A tale for the weekend

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During the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, an unusual study was carried out by two American academics, H Louis Nightly and Fred Skrase. Nightly was a flamboyant psychologist who came to minor prominence in the nineteen sixties on the back of a series of provocative public statements about drugs culture. This phase did not last longer than it took Nightly to get himself noticed and by the mid-sixties he had switched his attention to the consumer society and the psychology of spending.

Fred Skrase was a more traditional and less colourful academic statistician with a taste for lateral thinking. He was a moderately successful writer of books on popular science in which he often presented semi-serious demonstrations of improbable statistical relationships between such things as traffic congestion and the phases of the moon.

Nightly and Skrase first met one evening in 1965 at the house of a mutual university friend and although the two men had quite different temperaments, for some reason they hit it off. They got talking about their respective specialties and ended up discussing the effect of consumer society on the health of the average American.

Out of this casual conversation came a research project which was to be a definitive study of the consumer society they saw growing up before their eyes. Although Nightly and Skrase were academics, their research was not pure academic research because Nightly somehow managed to arrange for it to be part-funded by a large advertising agency, which was unusual even in those days.

Nightly and Skrase carried out an exhaustive examination of the health records of about 12,000 people over a five year period from 1966 to 1971. They also got each subject to fill in a detailed questionnaire on the spending patterns of their household. After an enormous amount of work, mostly carried out by Skrase, the two researchers claimed they had found a definite correlation between the general health of their subjects and the number of durable goods bought by the subject’s household.

The more durable goods bought by a household and the more expensive the goods were, the better the general health of the household. Also, there was a more strongly significant health correlation with goods bought for cleaning purposes such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Other household durables such as TV sets and electric toasters had a less significant correlation with health.

Of course, as soon as Nightly and Skrase found these correlations, they immediately made the obvious conclusion - a more healthy household is generally a more prosperous household which simply spends more on durable goods. However Nightly and Skrase had a way round this by taking advantage of a feature of their times – breakfast food competitions.

They were able to show that if poorer households acquired durable goods by winning them in competitions, then they had the same general level of health which they would have had if they had paid for the goods like a more prosperous household.

For example, a poorer household might get lucky and win a washing machine or a freezer, or even a car in a breakfast food competition. At that time these competitions were very popular and Nightly and Skrase were able to compile enough data on poorer households to be statistically valid. They concluded that there was a valid relationship between spending on durable goods and household health even if those goods had been won in a breakfast cereal competition.

Even though this study was based on a large sample population, the research was not greeted with enthusiasm. Nobody seems to have accepted that spending their money on household goods would improve their health. The advertising agency was not impressed either. Somehow by 1971 a belief in the consumer revolution had faded and the agency did not use the research they had paid for and seem to have written the idea off as a failure.

So the world was never exposed to ads claiming that buying a new washing machine was good for your health, even though Nightly and Skrase appear to have made their case. The two friends never followed up their work so now it sits on dusty academic shelves as a little-known slice of oddball consumer research which nobody ever quite believed in spite of Fred Skrase’s solid statistics.

Shortly afterwards Fred Skrase left academia and went on to found a modestly successful computer software company on the back of the personal computer boom, while Louis Nightly tried and failed to interest health insurance companies in a scheme to give away vacuum cleaners with their health insurance policies. Nightly tried to argue that the cost of the vacuum cleaners would be more than offset by reduced health insurance claims due to the beneficial effects of owning a brand new cleaner, but insurance companies were not convinced or interested.

A tale for the weekend is fiction

I’m sure nobody found themselves believing this story even though it is intended to be vaguely plausible. As a spot of weekend relaxation I invented Nightly and Skrase to make two related points which we all know.

People prefer plausible fiction to the complexities and uncertainties of analysis.

Media folk know it, so they prefer it too.