Masterly Inactivity Versus Micromanaging
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Lady Sale was eating her last breakfast in Kabul, Afghanistan. She'd had to burn the legs of her mahogany dining table to cook it. That was her last remaining wood. There wasn't much food either, but it would have to do. The year was 1842, the 6th of January. Not the best time of year to embark on a five-day trek through the mountains. The cold was bitter, the snow knee-high.

Shortly after nine in the morning, they set out. Hundreds of British and many thousands of Indians recruited from an India that was under British control. There were sepoys or soldiers and the camp followers, civilians, wives and children. The British-led troops had occupied Afghanistan for three years. It had been clear for weeks now that they'd have to leave their base in Kabul. It still wasn't clear if they'd get out alive.

They'd been trying to negotiate with the various Afghan rebels who surrounded them, both for the safe passage to the British-held fort at Jalalabad and to buy the food they so desperately needed. The soldiers were on half rations. There was nothing at all for the animals. The cattle chewed the bark off trees, wrote Lady Sale in her journal. I have seen my own riding horse gnaw voraciously at a cartwheel.

Lady Sale's son-in-law had spent the previous night waist-deep in the icy Kabul River, constructing a makeshift bridge for the convoy. This must have been a galling task because he'd repeatedly told his superiors that the river could easily be forded upstream. They told him, "Build the bridge anyway."

As usual, every sensible proposition was overruled. Trying to get almost 20,000 people, plus pack animals, across rickety planks between icy riverbanks proved slow going. As the day dragged on, a long line of baggage carriers backed up at the bridge. Rebels started to shoot at them. They abandoned the baggage.

And so, as night fell, the convoy had managed to cover just six miles and lose most of their supplies. One of the few tents that had made it through was chivalrously pitched over Lady Sale, her pregnant daughter and her exhausted son-in-law. At daylight, we found several men frozen to death. Hungry and frostbitten, the survivors trudged on.

straight into a carefully planned ambush. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. We'll come back to the story of Lady Sale and why the bedraggled imperial convoy was fleeing Kabul. First, I want to talk about something that may seem quite unrelated. Helicopter parenting. Dropping in to micromanage your child's life.

The practice is much mocked, but it's also widespread. Some evidence suggests that it's not a good idea. In 2013, for example, researchers from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia asked college students to say whether or not they agreed with statements such as, ''My mother monitors my exercise schedule,'' or, ''If I'm having an issue with my roommate, my mother would try to intervene.''

The more their parents were like helicopters constantly hovering over their child's life, the more likely the students were to be depressed and dissatisfied. Criticism of helicopter parenting goes back to long before the invention of the helicopter. Charlotte Mason was a Welsh educator in the late 1800s. Her writings are still studied today, especially by homeschoolers.

Mason chastised parents who think they have to organise every moment of their children's lives. 'Fussy and restless', she called them. 'Let them choose their own friends', Mason said, 'and form their own opinions, and spend their own pocket money. Don't repeatedly remind them to do the things you've asked them to do. Instead, let them choose to fail to do those things, as long as you then make them suffer the consequences.

When Charlotte Mason wanted a memorable phrase to sum up this approach, she reached for one that had suddenly become popular in the British discourse of the 1860s. I wish to bring before parents and teachers the subject of masterly inactivity. Masterly inactivity. It's a lovely phrase and a surprisingly useful concept, as we'll see.

Afghanistan in the 1830s was not an easy place to rule. So many competing tribal leaders had to be kept happy, or at least quiescent. But Dost Mohammad Khan was proving remarkably adept at it.

He was also, or so he thought, on friendly terms with Britain, the colonial power that, in effect, governed neighbouring India through the British East India Company. At any rate, Dost Mohammad had hit it off with Britain's man in Kabul, the charming and brilliant Scotsman, 34-year-old Alexander Burns.

Kabul was thriving. Its Grand Bazaar was the commercial hub of Central Asia. You could buy anything from spices to silk, furs to fine porcelain. Kabul was diverse. Traders from Hindu and Jewish minorities felt welcome and secure. Alexander Burns was impressed by how skilfully Dost Muhammad was running the country.

The peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny, the citizen at the safety of his home, the merchant at the equity of the decisions in the protection of his property, and the soldier at the regular manner in which his arrears are discharged. A man in power can have no higher praise.

So imagine the outrage when Afghans learned that Britain was invading their land to oust Dost Mohammad, and Alexander Burns was riding with the invading troops. Burns was cast as Namak Haram, a traitor, literally impure salt. In the histories told by Afghan poets, Burns does not come out well.

On the outside, he seems a man. But inside, he is the very devil. To be fair to Burns, he had tried. Russia was trying to muscle in on Central Asia, threatening Britain's influence in the region. Burns repeatedly begged his political masters, leave this to me, I can handle it. Let me work with Dostmohamed.

But all of Burns' charm and brilliance couldn't make up for his unforgivable youth. Who was this upstart questioning the received wisdom of Britain's most senior experts on Afghan affairs?

Those senior experts had, admittedly, never actually been to Afghanistan. Still, they were sure they knew exactly what the Afghan people wanted. The reinstatement of their former king, who'd been deposed by relatives of Dost Muhammad some three decades earlier, and had since been living in exile as a guest of the British East India Company.

From their faraway desks, the experts hatched a dramatic plan to deal with the Russian threat. They'd invade Afghanistan to put the former king back on the throne, where he'd rule gratefully in Britain's interests. The story of the 1839 invasion is told in William Dalrymple's masterful book, Return of a King.

As the British and Indian army marched through Afghanistan, it dawned on the senior officers that Afghans had not, after all, been hankering after their former king. Alexander Burns was exasperated. He'd tried to tell them. But he was also loyal, or maybe just ambitious. He was sent ahead of the troops to try to smooth their path with local leaders. On hearing about the size of the advancing army…

One such leader told him, You can easily replace Dostoevsky, but you will never win over the Afghan nation. You have brought an army into the country. How do you propose to take it out again? That turned out to be a very astute question. Cautionary Tales will return after this message.

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The British took action in Afghanistan. With hindsight, they should have left it alone. That's an obvious enough point from our modern perspective, but colonial invasions are by no means the only situation where doing less achieves more. I've had a bad throat for a couple of days. It happens every year. They usually give me Zithromax and it goes away. Let me see.

Your throat looks normal. It's very unlikely that you have strep throat. I'll take a swab, but it will likely be negative. Can I have a prescription in the meantime? You don't need a prescription. Why can't you just give me the prescription? A surprising amount of medical care simply isn't necessary. A few years ago, researchers conducted a survey of over 2,000 American physicians

On average, they secretly reckoned that one-tenth of the procedures they approved didn't actually need to be done. Furthermore, their patients could have survived without a fifth of the medications they were prescribed, and over a quarter of the tests ordered were quite pointless. That adds up to a lot of wasted time and money. What were the doctors thinking?

Sometimes, they told the researchers, it was quicker to do another test than track down a patient's medical records. But two motives far outweighed the others. The fear of being sued for malpractice and a desire to get rid of the pushy patients. That conversation about Zithromax, an antibiotic, came from a blog post by an emergency room doctor in Canada. And it was shared by the Canadian branch of an initiative called Choosing Wisely.

The aim of Choosing Wisely is to cut down on wasteful medical spending. It produces lists of things not to do, such as prescribing antibiotics for minor infections, viral infections, or infections that exist only in a patient's imagination. Antibiotics are a clear-cut case. Their overuse affects us all by speeding the growth of drug-resistant bugs.

But few medications or procedures are completely free of risk. And some tests can be a waste of time too. Say a patient has lower back pain. They've had it for less than six weeks and they have no other red flags. Do you send them for a scan? It turns out to make no difference to the patient's outcomes. Francois Mai is an author and professor of psychiatry. He wrote about Choosing Wisely for the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Sometimes, just waiting and seemingly doing nothing is the favoured therapeutic modality. The favoured therapeutic modality! What Francois May is saying is that sometimes the best treatment is no treatment at all. Instead, waiting and watching. Ready to act, but only if you have to. May explains how he first came across this idea.

When I was a medical student, a wise old professor introduced me to the treatment concept of masterly inactivity. So there it is again, masterly inactivity. It's 1839. A huge army of British and Indians is marching on Kabul. The Afghan leader, Dost Mohammad, sees that the cause is hopeless. Soon, the old king is duly reinstalled

But while Dost Muhammad had painstakingly earned the respect and goodwill of the many tribal factions, those emperors behind every hillock, the returned king was seen as Britain's puppet. He relied on British largesse and the occupying troops to keep everyone in line. It was clear that the king wouldn't last if the British troops withdrew, so they stayed.

Some of the officers had their families join them. Lady Sale arrived in Kabul with a grand piano, a marriageable daughter and a collection of seeds. My sweet peas and geraniums are much admired. In the kitchen garden, the potatoes especially thrive. But the cost of occupying Afghanistan was ruinous.

The British East India Company made tidy profits from tea and opium. But those profits were all swallowed up, and more. And Afghans were becoming more and more appalled at the liberties taken by the firangis, the foreigners. One complained to the king that female prostitutes are publicly, day and night, carried on horseback into the English camp.

The King took it up with the top British envoy, who unwisely waved the worry away. If we stop the soldiers having sex, the poor boys will fall quite ill. One man was acquiring a particularly saucy reputation, the envoy's deputy, Alexander Burns, the very devil himself.

Burns wasn't just a diplomatic charmer, he charmed the ladies too, as one local writer described: "In his private quarters, he would take a bath with his Afghan mistress in the hot water of lust and pleasure, as the two rubbed each other down with flanners of giddy joy and the talc of intimacy."

Have a care, Alexander Burns. Next to the flannels of giddy joy and the talc of intimacy lies the tinder of bad feeling. And in November 1841, something happened to put a spark to that tinder. Some say Burns seduced someone he shouldn't have, offending a local power broker. Whatever the reason, a mob descended on Burns' house. He sent a messenger to ask what they wanted.

They killed the messenger, stormed Burns compound and hacked him to death. The young Scot's dismembered body was left in the street for the dogs to eat. Clearly the British-led forces couldn't stay in Kabul now. Afghan rebels cut off the camp's food supplies. That's why Lady Sale's riding horse was gnawing at a cartwheel. The British envoy tried to negotiate for safe passage

But he clumsily double-crossed the leaders of rival factions in the rebellion, a subterfuge that ended with the swish of a sword, a sickening thunk, and, in the words of one young officer who witnessed it, the British envoy's head was where his heels had been, consternation and horror depicted on his countenance.

After that execution, the incompetent retreat, the unnecessary bridge, the long delay, the abandoned baggage, the frozen night, the ambush. I had fortunately only one bullet in my arm. The party that fired on us were not above 50 yards from us and we owed our escape to urging our horses on as fast as they could go over a road where, at any other time, we should have walked our horses very carefully.

Lady Sale's son-in-law was not so lucky. Shot in the stomach, he died. After the ambush came the blizzard. The convoy made just one mile's progress in a day. Living and dead were indistinguishable. Motionless in the frozen waste. The British met a rebel leader on the road. He said, give me the officers' wives and children. I'll keep them safe and warm and fed.

Lady Sale and her daughter were now among the hostages, taken back along the route of their attempted escape. The road was covered with awfully mangled bodies, all naked, camp followers still alive, frostbitten and starving, some perfectly out of their senses. The sight was dreadful, the smell of the blood sickening. It required care to guide my horse so as not to tread upon the bodies of

Nearly 20,000 British and Indians, soldiers, camp followers, men, women and children, set off from Kabul in the knee-high snow in January 1842. Barely one in ten survived to tell the tale of what happened. It was, in the words of the historian William Dalrymple, a rare moment of complete colonial humiliation. The British Empire's pride had been stung.

and they lashed out. They still had other troops in other Afghan cities. The orders came through. Withdraw via Kabul, leaving decisive proofs of the power of the British army. There followed one of the most shameful episodes in British colonial history.

The remaining troops laid waste to villages, killing the men and raping the women, and even taking the time for less heinous acts of cruelty, such as destroying the ancient fruit trees. In Kabul, they plundered the shops and dynamited the Grand Bazaar, that once diverse and thriving hub of commerce. As the Afghan writer Mirza Atta put it,

For all the treasure they expended, and for all the lives they sacrificed, the only result was ruin and disgrace. Cautionary Tales will return.

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And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.

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Just a quarter century later, in 1867, the drumbeats of war were sounding again. Once more, British foreign policy experts were worried about Russian ambitions in Central Asia, and the British military were gung-ho. But for now, at least, there was a cautious man in charge of that decision. Britain had appointed as India's governor-general a man called John Lawrence.

He had his own views on the Afghans. I am for letting them alone to adjust to their own affairs. What, you mean do nothing? Yes. But that didn't mean indifference, as some critics assumed. Remember how the physician Francois May put it, waiting and seemingly doing nothing.

John Lawrence asked a subordinate to write an article explaining that he had his eye on things and he'd act if he had to, but not before. The article was published in the Edinburgh Review and it ran to some 47 pages. Within those pages were two words that caught on as a description of Lawrence's approach. You know what's coming. Those words were masterly inactivity.

It's a challenge for doctors to practice masterly inactivity and the Canadian physician Francois Mai explains why. Many patients demand that something, anything be done to ease their complaint. They believe that action, any action, is better than waiting for the body's built-in remedies to do their bit. Those lists of things not to do from the Choosing Wisely initiative are intended to help doctors to have those difficult conversations.

Political leaders too often face demands to do something about a perceived threat. And that often leads to action that's rushed and ill-conceived. There's an old joke about politicians' logic: we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this. Behavioural economists call this an example of action bias.

In some situations we seem to feel compelled to take action, even if there's no real evidence that action will help. Perhaps the purest example of action bias is seen in soccer goalkeepers facing a penalty kick. The goalkeeper tends to dive, either left or right, a split second before the penalty taker kicks the ball.

The thinking is that if they've correctly guessed which side the striker will aim for, that split second will give them more chance of reaching the ball if it goes near the edge of the goal. But penalties are often kicked nearer the middle of the goal. And studies show that if the goalkeepers stood still and waited to see where the ball was heading, they'd save more penalties. So why don't they? Presumably because soccer fans are like impatient patients or anxious voters.

They expect action. Seemingly doing nothing can take a lot of courage. Sir Stafford Northcote was the British government minister in charge of India at the time John Lawrence was its governor-general.

he told the House of Commons. The policy of Sir John Lawrence, which has been characterised sometimes half-sneeringly, I'm afraid, as a policy of masterly inactivity, is what we ought in every way to support and strengthen. Sometimes half-sneeringly? Why the sneers?

Well, some of John Lawrence's more bellicose critics thought he was too afraid to act. They thought he'd been scarred by his family connection to the omni-shambles of the first Anglo-Afghan war. Remember that young officer who'd watched in horror as the top British envoy was beheaded? That officer was John Lawrence's brother.

Other critics doubted if Britain could do anything in Afghanistan. After all, the last time they'd tried, it had ended in humiliation. And if, in fact, there's nothing you can do, your inactivity can't be masterly. You're deluding yourself if you think that it is. The Victorian pioneer of free-range parenting, Charlotte Mason, took pains to make that point. Consider the difference between this scenario...

An ice cream shop. Can we get ice creams? Yes, we can. Let's treat ourselves. And this scenario. An ice cream shop. Can we get ice creams? Um, I don't think... Please? It'll be dinner time soon and... I really want an ice cream. Well, I suppose... Please, can we get ice creams? All right then. Mason describes that as the difference between a masterly yes and an abject yes.

She points out how much better it feels to give a masterly yes. If you're eating ice cream after an abject yes, it tastes of nagging worry that you've incentivised more pestering in the future. But the only way you get to give a masterly yes is if you know that you could have said no. So masterly inactivity has two ingredients. You need the wisdom to judge when activity would be pointless or counterproductive.

And you need to be sure that you would have the ability to act if and when you judge that the time is right. It's that second ingredient that makes masterly inactivity such a useful idea. It's what makes it different from ideas like benign neglect, laisser faire or laisser aller. Those phrases imply a realisation that trying to act will always be pointless or counterproductive.

As Mason herself put it, The phrase has nothing in common with a laissez-aller attitude. That comes of thinking, what's the good? There are times when that is the right attitude. There's a much-repeated story of an investment brokerage that discovered their best-performing accounts belonged to clients who had died. Because, being dead, they were no longer tempted to keep meddling with their stock portfolio.

Sadly, that story seems to be an urban myth, but it persists because it rings true. One classic study finds that the most active investors did significantly worse than those who simply bought into the market and let their investments ride. If you're Warren Buffett, masterly inactivity might make sense. Watch your portfolio, always ready to act.

For most of us, benign neglect looks like the better option. We should just admit that we lack the competence ever to intervene wisely. But of course, that's hardly an attitude you want from doctors or parents. And you don't want a goalkeeper to benignly neglect her goal. Lady Sale spent months as a hostage, along with her widowed daughter, and now a baby granddaughter too.

She said the Afghan rebels treated them well. Honor has been respected. It is true that we have not common comforts, but what we denominate such are unknown to Afghan females. Eventually, the hostages were assigned new guards who proved to be bribable, especially with the news that British troops were on their way. The guards even offered the hostages their guns.

The men were so surprised, nobody rushed to take one. But one person had her wits about her. "You had better give me one and I will lead the party." Someone else had been held captive too. Dost Mohammad. The Afghan leader the British had deposed. He had surrendered to British troops and they had let him live in India. Now they quietly set him free. He rebuilt his power and ruled Afghanistan again for two more decades.

He was good at it. As Alexander Burns had noticed once, Afghans would have been far better off if Dost Mohammad had never been interrupted. Britain eventually fell in love with the notion of masterly inactivity, and it was certainly an improvement on the atrocities committed by their armies. But perhaps benign neglect would have been better all along.

Key sources for this episode include William Dalrymple's The Return of a King, Charlotte Mason's book School Education, and Francois May's article for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. For a full list of references, see timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazi, Ed Gochan, and David Cain.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of... Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries...

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

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and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

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To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.

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