Airport Book Brain

How faddish ideas keep seducing.

If you’ve ever killed time in an airport bookshop, you’ll have noticed a curious imbalance. A few token classics cling on in one corner, but most of the space is given over to glossy paperbacks promising transformation: sharper habits, better decisions, faster success. They sit alongside the rom-coms and celebrity memoirs, quietly whispering that your next flight could also be the start of a new, more efficient version of yourself. They’re aimed at anyone who’s ever felt the itch for a shortcut — people building careers, running small businesses, juggling ambition with exhaustion, or simply wondering whether there might be a smarter way to play the game.

Half will be about personal development, the other half about business. They might channel a historical figure or an inspirational man of the moment. “Stop giving a damn and start WINNING!”, “The 6-7 rules to live by”, “Business Secrets of the Pharaohs“, that sort of thing. They come in and out of fashion, somewhere between snake oil and common sense repackaged as novel insight. Most of them take some glimmer of something useful and steelman it into being an essential life lesson. The successful ones make their authors a star.

Of course, they don’t work as promised. If they did, there wouldn’t be so many of them, or a cycle of trends as new ones cycle through. If someone condensed genuinely life-improving cheat codes into 350 pages, that one would win the commercial raise, and we’d all become as self-controlled, skinny and successful as we dreamed. They do, however, serve their real purpose – catching the attention and the spending money of the time-poor looking for inspiration.

They satiate a hunger for quick coherence. They offer an easy answer of portable frameworks and transferable lessons. Usually backed by at least some coherent social science, they give you a way to sound innovative, current, and effective. As such, their influence spreads beyond the departure lounge into the slide deck and the C-suite. Marginal gains, radical candour, or some other buzzword becomes the spirit of the age for 18 months or so, before something else supplants it.

What matters is not the books themselves, but the thinking they reward. They cultivate a taste for compression over depth, for transferable lessons over context, for confidence over uncertainty. They attract people who want the world to be legible in a handful of rules, who prefer inspiration to explanation, and who mistake momentum for understanding. Over time, this becomes a habit of mind: a way of approaching problems that privileges clarity and speed over patience and complexity. It becomes a sort of “Airport Book Brain”.

Increasingly, it is spreading to our politics, too. From social media bans to ultra-processed foods and vaguely defined “abundance”, catchy but half-formed ideas spread rapidly. It’s a consequence of how our political system discourages deep thinking and values novelty above substance, fetishising approaches that are simplistic and en vogue. It is an important trend to understand for those who want to influence policy and those who care about making our politicians better.

After all, many MPs and ministers aren’t too dissimilar from those middle managers browsing the shelves of Gatwick’s WHSmith. They are ambitious and time poor. They want to make a name for themselves by coming up with ideas that stand out, but often don’t have the time or skills to flesh them out fully. Again, this is not to say they are stupid, but instead that they are massive generalists, often bent into roles for which they have a limited background and little time to adapt.

They are also the result of processes that massively select towards optimism. If you spend much time in political parties, you see how the sceptics rarely get far. You are expected to throw yourself into hopeless campaigns, back policies that come down from on high, and pivot as they change. Enthusiasm is the most valuable thing for an aspiring MP to have. Stopping to check the footnotes wins you few friends. It’s like those episodes of The Apprentice, where everyone turns on the person who says, “Look, this is a stupid idea,” while throwing themselves wholeheartedly into what turns out to be a stupid idea.

Politicians looking for a shortcut buy into hype. If an idea is legible, reasonably presented, and gels with their priors, it tends to gain traction. It is the same instinct that drives the posting-policy pipeline. Visibility becomes more important than validation, and narrative coherence matters more than what lies behind. Politicians might kick the tyres of an idea to make sure it’s not totally absurd (though some don’t), but rarely engage with rigour. The result is a slew of faddy ideas that kick around Westminster, working their way into policy, and figures who are celebrated less for what they have demonstrably built or delivered than for how neatly they fit a compelling story. In both cases, legibility substitutes for depth, and brand travels faster than substance.

Take, for example, the now-much-maligned Michelle Mone. She was rapidly spirited through Westminster because she fitted the brief the Tories were looking for at the time. She was a woman who had risen from a humble background to running a successful business. Catnip for Cameron. Yet she was more PR than entrepreneur. She’d racked up TV appearances, yet her business had only a bit more turnover than a successful McDonald’s franchise, and none of the profit.

Mone fit a narrative, and no one bothered to check if it stood up. The story was mistaken for signal – brand over evidence, enthusiasm over rigour. The product of a political culture framed around a hunger for symbolic wins rather than getting things right. She was basically the embodiment of the ideas you see in an airport bookshop. Neatly packaged, over-hyped and ultimately unconvincing. The same sort of intellectual shortcuts apply to ideas themselves. Things that are snappy, concise and served with a slice of social proof gain ground.

Faced with uncertainty and limited time, people come to rely on heuristics that allow them to move at speed. Narrative and confidence serve as proxies for credibility and rigour. It is the idea that underpins much of the market for airport lounge self-help books. A person with the trappings of success should be able to impart it and have ideas that work.

Once an idea or figure acquires surface legitimacy — media attention, elite endorsement, internal circulation — it rapidly compounds, creating a feedback loop in which visibility itself becomes evidence. Dissent and ambiguity struggle to survive inside this loop, not because they are wrong, but because they slow the system down and complicate messaging. Over time, institutions trained to operate this way lose their capacity for genuine evaluation. They become adept at selecting what travels well, rather than what withstands scrutiny.

We see this time and again with government and the ideas that surround it. This week, it was reported that Wes Streeting was drawing on Jonathan Haidt for policy ideas on social media for under-16s. Now, Haidt isn’t a malevolent force and is a respected figure. Much of his work, especially his popular work, is built on overconfident, sweeping claims – conjecture, rather than proof. Within academia, many of his conclusions remain actively debated. In politics, however, those caveats tend to evaporate. What travels is not the uncertainty, the methodological disagreement, or the limits of the data, but the clarity of the headline claim and the moral urgency of the diagnosis. A compressed version enters the body politic and spreads as a certainty.

Elsewhere, we see the “start-up culture“ trope repeated time and time again. It is a classic import from the business jargon of the 2010s, when it became a byword for rapid success, and something everyone with a PowerPoint deck wanted to associate themselves with. Stripped of context, it promised speed, disruption, flat hierarchies and a bias toward action — a flattering self-image for organisations impatient with their own constraints. Transposed into the state, however, the metaphor quickly collapses.

Governments do not get to pivot their legal obligations, abandon unprofitable citizens, or fail fast without consequence. They operate through accumulated institutions, political consent, and irreversible commitments. Yet the language persists precisely because it is legible, optimistic and morally energising. It offers the intoxicating sense that structural problems can be solved by attitude and tempo alone, rather than by the slow, unglamorous work of institutional reform. The same is now happening with AI, often invoked by ambitious politicians who barely have an idea how any of it works. It’s Airport Book Brain through and through.

These ideas thrive because they flatter. They offer certainty and speed, with the conceit that you are the free thinker who has gone outside the norms. That’s never true. You’ve just gone to WHSmith and picked up some bullshit and carried it into a culture where doubt is discriminated against – whether you are a flashy junior exec or an up-and-coming junior minister trying to make your name without doing the intellectual long yards.

The danger is not merely that bad ideas occasionally slip through. It is that the system gradually loses the capacity to recognise what a good idea even looks like. When legibility becomes the primary filter, anything that resists compression — institutional reform, behavioural change, long-run capacity building — begins to feel faintly suspect, even dull. Serious policy problems start to appear insoluble not because they are intrinsically so, but because the political imagination has been trained to look only for solutions that arrive neatly packaged and rhetorically complete.

Airport Book Brain is therefore not just a problem of political leadership, but of intellectual self-discipline. It asks whether we are willing to tolerate slower progress, weaker slogans, and messier arguments in exchange for decisions grounded in reality. Most political environments quietly answer no. They prefer the comfort of coherence to the discomfort of uncertainty. And until that preference shifts, the temptation to govern by fashionable ideas rather than hard judgment will remain not a bug of the system, but its defining feature.

And now for something else…

My picks from around the web this week:

ICE is forcing a reckoning among America’s religious leaders

State-church interactions are always interesting, and especially so in modern America. This piece looks at how churches and other institutions are responding to immigration crackdowns in the US. Many serve migrant-heavy congregations; others are motivated by a broader sense of morality; and others, of course, have more conservative instincts they are trying to balance. This piece explores some of the issues at play, and predicts that religious opposition to Trump is likely to grow.

Europe Has More Military Leverage Than Trump Realizes

An interesting response to the discussions about NATO, Greenland and Europe. It points to the huge advantage America enjoys by having so many bases on the continent. Yes, these underpin European security, but they also benefit the United States. Turfing them out would be an extreme option - but perhaps one is no longer unthinkable.

Liberalism Did Not Fail, Conservatism Did

An interesting and challenging piece arguing it is not liberalism, but conservatism that has fallen. It suggests that the centre-right, which has largely been absorbed or displaced by far-right movements around the world, has been the real victim of recent politics.. In the United States, anti-Trump Republicans are now a small faction within the Democratic coalition; in France, the traditional right has been eclipsed by the National Rally; in the UK, the Conservative Party is weakened and ideologically adrift. The result is a bipolar politics - with liberalism on one side and the far right on the other.

Power Failure: A new theory of power

An antidote to my main article this week. Someone has done some serious thinking about the British state. Drawing from interviews with senior decision-makers, it rethinks how power operates in the British state: where it lies, how this undermines effective government, and what needs to change to make it work for the public.