from
(31:54):
Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilly with
support from Pete Norton. The music mixing and mastering are
the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by
Julia Barton. Special thanks to Neil LaBelle, Carli Milli, Ry,
Heather Fame, Maya Kainigg, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary
(32:15):
Tales is a Pushkin industry's production
Pushkin. Hello and welcome to Cautionary Tales. This week we're
on our summer holidays, but we've got something from the
archives I hope you'll like. This year, of course, marks
the anniversary we would all rather forget five years since
COVID and the COVID lockdowns. During the summer of twenty twenty,
(00:38):
when I and everyone else were shut indoors, I wrote
some mini episodes about what we were learning in real
time over the pandemic. Five years on, Are those lessons
any different? Here is one of those episodes. It's called
Fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, and afterwards I
(00:58):
will be back for a talk with my producer, Georgia
Mills about whether we've really learned our lessons. Imagine the
seed a large ballroom. Twelve hundred people are seated around
the tables, enjoying the finest dining that nineteen seventy seven
(01:18):
has to offer, which admittedly isn't saying much, but everyone's
having a wonderful evening at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which,
naturally given the name, is just outside Cincinnati. There's a
comedy duo on stage and the headline performer is expected
very soon. The singer and TV personality John Davidson a
(01:40):
big star at the time. But what the audience here
doesn't know is that on the other side of this
scrawling complex of function rooms, something's gone wrong. A fire
has broken out and it's spreading fast. The fire department
has already been called, and the fire is still some
distance away from the crowded cabaret room. But the more
(02:03):
it spreads, the more fuel it finds, the hotter it gets,
and the faster it moves. Safety standards at the supper
club aren't what they should be. There isn't a fire alarm,
there isn't a sprinkler system, and there isn't a lot
of time, and nobody in that room knows that the
fire is on its way. One remarkable young man, Walter Bailey,
(02:28):
did his best. Bailey was barely more than a boy.
He was eighteen years old and he worked as an
assistant waiter. Bailey had seen the fire and he realized
that although it was a long way from the cabaret room,
somebody needed to tell all those people to start evacuating.
Walter Bailey found the supervisor in the cabaret room, explained
(02:50):
about the fire, and asked him to clear the room.
The supervisor looked confused. Bailey told him again. The supervisor
turned and walked off to clear the room, thought Bailey,
who found seventy people lining up to get into the
cabaret room. Bailey led them instead to safety. When he returned,
(03:12):
he found that nobody inside the cabaret room had moved.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This
(03:44):
Cautionary Tale is going to be a little different. I
hope that's okay. The world seems different these days, so
I've been writing some new stories for you to suit
the times we're in. They'll be a little shorter, a
little simpler, and perhaps a little more focused on the
challenges we face right now. And this episode is different
in another way too, because in a small way, it's
(04:06):
about me, about what I got wrong, and I hope
about what you can learn from my mistakes. We'll come
back to my mistakes and to the fire in the
Beverly Hills supper Club. But first I wanted to ask
you a question. Do you remember Captain Pastrengo Rugiati? You
must Cautionary Tales, Season one, Episode one, there was about
(04:30):
an oil tanker the size of the Chrysler building, a
ship with a name Tory Canyon. That ship was headed
for a sunken mass of rocks with a vicious reputation
called the Seven Stones, and Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati, Poor Pastrengo Rugiati,
steered his ship closer and closer and closer to disaster.
(04:59):
You can go and listen again if you like, I'll wait.
The mystery of Tory Canyon, you may remember, is that
while Captain Rugiati was steering his ship towards the rocks,
the weather was good, the visibility was good, Tory Kanyon
had radar, and the seven Stones were clearly marked both
(05:19):
on all the charts and by a lighthouse vessel warning
ships to keep away. There was still time to change course,
just as there was still time to evacuate the cabaret room.
And yet Tory Kanyon did not turn, just as the
people in the supper club cabaret room did not move.
(05:43):
Captain Rujati was a man in a hurry. He'd made
a plan to head straight for a harbor one hundred
and fifty miles beyond those rocks, But his original course
was charted safely through deep open water. That at least
was the plan. But now new information is coming in.
The ship has drifted off the expected course overnight, closer
(06:05):
to shore. He's now heading for a tight squeeze past
seven stones. Fishing boats have appeared blocking his way. The
current is pushing him towards the rocks. His plan is
getting riskier and riskier, but at no point does he
stop reflect and rethink everything. Instead, with each new piece
(06:28):
of bad news, he furrows his brow and rededicates himself
to his original plan. So here's my confession. In the
face of the growing coronavirus epidemic, I behaved in exactly
the same way. It took me far too long to
really think about the information that was coming my way.
(06:50):
It took me even longer to take action. I too,
am Captain Ruggiati. In our very first quretionary tale, I
discussed one reason why we don't change course. Psychologists call
(07:14):
it plan continuation bias. We focus on a particular goal.
When bad news comes in that should make us rethink,
our tunnel vision only narrows. The bad news makes us
redouble our focus on the initial plan. Now that we
know it's going to be difficult. Rugiati was racing against
the clock, and with each setback the tunnel vision must
(07:36):
have closed. In Further, he also made his fateful decisions
by himself. He was a captain who didn't inform his
crew of the details of his plans and didn't seek
their comments. As he acknowledged, I must answer for everything
for everyone. I must carry the cross along. If only
(07:58):
Ruggiati had been open to criticism and had sought the
views of his officers, they might have helped him to
regain his grasp of the risks and rethink his plans.
But having other people to guide you doesn't always help.
If they're in the same situation as you, with the
same assumptions, they can lull you into thinking that none
(08:19):
of you have a problem, when in fact, all of
you have a problem. There's a famous psychological study conducted
in the nineteen sixties by bib Latane and John Darley.
The scientists ask their subjects to sit quietly and fill
out a questionnaire. Sometimes the subject would be alone and
(08:39):
sometimes in a group of three. Gradually, the researchers pumped
smoke into the room. When the subject was sitting alone,
he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly
leave to report it. When the subjects were in a
group of three who were much less likely to react,
each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others.
(09:07):
Based on what we now know about the Beverly Hills
supper Club in nineteen seventy seven, that experiment seems darkly prophetic.
That incident is vividly described by Amanda Ripley in her
book The Unthinkable. Remember where We left off? Twelve hundred
people were in the cabaret room listening to the warm
(09:28):
up act crack jokes on stage. A fire was racing
towards them. Young Walter Bailey's supervisor had shrugged and ignored
the problem. Like Pastrengo Ugiati, the supervisor had a plan
and didn't seem able to fully appreciate that the plan
would have to change. So Walter Bailey did something big,
something he assumed would cost him his job. But someone
(09:50):
had to act. He decided that it was going to
be him. Although he was just a teenager, and although
he suffered from stage fright, Bailey strode down the middle
of the room, climbed up on stage, grabbed a microphone.
I want everyone to look to my right, there's an
exit to the right corner of the room. And look
to my left, there's an exit on the left. And
(10:11):
now look to the back. There's an exit at the back.
I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There is
a fire at the front of the building. And then
Walter Bailey left the stage. I wish I could tell
you that one two hundred people rose to their feet
and filed out of the room, But they didn't. Who
(10:35):
was this kid? They thought, was he part of the act?
Was the fire for real? Was it a problem? People
thought of the expense of their ticket, of how much
they were enjoying the food, they were looking forward to
hearing John Davidson sing. They didn't want to rush out
if they didn't have to. So did they have to?
(10:56):
It wasn't clear. Think about the last time you were
sitting around in a building and a fire alarm went off.
Did you spring to your feet and seek the nearest
fire exit? And oh I didn't. I looked around to
see what others were doing. The same thing happened in
the Beverly Hills supper Club. People did what people do.
They look to the left and to the right, as
(11:18):
Walter Bailey had told them to, but they weren't looking
for the exits. They were looking at what the people
next to them were doing. Was Susan to my left moving?
What about Fred to my right? With everyone taking cues
from everyone else, the group was slow to respond, and
they really didn't have a minute to spare. Because I'm
(11:48):
a journalist and frankly a nerd, I should have been
way ahead of the curve on coronavirus. Think back to
the thirteenth of February twenty twenty. I know it feels
a long time ago. Only three people outside of China
had died from the new virus, at least as far
as anyone knew at the time. Nobody in the US
(12:09):
thought to have died of it, nor had anyone in
my own country, the UK. The virus felt a very
distant threat, but it wasn't. More than a thousand people
had died in China, and that number was rising rapidly.
Twenty five countries had confirmed cases. Well respected epidemiologists had
(12:29):
already concluded that there was little chance of stamping out
these other cases quickly. The novel coronavirus was too contagious,
like the fire in the supper club. It was spreading
everywhere and rapidly gathering speed. And I know this because
I interviewed one of those well respected epidemiologists. On February thirteenth,
(12:53):
Dr Natalie MacDermott of King's College, London walked into a
studio at the BBC and told me the latest thinking
on the new coronavirus. The early data had suggested that
the virus killed more than one in ten of the
people it infected. Doctor MacDermott reassured me that no, it
probably wasn't quite that dangerous. The best guess at the
(13:15):
fatality rate was more like one in a hundred, may
be as low as one in two hundred. Nobody knew
for sure. Should I just assume that every one on
the planet would get it? I asked now. She said
that was too fatalistic, but if we couldn't contain it,
it was certainly infectious enough to infect a majority of
(13:35):
the planet's population. I nodded. I believed her. I even
did the mental arithmetic. There might be five billion cases,
and with a one in a hundred death rate, that
would be fifty million people around the world dying over
the course of a few months in the United States,
(13:55):
it would be two million deaths. What did I do
with the doctor's information.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I did what.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Pastrengo ROGALTI did. As his ship plowed on towards the rocks,
I anxiously furrowed my brow and I kept on going,
hoping the worst wouldn't happen. Now, I don't want to
exaggerate my failings. I didn't crash any oil tankers. Nobody
(14:23):
died because of my mistakes. But I could have done
better easily. I could have held off on booking my
summer vacation. I could have made sure I caught up
with my elderly father and stepmother, who were in high
risk groups. I could have sold all my shares, or
at least most of them, and waited for a couple
of months to see whether doctor Macdermott's grim scenario was
(14:44):
starting to become a reality. Instead, I took some money
out of savings to pay down some of my mortgage
because I had gigs firmly in the diary that would
top the savings back up again. Those gigs were canceled,
of course, which means I drained my savings at the
worst possible moment. If for goodness sake, I could at
(15:05):
least have bought some extra toilet paper. But none of
this went through my mind. It wasn't that I wasn't anxious.
I was anxious, just like Pastrengo VIGIATI was anxious. I
was aware there was a problem, and yet I didn't
step back, think things through, and turn my anxiety into action.
And perhaps you may recognize yourself in that description too.
(15:30):
Remember the experiment by psychologists bib Latane and John Darley.
They slowly pumped smoke into rooms containing people filling in questionnaires.
Solitary subjects didn't hesitate to leave and report the smoke,
but groups of people stayed and stayed as the smoke thickened,
(15:50):
reassured by each other's passivity. Those experimental subjects had done nothing.
Now a decade later, the customers of the Beverly Hill
supper Club were re enacting that experiment in the most
terrible way. Some people moved in reaction to young Walter
Bailey's warning he saved them, but many people were too
(16:15):
slow to react, lulled into complacency by the fact that
others were also too slow. Four minutes later, the power
failed and the lights went out in the ballroom, Toxic
smoke rolled in, and anyone still in that room faced
a dreadful challenge in getting out alive. Walter Bailey repeatedly
(16:35):
held his breath and headed back in to drag out
as many people as he could. One hundred and sixty
seven people died that night. If it hadn't been for
Walter Bailey, the death toll might have been many hundreds more.
Bailey also survived. He's a true hero. I'd like to
(17:02):
think that if disaster struck, I'd have the courage and
the presence of mind of Walter Bailey. But I'm more
like those poor, unsuspecting supper club patrons, enjoying their food
and looking forward to the music, then wondering what to
do and taking cues from everyone else. We're social animals,
we humans. We know instinctively that it's normally safer to
(17:26):
stay with the group than to do what the group does,
but not always. I hesitated too, And then when I
started reacting in earnest to the pandemic, I found that
the stock market was already plunging. The pasta and toilet
paper was already sold out, and there was no hope
of getting masks. Our governments found themselves in the same
(17:47):
situation for much the same reason. This series. I'll have
more to say about what our leaders have done and
failed to do, but for now, let's simply note that
many Western democracies found themselves in the same crazy scramble
for ventilators, for swab testing kits, for masks, and for gowns.
(18:07):
If everyone had started to taking action in January, while
the risk of a pandemic was still just a risk,
we'd all be in better shape now. But just as
in the supper club, before they acted, everyone wanted to
be a little more certain that there really was a problem.
Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, calls this
(18:29):
sort of problem an ambiguous threat. The warning signs aren't
completely straightforward, and the potential for harm is unclear as well.
Ambiguous threats might be serious or they might not. As
Professor Edmondson points out, that ambiguity is exactly what makes
these types of threats so dangerous. Because we're not sure
(18:51):
that they're serious, we easily find excuses not to take
them serious. Lee While leading epidemiologists were warning that the
virus might well become a pandemic. It wasn't obvious that
they were right. It wasn't obvious that it would spread
so quickly. It wasn't obvious that it would lead to
the complete shutdown of major economies around the world. But then,
(19:14):
for Captain Pastrengo Rugiati, it wasn't obvious that fishing boats
would appear to block his way. It wasn't obvious that
one of his officers would make a navigational error. It
wasn't obvious that his ship's maneuvering would be delayed by
confusion about whether the ship was on autopilot or not.
I didn't expect Rugiati to predict all these things, just
(19:35):
as I don't blame myself for failing to forecast every
detail of the pandemic. But what he should have done
was realize the risks and take action to reduce those risks.
And so should I. I should have thought through the implications.
What might it mean if a pandemic threatened to kill
two million Europeans and another two million Americans? How might
(19:57):
we all respond? And while I might not have realized
on February the thirteenth that almost half the world was
heading into Lockdown. It was surely a possibility that I
should have considered much sooner than I did. But no,
faced with the unthinkable, it's hard to think it. That
was never in my mind, never said Pastrengo Ruggiati. There
(20:23):
were a lot of things that were never in my
mind either. Perhaps they should have been. I hope that
I remember my own limitations in future. Anciosno il capitano Ruggiati.
I too, am Captain Ruggiati. Hello. Everyone, It is twenty
(20:49):
twenty five. Tim Harford back with you, and I am
joined in the studio by series producer Georgia Mills. Hello Georgia,
Hi Tim.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Listening to this episode and looking back at the Lockdown,
what was that time like for you, both as a
journalist and also just as a regular human.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, I don't think my experience is a regular human
were any different from anyone else's. I was thinking, Oh,
this must be particularly tough for people with young children
who could be going to nurse. Why. I was, Oh, no, actually,
maybe it's particularly tough for people with teenagers who were
studying for exams. I don't know. It must be really
tough for people who don't have any family and who
(21:27):
were all by themselves. Actually, no, maybe it's really tough
for older people who were most at risk. And then
I realized it's kind of tough for a lot of people.
I had the privilege of feeling useful while also staying safe,
so unlike the medics or essential workers, I didn't have
to go out and expose myself to the virus. But
(21:47):
at the same time, I was covering the story for
the Financial Times and particularly for the BBC. We had
an epic series of our numbers related radio series, more
or less trying to make sense of what was going on,
and I did all of that from home, so really
feeling that I was kind of I was doing something
(22:08):
useful and I had something to do, but at the
same time and absolutely no risks. So frankly a lot
easier for me than for many.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
And listening back to the pandemic series you made, what
thoughts do you have hearing that now?
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Oh, it is fascinating the number of different issues that
have come up. So we were talking about unintended consequences,
we were talking about the failure to react, we were
talking about the importance of data. So I think a
lot of it still stands up. But at the same time,
there was certain things. Listening to the series, you just think, oh,
we had no idea what was coming. So it's an
(22:45):
interesting time capsule. One other thing I've found is that
some people listen to the podcast and go, oh, wow,
that was so prescient, and other people listen to the
podcast and go, wow, that's so embarrassing. You got everything wrong,
which is just a reminder that people are going to
adopt particular views of the world, and you're going to
seem very smart or very stupid, depending on whether what
(23:05):
you said happens to align with those views.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I mean, they were made in June twenty twenty, so
it already felt like probably a million years of COVID
by them, but there was so much of a wild
rollercoaster to come. So what other cautionary tales related to
COVID do you think have emerged since?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Well, there's obviously a whole slew of lessons to learn
about vaccines and vaccine communication and vaccine skepticism. The vaccine
obviously was a huge story in twenty twenty one, as
vaccines started to be rolled out and protect people from
the virus. I think another lesson is that how countries
(23:48):
did in the first wave does not necessarily predict much
about how well they did overall. So I remember very
clearly that summer of twenty twenty doing it and a
series for the BBC or an episode for the BBC
asking why had things gone so much worse in the
(24:08):
UK than in Germany? The number of people who died
in Germany was so much less about a quarter a
number of people who died in the UK. And then
actually roll forward a year and the Germans had caught up.
In the long run, it didn't really make any difference.
The virus was going to do what it was going
to do, so that I think, what was a surprise
We'd told ourselves the Germans had done so much better.
(24:29):
But maybe in the end, all the preparation you can
do doesn't make as much difference as you might think.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
What about looking back at lockdowns? They were they worth it?
Were they important? Do we even have answers today?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Well, we have some answers, but a lot of the
kind of data that we would want to have stopped
being collected during the lockdowns because of the lockdowns. So,
for example, children's exam performance, did children's academic performance suffer
did they regress. Actually quite hard to answer that question
(25:03):
because the very exams that you might use to answer
that question were discontinued or were changed. It's hard to
generalize because different parts of the world had very different
lockdown policies. But let me offer a couple of reflections.
One is that looking at the UK, which I have
done in some detail, we have quite good evidence that
(25:26):
a lot of kids bounced back academically. The academic impact
was really bad, but it was quite short lived and
a lot of kids had caught up surprisingly quickly. So
in the end you go, okay, fine, no harm done.
It turns out people can bounce back. The impact on
mental health I think less of a cheerful story. Mental
(25:48):
health definitely deteriorated a lot. There was a long term
decline of teenage mental health, possibly something to do with smartphones,
possibly something to do with something else. And then we
had COVID and we had the lockdowns, and that seemed
to make it all worse. Unclear whether it really made
a long term difference, And also unclear was the problem
(26:11):
of the lockdown, so was the problem of the virus,
because they're happening at the same time, so you know,
Are you suffering because you can't get out and see
your friends, or are you suffering because you're terrified that
you're going to lose your parents to this deadly virus?
Or is it both so hard to know. One final
point I think is worth making is when you look
at countries such as Sweden who had much more liberal
(26:34):
lockdown policies, actually, and you get a similar story in
certain US states. People still sort of lock themselves down.
So you had many of the same benefits of the
lockdowns in terms of controlling the virus, and you had
many of the same costs in terms of you know,
if you're running a restaurant or a bar. In Sweden,
(26:57):
it's legal for people to come and sit in your restaurant,
but they're not going to do it. So I understand
why when a government mandates something that's to be taken seriously,
and that is that is to be It's not a
trivial matter. But it's worth bearing in mind that if
governments had done nothing, I think a lot of the
impact on the virus, on the economy and on people's
(27:19):
mental health might not have been as different as all
the people shouting at each other about it. Would like
to think right.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
And you mentioned there that there's not enough data to
really establish quite a lot of things we'd like to establish.
So is there a cautionary tailer hear about the gathering
of data.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I think there is. It's easy to underestimate quite how
important data was, and ultimately, if you had enough data,
there's no pandemic. I mean that it may sound a
strange thing to claim, but imagine in the ideal case. Okay,
here's the data we've got. We've got data. The moment
somebody is infected, we immediately know they're infected, and we
(28:00):
know how infectious they are, how likely they are to
spread the disease to other people. And let's say that
everybody is wearing a smart watch, and that smart watch
just glows bright red as you're walking down the street.
If you're infectious and you just look around and you
can see anybody who's wearing a bright red smart watch,
you keep away from them. And in fact, those people
(28:21):
have to stay at home, and if they don't stay
at home, the police will come and have a word.
If you had that, if the data were that good,
the pandemic's over in a week, right, It's literally over.
When you realize that, you realize, oh, so much of
this is not actually about treatments or about vaccines. It's
about that we don't know who's infectious and who isn't,
(28:45):
and if we had better data, we make a real
contribution to preventing future pandemics. Now, of course, we're not
going to have that ultimate glowing smart watch in future,
well probably not, probably not, maybe not, who knows what
we'll have in the future. But what we might have
is much better testing, availability of really rapid tests, and
maybe some smarter algorithms to process the information. So you
(29:09):
you do a test you can't positive, and the computer
is better able to say, oh, well, you know, here
are the people you met after you got infected. Here
are the people you met before you got infected. They
might be infected, and just do a better job of
controlling the disease without these really widespread draconian lockdowns. So
(29:29):
there's a huge amount to be gained by having better data,
and I think it's very very easy to overlook. We
always overlook the power of data in my experience.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
So are you optimistic for whenever the next pandemic hits,
that we'll get the data right or at least better.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I think we've learned an awful lot. I think the
technology is going to get a lot better. I think
we're going to have a much faster development of vaccines,
you know, all things being equal, So you know, there's
a lot to be optimistic about. Clearly, what we've also
learned is there's an awful lot of politics, and the
politics is not necessarily helpful. But overall, I think COVID
(30:06):
could have been a much more serious illness. Just imagine
if it had been ten times more deadly than it was.
Just imagine if it had affected children instead of eighty
year olds. I mean, obviously it did affect some children,
but imagine if it had been more deadly for children
than for the very elderly. It could have been so
much worse. It could have been so much deadlier, it
could have been absolutely terrifying. So in a way, maybe
(30:29):
we should think of COVID not as this disaster, but
as a near miss that should give us lessons that
would help us avoid a much worse disaster in future.
And well, the lesson of cautionary tales is always you
should try to learn from past mistakes. But also we
(30:49):
don't always do so.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Nice we'll have to wait and see, so thank you, Tim.
I think we'll leave it there, but if you haven't
heard the rest of the Pandemic specials, I really recommend
going back. I listened to them for the first time
this year and they are both a really interesting time
capsule but also really relevant still, so lots of other
episodes to check out, and.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
We'll be back next week with another classic from the archive,
a tale about Peps's disastrous bottlecap promotion and a man
who bought more than a thousand chocolate puddings. See you them.
Three books that helped us research this episode are The
(31:31):
Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Conruther
and Robert Mayer, and Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andrew Tiltik.
As always, a full list of our sources is in
the show notes on Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is
written and presented by me Tim Harford, with help from
(31:54):
Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilly with
support from Pete Norton. The music mixing and mastering are
the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by
Julia Barton. Special thanks to Neil LaBelle, Carli Milli, Ry,
Heather Fame, Maya Kainigg, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary
(32:15):
Tales is a Pushkin industry's production
Host
Tim Harford
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