Daily catch-up: Volkswagen and the psychology of cheating

Plus more Thatcher, modern liberalism and the loss aversion theory of the EU referendum

The VW diesel crisis – Alastair Campbell has officially declared it a crisis – is fascinating. What was the thought process of those who designed the software that would cheat the emissions tests? “Nobody will ever know”?

The New York Times had a good account of how the scam was uncovered. Damian Counsell said they would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, but the deception was so blatant it seems odd that anyone could have expected it not to be discovered.

Others have gleefully claimed that cheating is intrinsic to capitalism, which rather overlooks the history of tractor production targets under communism, but what is striking is how unusual such disastrous wrongdoing is. Which makes it harder to understand the thinking of the perpetrators. We don’t yet know. There presumably was an element of “everyone is doing it”, just as there was in the Libor scandal, but it is going to be quite a story when we find out.

• My King’s College, London, colleagues have published another interview on the Margaret Thatcher and No 10 website, this time with Cecil Parkinson. “She had very few weaknesses but she did have one – that she could seize on a point and flog it to death, if you weren’t careful. And it might be a minor point.”

• Rafael Behr has a very fine article about modern liberalism. He starts with Tim Farron’s party, but takes off into global politics and economics:

“The Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this week felt like the political equivalent of a convention for model railway enthusiasts. The policy debates were a fine technical replica of the issues facing a full-scale government, but none of it seemed relevant to the people elsewhere, heading to work on real trains.”

• Also worth catching up with Janan Ganesh on the EU referendum in Monday’s Financial Times:

“Here is a list, far from comprehensive, of things that will not decide the outcome of the referendum. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; the personalities who front the Leave and Remain campaigns; the financial resources of each side; the wording of the question; the purdah that forbids government officials from campaigning to stay in; the ground campaigns; the performance of the economy; the neutrality or otherwise of the Conservative party machine; and which side London’s coquettish mayor Boris Johnson ultimately decides to take. ...

“Leavers spend too much time worrying about technicalities and too little honing an argument that, in its present form, cannot withstand the human impulse to keep what we have. Britons were not likely to vote to leave the EU before the summer began. They are no more likely now.”

• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:

“In the UK we call them lifts but in the US they call them elevators, because we’re raised differently.”