Over the last one year, most celebrity economists have sounded nothing less than the Grim Reaper. But Tim Harford, a columnist with the Financial Times and also best-selling author of The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life and now Dear Undercover Economist, is different.

On the sidelines of the TED India Conference at the beautiful, spanking new Infosys Technologies campus in Mysore on Wednesday, he told Vivek Kaul how to find that someone special in his life, how not to bother about his lost socks, how to leave the lavatory seat down … and other such problems of everyday life. “You are going through these everyday experiences, everyday things the same way as everybody else does, but you see it differently because you are economist,” Harford said of himself. Excerpts from the interaction:

I am looking for ‘the one’. Is she out there?
I will answer this question using my favourite piece of economics research, which is about speed dating. In a speed date, you have got maybe 20 men, 20 women, 20 tables, 20 candles, 20 large glasses of beer and 20 large glasses of wine, because everyone’s going to need a drink.

Each man meets a woman for three minutes. They talk to the women for three minutes, which, of course, is a mistake. They should be listening. But they talk. At the end of the date, they move on and they talk to other women. You get to meet everybody at a speed date. Now, a couple of economists — Michele Belot and Marco Franscesconi — have got hold of data on thousands and thousands of speed dates. And also questionnaires that people filled in about their height, weight, income, education etc. All information that we have never had in the past. And we found a lot of fun stuff. Women like tall, rich, well-educated men. Men like slim, educated women who do not smoke. These things were not surprises.

So what were?
One thing that is a surprise is that on a speed date, where all the guys are attractive or rich, you might think that a women might propose more dates because more people meet her standards. That isn’t what happens. What happens is that the woman immediately raises her standards, thinking, “Hey I never realised that the speed dating market was so great!” She raises her standards, and proposes very few dates. Conversely, a speed dating evening where all the guys are short, and they were all smokers, not educated, not rich, you might expect that the woman might not propose any date. But instead, the Bridget Jones part of the brain kicks in. She thinks, “I never realised that the dating market was so tough. I have got to propose some dates.” And so she lowers her standards.

I know that what I am saying sounds very sexist. But men acted exactly the same way. They raised or lowered their standards depending on the attractiveness of the pool in front.

So what does that mean for the question you have asked? It means that anybody can be ‘the one’, you just have to compare them with the right people. This is because we don’t have fixed standards, that there is this one person, who is the right person for us.

Basically, we are moving our standards up and down all the time depending on what is available.

By the way, if you are ever going on a speed date, make sure you take short, ugly friends with you. It’s going to increase your chances.

Traditionally women wait for a guy to propose or for that matter even ask her out on a date. Does that help?
I guess the interesting question is, does it make a difference? Is it to men’s advantage that they do the asking-out? But that is not obvious. On the one hand, men get to choose and the women just have to wait, but on the other men have to go through quite a few decisions. It turns out there is a highly mathematical model of the matching process.

Actually, it could be anything. It doesn’t have to be men and women, marrying … it could be doctors applying for training in hospitals or students applying to universities. So you would need an algorithm to generate who matches up with whom. At the same time, you have to decide who gets to go first. Does the university make its offers first and then sees which students accept? Does the training hospital make its offers first? Do the men make their offers first and see which women accept them? Or the other way around? Does it make a difference? It turns out that it does make a difference. And it is advantageous to be the people asking, and that’s proved with mathematics. My message to the women of this world is that they should throw off this tradition and get out there and start asking the guys first and that is the way they play the game to their advantage.

Should women fake orgasms?
This is the only example, I think, where the economist got it wrong. Normally, I defend economists. The economist was a guy called Hugo Mialon. He got interested in faking orgasms because he was originally interested in whether people would lie to the police or not when arrested. And he said, hang on, I have a model for lying and I could apply it to orgasms too. He had quantitative data from the 2,000 Orgasm Survey. I think that was a survey done in the year 2000, and not a survey of 2,000 orgasms, but I am not sure. And the main problem with his research is that he assumes there is nothing you can do to make an orgasm more likely. So, basically, you either have an orgasm or you don’t, and then you got to decide whether to fake. That’s crazy because the whole point is that your partner could try a bit harder. This is an important omission because it denies your partner the feedback he or she needs to improve. So my advice is that forget about faking orgasms, make sure that your partner doesn’t fake foreplay. And I have no idea whether you can publish that!

I just want to be happy. What is the way out?
There are a huge number of different pieces of research answering this question. Some of the research on this is done by Daniel Kahneman, who shared a Nobel Prize in economics — despite not being an economist —  and Alan Kruger, who is one of the deputy treasury secretaries in the US currently advising president (Barack) Obama. And their method of working out what makes people happy is not to ask them, “Are you happy?”, because there will be a lot of problems with that. Instead, they just say, “Just talk us through yesterday. What did you do? How did the day start? What was the first thing you did? How long did it take? Who were you with? And how did you feel on a scale of 1 to 10? What was your dominant emotion? Stressed, bored, tired, excited, in love, happy, relaxed?” They just work out how likely people are to be in a negative mental state for each activity. And how long people spend in a negative mental state.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. It tells us what people are doing that makes them miserable and happy. So a couple of things: Try to avoid commuting. We spend a lot of time commuting and we hate it. Try to spend time with other people. The company of any person makes you happier, unless it’s your boss. One piece of advice that might not be surprising is that people enjoy having sex, but they spend very little time doing it. We don’t know what happens when you have sex while you are commuting, or what happens when you have sex with your boss. One final thing, people don’t particularly enjoy shopping. And they don’t particularly enjoy looking after their children. But they do enjoy spending time with their parents. So, a lot of surprises.

I stopped wearing socks because I used to keep losing one part of the pair. Why do socks disappear?
Socks disappear. So forget the socks. The problem is when you lose a sock, you basically lose two socks, because they are matching pairs. We need to look at the Industrial Revolution here. One of the main advantages of the Industrial Revolution was something called interchangeable parts. So when a part of the machine breaks down you throw out the broken part, you slot in the new part and the machine starts working again. You don’t have to throw away the whole machine. So you need to apply the theory of interchangeable parts to your socks. And make sure all your socks are the same. So if you lose one sock, fine you lose one sock, but you haven’t got all this problem of matching odd socks. And when you lose a sock, you only lose one sock, and you don’t lose a pair of socks. So that is my advice. You need to just go out there and buy two dozen pairs of identical black socks. And look (points towards his identical black socks). In my suitcase, there are four more identical black socks. At home I have another twenty identical black socks. Every now on then I go and buy more socks from the same shop. I am frightened that one day they will stop making these socks. But, so far, so good.

A friend of mine is trying to have a child. Should she pray for a boy or girl?
Probably a boy. I have two girls and I am delighted that I have two girls. But there is this rather strange piece of research done by a couple of economists who discovered that married couples with girls were more likely to split up, unmarried couples with girls were less likely to get married, and single mothers with daughters were less likely to remarry. There seems to be something going on there. Are girls disrupting marriages? I think probably not. There is an interesting evolutionary explanation for why this might be, which is that we men are extremely fragile creatures. Women are more robust. So the idea is that men’s evolutionary success is very sensitive and a women’s is not. If that is true, when you have a boy, you need to do everything you can to protect him. You don’t want to split up the family. You don’t want to damage the family income, you got to stay together and make sure that this boy gets the best start in life. If you have a girl, she is going to be fine. And so you are happy to split up, if that’s what the couple wants. Very interesting. I don’t know if the explanation is true, but whatever the explanation is, the data is pretty compelling. But let me say, in case my wife ever reads this, I am very happy with my two girls. I didn’t want boys. So I just saw the research and thought: doesn’t apply to me.

My editor swears that my salary is in line with my performance. Is that an economic reality?
It is. But it’s quite rare. There is a very famous economic study of window fitters done by Edward Lazear, who was a very senior advisor to US president (George) Bush junior. What they found is that when they enforced performance pay, they massively increased productivity and reliability. They penalised people for making mistakes. What happened was, there was a ‘selection effect’ —- all the lazy workers resigned and the hardworking ones joined. There was also the ‘intentive effect’, where the hardworking workers worked even harder. It was very, very effective and quite influenced the idea of performance pay. But here is the trouble: It is very hard to measure performance. When your editor measures your performance, what is he going to measure? The number of words you type? With investment bankers, they appear to be about making profits, but then we realise that actually they were just picking nickels in front of the steamroller. And then they wipe out the whole bank. But they have already collected their bonuses. In many, many other cases, its hard to pay for performance. It is a good idea if you can do it. The trouble is, many people will admit that they don’t know how to measure performance, but they will still have performance pay. It makes no sense.

Should men leave the lavatory seat down as women demand?
There is a narrow technocratic answer and there is a big answer. The narrow answer is that you should leave it the way you have found it under most plausible assumptions. The reason is that the seat should be moved only when necessary —  just before someone uses the lavatory. If a man visits the lavatory twice in a row, the ‘status quo’ rule saves the cost of lowering the seat when leaving only to raise it when returning. That’s the narrow answer. This was addressed by male economist and a male mathematician. I think they got it wrong. You have to consider the bigger game. And the bigger game is: putting the lavatory seat down is a very easy way of showing that you are a thoughtful man, and the guys who don’t bother to put it down or wipe up, if I may say so, they are the guys who don’t think. I always put the lavatory seat down, and you know what? My wife thanks me for it, roughly twice a year. I think I am winning there, forget what the mathematics says.

Why is your latest book Dear Undercover Economist priced at £12.99 and not £13?
There are a couple of different theories. But they haven’t been properly tested, I think. One is that people misperceive it. They misperceive twelve pounds and ninetynine pennies as twelve pounds something, as being importantly less than thirteen pounds. So that’s the theory. We economists don’t actually believe this. The other explanation is that it forces shop assistants to make change. If it’s a thirteen-pound book and you pay thirteen pounds, the shop assistant can take thirteen pounds, doesn’t have to make any change, can give you the book, and where does the thirteen pound go? Into his pocket. And you shoplifted the book without knowing. As far as the owner is concerned, the book disappeared and nobody paid for it. Very few people hand over twelve pounds and ninety nine pennies. They give thirteen pounds. Then the shop assistant has to hand back a penny change. Then he has to open the till and ring up a transaction and that’s a very effective of the transaction to be rung up.

How do I get hold of the shortest queue in the supermarket?
What I suggest is that unless you have the time to really specialise in studying supermarket queues and trying to be smarter than someone else, just get into the queue and don’t worry. And, by the way, probably it won’t be the fastest one, because you have one queue on this side, one queue on that side, so two to one, you will have a queue next to you that is faster. But that’s life. Sometimes we economists have to take a Zen attitude and that’s one of those times.