There’s a horrible feature of modern life which is that on observing something being done people call for us to do it too. That’s not the way that either markets or experiments work. Markets, of course, being one of the ways that we conduct experiments. What is it that works among all the myriad things that can be tried?

Paris has turned its back on e-scooters – so will Britain soon follow?

Electric scooters were meant to be the clean, green commuting machines of the future – now, they’re the scourge of the city

It might be that electric scooters are the scourge of a city. It could be that the value they provide - that there is such value is proven by people using them - is greater than the scourge. Finding out the balance would indeed be interesting, that requires experiment and observation. At which point Paris is doing the experiment - we should therefore observe and see what the outcome is before committing ourselves either way.

Of course, e-scooters are a relatively trivial matter but this principle holds true for everything. That someone else is doing something is not an argument that we therefore should - it’s an argument for us to observe and then decide.

As, you know, happens in that most successful of all economic organisational methods, capitalist free marketry. The capitalists watch what succeeds then copy that, leaving the failures to die in the dust. Thereby we gain much more of the successful things and very much less of the failures. It’s an obviously useful principle.