Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Welcome, everybody. This is our latest, pre-recorded Academy series. I’m Natasha Holme, I’m one of the Associates in the Private Wealth Dispute team here at Mishcon de Reya and I’m delighted to be joined by Dr Andrew Brooks and, as I was going through your accolade, it did make me feel incredibly impressed about everything you’ve accomplished so, for those that don’t know, Andrew has obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Developmental Geography at King’s College London, you then went on to achieve a Master of Science in Practicing Sustainable Development at Royal Holloway and then you completed your Doctorate in Philosophy in 2012 and you’re currently a lecturer and the Deputy Head of Geography at King’s College and your research has spanned across the globe, most notably when you published your ‘Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fash Fashion and Second-hand Clothes’ where you followed a pair of jeans right from the cotton fields to the production and then on to the consumer, and the impact that the clothing industry has along the way. But today, we’re here to talk about your latest book, which is called the ‘Bullsh*t Comparisons: A Field Guide to Thinking Critically in a World of Difference’ and the book will be on sale from tomorrow. And the purpose of this book is to sharpen people’s analytical skills in an era where they are bombarded with comparisons and it’s meant to be a sort of practical guide, well, at least that’s how I found it but I wonder if you could just start from the beginning and tell us what inspired you to write this book.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, sure, thanks Natasha. So, I’m interested in spatial difference. As a geographer, I study difference across space in a way that a historian would study differences across time. So, for me, understanding the way in which pieces are different from one another, whether that’s differences in income or health outcomes or differences in culture or environment, is really at the heart of my research and oftentimes people try and compare places and I find a lot of these comparisons are done really poorly and then from thinking about comparisons of places, my writing ideas evolved to thinking about how we compare people and how we compare different historical periods. So a lot of these comparisons, they really wind me up, some of them are quite bullsh*t and that’s where ‘Bullsh*t Comparisons’ developed.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
And I love that and that takes us on to nicely, so what is a bullsh*t comparison?
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, well, yeah, it’s a, it’s a provocative, it’s a provocative phrase but it’s, I don’t use the term lightly. I’m sure many of you are familiar with talking about things being bullsh*t in terms of like a nearly truth, a mistruth, something which is, you might call your friends out on for talking bullsh*t, but here I use it as a kind of particular narrative device to explain moments when someone is saying something which is a fiction, which is maybe tied to a fact. I can maybe point to an example from Donald Trump, if that’s okay?
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Please do.
Dr Andrew Brooks
So, Donald Trump is maybe the bullsh*t artist par excellence, he puts forward these ideas, he says he won the election in 2020, he talks about attitudes towards migrants, lots of things he vocalises which are obvious mistruths but he also uses comparisons to tie facts and fiction together. So, recently he said, “I don’t mind facing jail. I don’t mind being another Nelson Mandella.” He was tying his political standing to Mandella’s, Mandella’s quest to, for justice and his antiapartheid stance; he was drawing a moral equivalent between himself and Mandella. In so doing, he was making a bullsh*t comparison but it might make some of his audience think that he is being politically persecuted and that actually what, there’s a grain of truth of it, so that tying fact and fiction together in that sense gives Bush, sorry Bush? Trump an aura of, of authenticity when it’s not.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
And I wonder if you can just expand on how economic factors might skew our perception of places.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, so a good example here would be if we look back to the Human Development Index, which is the UN’s main metric, its comparative table for measuring how successful a country is. I think Switzerland is at the top at the moment but recently, Ireland was very near the summit in the last, going back a few years ago, two or three years ago, it was in the top two or three, four places, right, really near the top and Britain was about ten places behind Ireland. Now for anyone who is familiar with the UK and Ireland, I don’t think there’s a big difference in development standards between these two neighbouring countries, indeed they’re very similar. And the reason for this big gap between British performance and Irish performance was because Ireland had a gross national income in the 70, 70,000 bracket and the UK was around 45,000 dollars a year and that was because lots of international firms have their headquarters in Ireland, or local regional headquarters, so Google, Apple and so on, and they were circulating a lot of capital through the Irish economy which was then pushing it up the league tables but that money wasn’t really feeding through to the people on the streets of Belfast, sorry not Belfast, Dublin or Cork so, was making, giving a false impression that it was a more affluent society than it really was and that was pushing it up the development tables, so that economic, economically influence indicator gave a false picture and it was a bullsh*t comparison between the UK and Ireland.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
So can you give any advice for travellers on how to spot a superficial comparison?
Dr Andrew Brooks
Well, I mean I think oftentimes it’s these kind of lists of Top 10 destinations.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Which I may or may not have read myself.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, and I think more likely than not, it’s probably someone in an office somewhere in London who is having to type that out and in a deadline to fill some content on a slow news day so, I think oftentimes those sort of rankings and ratings, which seem authoritative and quantitative, are based on very limited evidence so, yeah, use your own opinions rather than looking at these kind of travel lists.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Fair enough. Well one of the points I just wanted to ask you about was how environmental factors might play into how we compare places and the impact that that may have on sustainability going forwards.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, so the environment, it’s a long, it’s often the way in which people perceive or difference to be produced, so we have something called environmental determinism which is a very old-fashioned trope, quite colonial, not something we’d kind of teach nowadays in a Geography department but this will be the idea that somewhere is, I don’t know, too hot for it to be, well because it’s too much hard work or that it’s, it’s got too many mountains or that it’s got a bad coastline, these kind of environmentally deterministic factors sometimes used as kind of lazy, ignorant ways to explain an equality but where there’s lots of mountainous places, Switzerland at the top of the Development Index, which are rich, lots of hot countries which are very rich, lots of places without a coastline which are rich so, sometimes these geographical tropes are recycled as, as having explanatory power when they don’t.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
And I think you do give the example that a lot of places are compared to that western idea of what’s successful and that’s potentially quite unhelpful.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, so I think similar in the ways in which the male performance is often the standard of which other genders are measured against, I think the same can be said about the western world is seen as a model for other places to follow and we think about them as being a facsimile, a weaker photocopy, and I think that’s really a distorting picture of, of world history, we, we consider them to be less developed if they are less like us, which I think is a problematic lens.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
I wonder if you can give an example from your book of a common pitfall in comparisons that we may see in our day-to-day lives.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, so I think again, I would go back to the idea of, of metrics and it might be that which, this is a hypothetical example but if you were going in for a surgery, do you pick the surgeon with the, the 80% rate, success rate or the 20% success rate? Well, or the lawyer perhaps, the lawyer with the 80% success rate or 20% success rate? And it might be on, on first glance obviously, the one with the higher rate of performance we’re going to think is better but maybe there’s reasons that the one who’s, with the lower percentage takes on the tougher cases, the harder ones to prosecute, the harder ones that, the harder victories to win, so maybe there’s sometimes those circumstances, those relationships which are under, behind the comparison can be important to unpick and uncover.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
And I wondered what your view is on the impact of social media and AI on how people will use comparisons going forward.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Oh well comparisons are a real gift for social media. TikTok, Instagram, anything like that because they’re often quite visual. You can say, “Does this look… is this the same as that?” “Is that a picture of Kate Middleton or is it an imposter? Is it an actress?” “Is that Melania Trump is that an actor playing her role?” These sort of things are, like sometimes they’re diverting and fun but I think oftentimes then behind that, that can be, be very harmful to the, particularly for the mental health of the people involved, so I think social media is a way which any type of list or ranking or visual comparison is really attractive as a sort of TikTok story but yeah, maybe that’s fun in lunch hour but that’s not how you should be getting your news and understanding the world.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Also, we haven’t gone into the historical parts of your book. Do you think there’s any historical figures that may have influenced your thinking when writing this book?
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, I don’t, I think comparison, it’s kind of like this isn’t a, like a topic which everyone’s working on, this is not like, it’s not like wading through, it’s not like doing a piece of work on climate change or something like that but, yeah, there’s people like Rebecca Solnit whose work has really been important for me and as a geographer, Gillian Hart, who has shaped my, my understanding and definitely to think more about relational comparison, about those relationships, so those, so those are some of the thinkers who have influenced my work.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Did you have any difficulties that you had to overcome when writing this book and getting your research?
Dr Andrew Brooks
I think sometimes getting, trying to embrace the title was a little bit of a struggle for me and thinking about how that might be disengaging for some. And I think also just being, not being picking a kind of nihilistic approach to comparison, to embrace good comparison so, I do try to feature them and foreground those and it’s quite easy to be, with working on this sort of topic and this sort of argument to just be ultra critical of everything without kind of celebrating the good use of comparative tools.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
I wonder what the impact you think this book will have and who’s the book aimed at?
Dr Andrew Brooks
Well, I think it’s more geared towards those who want to kind of cut through some of this noise and kind of give themselves almost like a mental upgrade, it’s like a, like a new, it’s a new cognitive way of thinking, not in like a grand scale but a way to like recognise what, when they see a league table, when they see a metaphor, hear a metaphor being used, when they observe a model and to be able to like unpick and critique that, so I think it should give people some, some confidence to make those calls because I think a lot of what I’ve said, others have said beforehand but they haven’t drawn it together, they haven’t given it a structure, they haven’t given it authority and I’ve tried to make it amusing and accessible and in so doing, take people on a bit of a journey between comparisons and from the home all the way to the kind of the global sphere.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
But we can all be less I think lazy with our language. It’s easy to use a comparison to explain what we mean but actually, we haven’t through whether that’s, it’s appropriate to do so.
Dr Andrew Brooks
Yeah, and I don’t mean to be like sort of an angry man writing this as well because there’s lots of like comparisons which are well intentioned but don’t really work so, one might be the greenhouse effect, it kind of, it gets you thinking, “oh yeah, the world’s heating, it’s like a greenhouse, it’s getting hotter and hotter, the gases are trapped inside but it doesn’t really work as a model for global environmental change because a greenhouse, you can rapidly cool it if you open the windows or the door, a greenhouse has a nurturing effect, it helps infant plants grow and develop, whereas global environmental change, the climate crisis, isn’t just about heating, it’s about localised cooling, it’s about flooding, it’s about drought, it’s about more erratic patterns of weather and also, if we switched off carbon emissions tomorrow, if we went to net zero in 24 hours’ time, it would take twenty years, thirty years for the climate to stop warming, it’s not like opening the door in a greenhouse. So that kind of metaphor of a greenhouse, or maybe it’s a model, I’d probably say a metaphor, is, isn’t really good, isn’t really a good approach to understanding the climate but it’s something which is part of everyday language and it’s become embedded and I don’t blame the people who first came up with that, with that device because it helped explain a really difficult problem but now we’ve moved on and we’re so much more knowledgeable, both in the scientific community but also the wider public about the, the dangers of climate change, I think our language can evolve with it and we should then maybe stop using the phrase “greenhouse effect”.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Hopefully. I mean this is…
Dr Andrew Brooks
But it’s difficult for me to angry because I’d rather people used the wrong words and talk about that important topic.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Final question for you. Have you recently called someone out on a bullsh*t comparison in your personal life?
Dr Andrew Brooks
Well, what I was doing well, something I was doing quite recently was a lot of shortlisting of candidates for jobs and we had over a hundred candidates, I won’t go into the details but these candidates, many, many of them were appointable, I think the top thirty or forty met all the essential criteria but we had to hammer the list down to five outstanding candidates but in so doing, you start talking about them in really negative terms, the ones who don’t quite make the cut and then you’re kind of having this heated debate and discussion and then actually, you have to step back and think why am I being so mean about these people with excellent records who aren’t the top one, so in that instance, actually one of my colleagues called me out, knowing that I had written this book, for making bullsh*t comparisons so, even I’m guilty, or I’m certainly guilty of making these bullsh*t comparisons at times.
Natasha Holme, Associate
Mishcon de Reya
Well, that gives me faith that you know, you’re, you’re recognising your own bullsh*t comparison because you’re being called out on them and then hopefully, going forward once we’ve all read the book, we can call out each other on these comparisons and so it, I mean it’s, it was absolutely fascinating so I’m really privileged to have had the opportunity to read it and speak to you today and for those that are in Mishcon’s offices, we’ve got copies of the book in Africa House on the first floor, and for those who are not at Mishcon, you will be able to purchase it online from the 28th March. Perfect, well, thank you so much for coming in.