Edinburgh Fringe fame for a one woman show is proof of the randomness of celebrity

THE Edinburgh Festival is in full swing and the number of performers is almost incredible: the overall total this year is estimated to be around 50,000.

A small fraction are already established names; an even smaller fraction may become famous as the festival unfolds. But most will return home just as unknown as when they arrived.

There was an outpouring of support - and subsequent publicity - for performer Georgie Grier after she tweeted that only one person had turned up to watch her show. She now seems to have become something of a celebrity and wound up performing to a packed house.

This is very much the exception rather than the rule. Those responding to the tweet had not seen Georgie’s show; they would have been completely unaware of its inherent quality. So following basic rational choice theory, in which people evalu-

Paul Ormerod

ate the attributes of a product or serv- ice and see how it matches their own preferences before forming a view, endorsing the show makes little sense.

This small vignette tells us a great deal about the artistic sector as a whole. The arts are inherently massively inegalitarian. A select few do extremely well and most do badly, very badly indeed.

The work of Duncan Watts helps us understand why this is the case. Watts, who was originally at Columbia University, went on to be paid huge salaries by Yahoo and Microsoft and is now ensconced back in academia.

Twenty years ago he published a paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the title “A simple model of global cascades on random networks”. Watts set up a computer model in which the agents could make one of two choices. For example, you could either go or not go to a particular show at the Edinburgh Festival. Your decision to go wouldn’t be based in any way on the quality of the show; it would be determined by the proportion of people who have seen the show and could influence your choice. Given Grier’s experience, this seems a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. columnist in this very newspaper concluded yesterday that “Ken just needs a real job”. While this is an understandable argument to grace the pages of London’s finest business newspaper, it is tragically misguided. Not every job need fill us with a profound sense of purpose. No society can function in a world in which everyone feels they are defined by their job. Who would choose to be defined by being a chartered accountant, for instance? These jobs are necessary. We need them filled. But we can’t possibly hope that every chartered accountant believes that is who they are, rather than simply what they do at work.

Watt’s model started with no one having been to the show. Then a few are selected at random to go. Watts then measured, across a large number of individual solutions of his model, how many eventually went. In any context in which the opinions of others have a strong impact on the choices a person makes, the eventual outcome will be very unequal.

The results were intriguing. Most of the time, very few people would go. But very occasionally, huge numbers do. This is exactly like the real life outcomes in the arts.

Watts then followed it up a few years later with some experiments. He got a group of students to listen, one at a time, to 48 music tracks and to rate them and select the ones they really liked. In one set, they just listened to bits of the music. Overall, some were more popular than others, but none stood out dramatically. In another set, students were told what others had selected before them. In this case, a few were hugely popular and most were not. The choices of others had a dramatic impact on the outcome.

This inequality is a deep seated feature of any part of the economy in which the choice which you make is significantly affected bywhat others do - especially the arts.

It is an unusual phenomenon in Britain, and America too, that we define ourselves by our jobs. Ask a Brit “what do you do?”, and they will invariably tell you what their job is. Ask a Swede, on the other hand, and they will probably tell you what they are doing in that very moment. If you don’t believe me, watch Sandi Toksvig dial-a-Swede on QI a few years ago (one of the stranger attempts by Sweden to tempt tourists to their cold, dark country) and discover the same herself.

It is perhaps worth noting that Sweden tops the EU’s gender equality index. Barbie has been hailed, rightly, as a feminist film – showing that women should not be defined by society. But Ken’s story takes us further than that – it shows us that men need not be defined by tradition either. To be ourselves is, in other words, kenough.

£ Josh William is Deputy Director of Labour Together and a columnist at City A.M.

Tax And Run

Italy’s far right prime minister Giorgia Meloni has wiped almost £9bn off of the value of Italian banks after launching a surprise raid on their finances with a socalled ‘windfall tax’. The country’s financial institutions face a 40 per cent levy in an effort to help first time buyers.

Paul Ormerod is an author and economist at Volterra Partners LLP

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