From script by Lou Cripps

Infrastructure schemes tend to suffer from optimism bias: assuming everything will work as planned.

Focusing on benefits and forgetting some costs is one reason infrastructure projects tend not to be as good as their business cases.

But there’s a parallel problem with risk and time.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.*

The UK TV programme Grand Designs comes to mind in relation to projects. It doesn’t seem to matter how many years the programme has been running, or the presumption that people who appear on it will have actually watched previous episodes.  

In ambitious projects for houses, there seems to be a McCloud Law at work. People will always plan to be in by Christmas, unless they are expecting a baby (in which case they want to be in just before it is born).

In the UK, that means they are probably rushing to weatherproof the house in November, so they can get to work on the interior.  And this in turn means they are invariably dependent on it not raining until the roof and windows are installed.

So the question is, is it likely to rain in the UK in November?

There is a technical corollary to this: that the glass for the windows will be delivered late, in any case.  Apparently all builders know this.

*Coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). McCloud after Grand Designs’ presenter Kevin McCloud.