Equitable estoppel, mutual restrictions and common resources

For reasons that we don’t need to explore*, I’ve found myself in my day job obliged to reinvestigate what I learned as a law student on the concept of estoppel. Not only is estoppel a quaint word but it’s a peculiar principle that arises in a number of different forms. It is another creation of equity, that odd and wonderful portion of the legal system that cares less about a strict interpretation of the law and rather (as the name implies) seeks to find what is the fair resolution in all the circumstances.

To simplify, estoppel enables someone who has acted to their detriment in reliance on another’s representation, or even just a course of dealing, to hold them to that representation (or to the representation that is implied by that course of dealing). The person making the representation is bound by the fact that the other has relied on their indicated intent, and will lose out if that intent isn’t delivered on. The key three elements of the doctrine of estoppel are representation, reliance and detriment.

A word that comes up often in equity case law is ‘unconscionable’ – someone is estopped from holding strictly to the letter of the law if their previous conduct would make that unconscionable. Instead, the court intervenes to ensure fairness. As law professor Alastair Hudson sets out in his guide to equity:

“estoppel is truly an example of equity at its purest, in that the court can do almost anything it wishes to prevent an unconscionable benefit being taken by the defendant or uncompensated detriment suffered by the claimant”

Again reflecting that heritage in equity, the courts have proven very open-minded in deciding on the appropriate remedy for such unconscionable behaviour. As Hudson explains: “the court’s intention is … to provide a remedy that prevents the claimant from suffering detriment”.

It is of course not quite as simple as this (the law, particularly equity, never is). “Estoppel in all its forms is based on a variety of underlying conceptions, varying from ‘honesty’ to ‘common sense’ to ‘common fairness’,” says Hudson. Indeed, Lord Sumption in a key recent Supreme Court case went even further, in saying that the “various doctrines of estoppel” offer a “safeguard against injustice”. Yet these broad words are not always fulfilled in practice: the English courts are clear that the various forms of estoppel – though they are sometimes referred to collectively, often as equitable estoppel – are separate and distinct, and not part of any great unified theory (courts elsewhere in the Commonwealth tradition have suggested otherwise). Though in his guide to equity and trusts, Hudson calls a chapter ‘Equitable estoppel’, he starts by pointing out the inaccuracy of the term, not least as some estoppels arise in common law, and not only in equity. In another of his books, he argues that the lack of clarity in defining and separating the different categories of estoppel is a necessary aspect of equity, leaving the courts free to reach the fair decision, and the fair remedy, according to the specific individual circumstances.

This peculiar artefact of fairness in the law is not only interesting in itself. Estoppel also helps illuminate some ongoing philosophical debates with regard to fairness more broadly. Indeed, the great fairness philosopher John Rawls talked about something that sounds very like estoppel within broad societal relations: “a person is [morally] required to do his part as defined by the rules of an institution when two conditions are met: first, the institution is just (or fair) … and second, one has voluntarily accepted the benefits of the arrangement or taken advantage of the opportunities it offers to further one’s interests”. In this, Rawls acknowledges his debt to earlier legal positivist philosopher Herbert (usually HLA) Hart, and especially Hart’s principle of mutual restriction. Rawls goes on: “The main idea is that when a number of persons engage in a mutually advantageous cooperative venture according to rules, and thus restrict their liberty in ways necessary to yield advantages for all, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission.”

In effect, Rawls argues, the whole rest of the societal group has acted to their own detriment, by themselves submitting to the social requirements, in reliance on the expectation that all who take the benefits of their shared endeavour should also submit. Free-riding on that goodwill and seeking to personally avoid the detriment is in many circumstances a breach of a representation given to society (not always explicitly, but perhaps by the course of dealing of enjoying the benefit) and ought to be remedied in some equitable fashion.

In a thorough and thoughtful article on free-riding, Australian philosopher (no, this is not an oxymoron) Garrett Cullity comes to talk about the unfairness of free-riders as being the act of objectionably granting themselves preferential treatment. Through his analysis, Cullity develops the thinking of Rawls and produces the following Principle of Fairness in relation to these kinds of challenges:

“If a person receives benefits from a scheme that satisfies the following conditions, it is unfair for her not to meet the requirements it makes of her in respect of her enjoyment of those benefits.

(i) The practice of participation in the scheme represents a net benefit for her.

(ii) It is not the case that practically everyone would be made worse off by the practice of participation in the recognition as obligatory of those further requirements that must in fairness be regarded as obligatory if the requirements in question are regarded as obligatory.

(iii) She is not raising a legitimate moral objection to the scheme.”

This begins to seem very like the way in which common resource problems are in practice effectively managed, according to the analysis of the great Elinor Ostrom, with mutual sharing of the burdens so that the benefits can also be shared, and often with scope to punish or ostracise those who seek to free-ride. And indeed, Cullity’s ‘recalcitrant fisherman’ example, with which he tests various versions of a possible rule against free-riding, seems very close to an explicit common resource problem and how it might be managed effectively.

In a later article further developing this thinking, Cullity directly references Ostrom. His articulation of general principles in this latter article is striking. I especially like one that is highly relevant to current considerations: “Relationships of trust involve an expressed commitment to reciprocal self-constraint for the sake of cooperation.” This has particular resonance given that, as I explain in my book, trust is the reciprocal of fairness. Cullity argues that failures of appropriate impartiality are at the core of all unacceptable unfair behaviour. He explains that any free-rider granting themselves preferential treatment by exempting themselves from contributing to a common good is exactly such a failure of appropriate impartiality.

Fairness in various forms – including the legal concepts of equity, philosophical approaches to fairness principles, and practical solutions to challenges of managing common resources – reach similar conclusions: there need to be mechanisms and controls over free-riding or reneging on a shared endeavour from which all participants benefit. People undertake a fair set of obligations through their participation in human societies; estoppel is just one way in which they are held to those obligations.

Fairly sharing the commons, sharing the future

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

* I don’t think I should inflict on readers a discussion of the current definition of a constructive obligation under IAS 37 accounting standard, nor proposals under consideration for building upon that definition

Understanding Equity and Trusts (7th ed), Alastair Hudson. Routledge, 2022

Rock Advertising v MWB Business Exchange Centres [2018] UKSC 24

Great Debates in Equity and Trusts, Alastair Hudson. Macmillan, 2014

A Theory of Justice, John Rawls. Harvard University Press, 1971

Are There Any Natural Rights? HLA Hart. Philosophical Review, 64, 1955

Moral Free Riding, Garrett Cullity. Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1995)

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Public Goods and Fairness, Garrett Cullity. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 1, March 2008

Fairness in Business and Investment, Paul Lee. Routledge, 2026

Introducing Fairness in Business and Investment

This is a version of my speech from the (very enjoyable) London launch event of my book, on October 29th 2026. A version, because as I spoke without notes so these aren’t the exact words that I actually said!

When I first worked in the City, I wasn’t actually working in the City. Before we moved to Portsoken Street, Hermes’ offices were just along from here, on the east side of Mansell Street, and the official bounds of the City ran straight down the middle of that street. It’s less stark now, but there are still streets in this area where you can see one one side of the street the steel, glass and concrete and the wealth of the City, and on this side the bricks and mortar and the poverty of Tower Hamlets, where we are now. I know of no better symbol of the unfairness of our world, and how it gets oddly fixed and ossified than that the arbitrary choices of the Romans in choosing the boundaries of their settlement 2000 years ago are still reflected in a divide between wealth and poverty today. And this place, and the organisation it hosts, Toynbee Hall, works with the poor of this poor borough, and they often use the language of fairness talk about themselves.

That’s why we’re here.

Why we are here, though, is of course this little book, Fairness in Business and Investment. We all feel unfairness viscerally, and it’s not just that we here are a self-selected bunch. Rather, fairness is core to the human condition, it’s been a foundation of our social success as a species, it has been shown to be hard-wired in our brains, and been demonstrated to be present in children of ages all the way down to 15 months. And the thesis of my book is that when we as business-people and investors fail to be fair, we are not just denying something core to our humanity, we are worse at business and investment. For being fair delivers better business and investment, and delivers more prosperity for the long-term.

The book is in 3 parts, introductory, then fairness in business and fairness in investment.

As part of the introduction, I look at how consistent fairness is across cultures around the world. The ultimatum game shows this. I give XX £20 that she must share as she chooses it with YY – and they will get to keep their chosen shares if YY accepts what she’s offered. Economists argue that XX should make a low offer, and YY accept any money that is offered, because it’s free money (at least for you!). But of course that’s not how it works. Almost everywhere in almost all conditions, the most frequent offer, the mode, is 50%; the mean is often a bit lower, but still usually in the low 40s%; and offers below around 20% or 25% are almost always rejected. Fairness is shown to be – almost – universal. There is a key exception to the fairness shown by the ultimatum game, which I’ll come back to later.

Also in the introductory section, I discuss fairness of process, including the crucial issue of the Rule of Law. And I discuss fairness of outcomes, including the question of meritocracy. We all so love fairness that we want to believe that we live in meritocracies, and we’re often willing to believe that those who are suffering somehow deserve their misfortune, even when we happen to know for sure that’s not really true, and even when we doubt the genuine existence of meritocracy. I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and someone asserted that ‘no one believes in meritocracy any more’, in the sense that no one believes that we do live in meritocracies any more. But sadly that’s not true. Exactly the wrong people believe in meritocracy: those who succeed tend to, they believe they merit their success, think it is based on their skill and hard work alone, and are willing to ignore advantages they had or the role of just plain luck. And if they fall into that myth of meritocracy trap, it turns them into the most awful people. They drive aggressively, cutting up other traffic. They cheat in tests. They literally steal sweets from children. Successful people really can be awful human beings in their personal lives; who knows how they might act in their working lives?

The core of the book is the section on fairness in business. Here I look at each of the main stakeholder relationships, as set out in s172 of the Companies Act – employees, customers, suppliers, communities and so on. For each of them I consider what fairness looks like in relation to that stakeholder, what the benefits of fairness are, and something about the current state of play (usually not as good as it could be). I use the s172 list because I think it’s a useful articulation, not because I want to be narrowly British in the analysis – in fact when I share that ‘enlightened shareholder value’ approach with directors as part of the training I do, directors from around the world recognise it as a clear articulation of their duties, what they think the job of boards is, and what they think companies are there to do. And I show that even in the supposedly narrowly shareholder-focused US, actually the law properly understood is much closer to that articulation of enlightened shareholder value.

Of the s172 stakeholders, there’s probably least evidence for fairness making a valuable difference in the case of the environment. I think that’s because that relationship isn’t mediated through humans, and so isn’t subject to the push and pull between people that is often the source of fairness. But even there I find evidence of the need to strike a fair balance. And I go all the way down the list of s172 stakeholders, including corporate governance and good business conduct, and fair dealing with shareholders. I cover dual class shares, and the accounting and reporting wonks among you will be particularly pleased to know that I cover true and fair, as well as fair, balanced and understandable and Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) in that section. It’s striking how central fairness is to the language we use when we talk about the corporate relationship with its investors.

But it’s odd that we use fairness rather less in our expectations of investors themselves. So, to move to the final section of the book, fairness in investment. This section is rather less evidence-based and rather more aspirational than the fairness in business section. And the reason for this is that there is simply much less experience of fairness operating in the investment world, on which such evidence might be founded. Someone here’s employer has just launched an advertising campaign based on their being the fair pension and investment provider. While normally I love to see fairness in marketing, seeing it being applied as a core differentiator in the investment world depresses me a little.

And it’s here also that the outlier in the ultimatum game comes in: when researchers merely briefly called it a ‘Wall Street game’ when introducing the rules, the outcomes were very different, with initial offers much less generous and much greater acceptance of lowball offers. We fundamentally believe and accept that Wall Street, that the investment world, is less fair than the real world.

And that’s ironic because the foundation of all investment is the concept of fiduciary duties, that we’re looking after other people’s money and therefore must care for their interests above all. People in investment proudly talk about themselves as fiduciaries, as they should. And here’s the thing: fiduciary duties arise from that branch of the legal system known as Equity, which as the name suggests seeks to deliver fair outcomes whatever a strict interpretation of the law might be. So it is odd that investment, which is based on fiduciary duty, and so founded in equity, is not actually expected to be fair.

Fairness proves a valuable way to illuminate other key challenges in the investment world too, including stewardship, systemic risk and short-termism. The final nugget I’ll share is on short-termism, which we measure in investment using discount rates – the amount by which future money is worth less than money in the present. With the scale of our long-term problems, we desperately need to be thinking more long-term and so have lower discount rates, valuing the future more. But there’s a finding that in conditions of inequality – which obviously we are currently in – people have higher discount rates, they discount the future more and focus more on the present. There’s some logic to it, as inequality increases the risk that we may not be around to enjoy the future, and we may not have the funds to enjoy it. But the researchers argue that it’s more a psychological outcome than a logical one, and given that they’ve shown other psychological effects on discount rates (not least that men become much more short-term while in the presence of an attractive woman) it’s hard to argue with them.

So not only does unfairness exacerbate many of our future problems, it also constrains our ability – or at least how we perceive our ability – to deal with them.

So, in short, fairness matters to us as humans, deeply, viscerally. We miss something fundamental if we close our minds to it in our business and investment lives. Businesses need strong stakeholder relationships, all of which are stronger if mediated through fairness. Investment ignores fairness at its peril, risking the strength of customer (fiduciary) relationships, bringing systemic risks and limiting the ability to address them, getting timeframes wrong and too short-term, not least because of excess discounting. Yet we are human, and we shouldn’t allow the Wall Street game to have different fundamental rules to the rest of our lives, or be fooled by success within what we hope are meritocracies but really aren’t.

Fairness matters, and we will succeed more in business and for our investment clients, if we believe that and act more vigorously on it.

I’m happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog, and indeed Fairness in Business and Investment, are purely personal endeavours.

Fairness as competitive differentiator

This advertising campaign crossed my desk last week, and it has been worrying away at me since.

Delighted as I normally am to see fairness used in marketing, it troubles me that the good people at People’s Pension should have reached the conclusion that fairness in investment and pensions provision is a competitive differentiator. One would hope and expect that it was a basic expectation.

People’s Pension was a client in a former life and I regard a number of its staff as friends. I’m sure they know what they’re doing, and that the campaign is based on sound research. It’s just that every pension provider should be putting its members’ (beneficiaries’) interests first, fairly. That’s what fiduciary duty requires, even if fairness isn’t always what the investment world delivers.

I’m happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Baring the necessities

I fight shy of defining fairness. There’s a broad range of options that fulfil fairness for human beings – and different individuals will reach different judgements as to whether a particular circumstance falls within that range. There’s somewhat more clarity about unfairness. That concept animates us all so viscerally that we can more readily agree that something is unfair, even though there is much human judgement in that too.

This human and emotional side of fairness and unfairness is exactly why it is more rewarding to explore than the definable and measurable concepts of equality and inequality.

Such is the strength of my sense that I shouldn’t seek to define fairness that throughout my forthcoming book I provide no easy answers. Instead, I talk about ways in which businesspeople and investors can develop their own approach to finding a fair landing ground. I believe that the push and pull between people is so key to finding what is fair in any particular circumstance that making assertions in the absence of its particular details is all but impossible. It’s not by chance that the legal approach of equity is entirely based on reaching a fair outcome, setting aside any detailed legal rules: equity – fairness – can’t be defined in advance, successive courts have found, but only decided by judges considering the facts of the individual case. The same is true of fairness outside the court context: it must be subject to judgement based on the particular circumstances.

So I found myself baulking a little at those sections of Will Snell’s highly accessible new book The Fair Necessities that assert “Fairness is definable”. Indeed, for Snell, the CEO of the wonderful Fairness Foundation, the definition of fairness is based on his eponymous ‘fair necessities’ (which he and the Fairness Foundation first launched on the world in 2021). They are, exactly as he sets them out in the book:

Fair essentials: Everyone should have their basic needs met, but we need to go further to enable people to play a constructive role in society.
Fair opportunities: Everyone should be able to thrive, without having to overcome unreasonable barriers to opportunity or earn a huge salary.
Fair rewards: Everyone’s hard work should be rewarded, in line with their contribution to our society as well as to our economy.
Fair exchange: Everyone should contribute to society by paying their fair share in tax, and in return should be supported by society when they need it.
Fair treatment: Everyone should be treated with equal respect and should be able to exercise equal influence on decisions made in their name.

These seem to me a good articulation of key pillars of fairness, and key elements of what fairness might look like if delivered in practice. But a definition? Maybe not so much.

So I personally welcome the book’s later comments that fairness inevitably means different things to different people, and particularly comments acknowledging that really the fair necessities offer a framework for understanding fairness, and operationalising it in society – rather than a definition as such. Certainly, it was as such a framework that Snell spoke about the fair necessities at the book launch I had the pleasure of attending last month.

And it is really in that operationalisation of fairness that Snell’s book comes into its own, in a powerful and valuable way. Even as someone who has chatted with Snell over a number of years and closely followed the Fairness Foundation’s thoughtful work, I found much that was new in the book’s later chapters, especially the last substantive one, ‘Dismantling the barriers to fairness’. In particular, Snell discusses how to win the social and political argument about the need for greater fairness, and particularly highlights the need for an engaging and emotional discussion of fairness, not a purely technocratic one. Only occasionally does he fall into the trap of implying that the fairness agenda is favoured by people of one specific political persuasion; elsewhere he rightly notes that the concept works across the political spectrum.

Only deploying such an engaging and emotional discussion of fairness will, in Snell’s words, change the political wind, and help society acknowledge the scale of the risk that our current unfairnesses represent. I suspect his quote from economist Angus Deaton (from his 2024 Rethinking my Economics comments) will stay with me for some time: “Efficiency is important, but we valorise it over other ends … When efficiency comes with upward redistribution – frequently though not inevitably – our recommendations have become little more than a license for plunder.”

I’ve niggled about a small aspect of the book (though the posited definition is the frame within which its title is first explained) but really I would, very simply, highly commend The Fair Necessities to all. It’s accessible and challenging, and like this blog it is based on the clear understanding that our world needs, and deserves, more fairness. Do read it, do enjoy, and do think about how we collectively can more effectively operationalise fairness.

Fairly sharing the commons, sharing the future

Interest rates are lurching upwards globally. In part, this is a good thing, a reversion to more normal times after money having been essentially free for too long – something that has been dangerously distorting. But rising interest rates have significant negative consequences for how we perceive the future. They mean we discount future money and value more too, making the future seem less important. Given that humans have in any case a tendency to be excessively short-term and favour the present, that’s unhelpful.

Research shows that rising interest rates also make sharing scarce resources harder.

There’s a strong band of thought that humans aren’t great at sharing. If they have shared access to resources – often called a resource held in common – they are likely to over-exploit it to the extent that becomes depleted and so of decreasing value over time. Often, it may simply be destroyed, and so unavailable to future generations.

This band of thought is usually called the tragedy of the commons, after a seminal 1968 article in Science. The naming of the concept arises from the shared commons to which all in a village had access for grazing animals, which were at risk of being overgrazed and damaged; there are other very real examples of the tragedy happening, perhaps the most renowned being the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery. Overexploitation can mean the common resource is lost to the future altogether. The usual asserted solutions to this challenge are either regulation or narrow private ownership of resources.

But commons need not be tragic. That was the conclusion of the first female economics Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom (referenced in my last blog). Ostrom won the award for demonstrating that it is entirely possible for human societies to develop approaches that avoid the tragedy of the commons – without needing to turn the commons over to private ownership or subject them to heavy regulation. Ostrom analyses cases of successful management of shared resources (ranging, among others, from irrigation in Spain and the Philippines to grazing in Switzerland and Japan, to fisheries off Nova Scotia and Indonesia) – what she calls common pool resource (CPR) problems. She shows that there are in fact multiple ways in which people have successfully addressed these problems and so shared the commons effectively over time.

Indeed, the evidence is that commons can be shared in such ways over extraordinary periods of time. The remarkable Dark Emu shows that Australia’s aboriginal peoples farmed the land and exploited other resources so lightly over centuries and perhaps millennia that arriving Europeans allowed themselves to believe that the entire land was tabula rasa and entirely untouched. There was of course a prejudiced and convenient colonial mindset that assisted this thinking, but the Aboriginal footprint on the land, and its exploitation of a range of shared commons, was so slight even after so long as to be deniable.

Ostrom sets out six variables she suggests make it most likely that a common pool resource problem can be addressed through the efforts of those involved in exploiting the shared resource (whom she calls the ‘appropriators’). The six variables are:

Most appropriators share a common judgment that they will be harmed if they do not adopt an alternative rule.
Most appropriators will be affected in similar ways by the proposed rule changes.
Most appropriators highly value the continuation activities from this CPR; in other words, they have low discount rates.
Appropriators face relatively low information, transformation, and enforcement costs.
Most appropriators share generalized norms of reciprocity and trust that can be used as initial social capital.
The group appropriating from the CPR is relatively small and stable.

Ostrom states that these variables are “weakly ordered” from most important to least, and she has significant doubts about whether the last matters at all, though others believe it is extremely important. As an aside, whatever weight is put on the various variables, when considering the list as a whole it isn’t hard to see why the world is so struggling with its current most severe common resource problem: overuse of the shared common of the atmosphere through excess carbon dioxide pollution.

The third of Ostrom’s variables is relevant when considering rising interest rates. In finance, the term discount rate is used synonymously for interest rate: it is the rate at which the future is discounted back to the present, i.e. the extent to which the present is preferred over the future. The synonymity with interest rates largely makes sense, though the extent to which interest rates are driven by narrow supply and demand considerations (in a current UK sense, the unwinding of the heavy investment in gilts by pension funds eager to manage the risk of apparent deficits as those pension schemes increasing sell out to insurers, which tend to invest in long-term assets other than gilts; and the overhang of Covid acquisitions of gilts still held by the Bank of England) rather than longer-term factors should be less relevant for discounting – so there may be a little distortion if we discount using the current interest rate without thinking.

One of the most striking things I found in my researches for my (shortly forthcoming) book was evidence that humans are more likely to place a steep discount on the future if they face conditions of inequality, as, of course, we all do at present. To the extent that this is based on logical reasoning, the future matters less to those who may not survive to reach it, and who may not have sufficient financial resources to enjoy it. However, the researchers suggest that this discounting of the future is much less of a logically reasoned approach and much more deeply embedded in human psychology. Since the same researchers have identified other ways in which the psychology around discount rates can be manipulated – perhaps most strikingly that men tend to discount the future more and rate the present more highly when in the presence of pretty women – I suspect we should accept their view that this impact of inequality on discounting isn’t a wholly logical phenomenon.

Its impact is real though: in conditions of inequality, people discount the future more. In a fairer world, the future matters more to all. As global interest rates rise and in our unequal world, we’ll need to lean still more heavily against the tendency to discount the future – our own and that of future generations. Future generations who need future commons to enjoy rely on us not to exploit them excessively in our present.

I’m happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin. Science, 162, 1968

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, Bruce Pascoe. Scribe, 2018

Carpe Diem: Adaptation and Devaluing the Future, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol 80, No. 1, March 2005

Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. Biology Letters 271(S4):177-179, 2004

Environment in the balance

As I was researching for my (now very shortly) forthcoming book, I found less evidence for the benefits of fairness in relation to one of the traditional stakeholders of business than the others. This was the environment. In part, this was because of the strength of that evidence almost universally across the other key stakeholders. But perhaps more significant is the fact that the business relationship with the environment is not mediated by people. There is something built into how we interact with other humans, an ongoing push and pull of interests and mutual expectations, that leads to an arrival at a degree of fairness. Where humans are less immediately involved, there’s less of a gravitational pull to fairness, more scope for unfairness.

This left me focusing more in the environmental chapter on the need to strike a fair balance (incidentally, the importance of fair balances spurred the choice of cover image for the book). Inevitably, I also discuss the challenge of externalities and the risks that businesses take when they depend on the persistence of those externalities – they can mask unprofitability when the ability to externalise costs is removed, as it usually is, sooner or later. I also discuss the so-called tragedy of the commons, whereby shared resources can be over-exploited and destroyed, and the remarkable work of Elinor Ostrom in identifying how readily communities can manage such common resources and preserve them into perpetuity. Ostrom’s work provides powerful insights helping support the delivery of intergenerational fairness.

It’s therefore been a pleasure for me to discover more recently that this idea of the need for environmental balance has support from a source I wasn’t aware of. That support comes from Islam. Indeed, for a number of Islamic scholars, the concept of balance is the religion’s key framing of the human interaction with the environment. Take the following, for example:

“Islam looks at the environment from the standpoint of balance. It envisions the environmental balance as a part of the universal ‘grand balance’. The Quran describes the notion of environmental balance in various terms like ‘adl’, ‘qadar’ and ‘mouzoon’.
“The term ‘adl’ literally means acting justly, rightly, or equitably. While explaining the meaning of ‘adl’, one interpreter of the Quran has observed that the universe has been created in balanced form.”

This scholar goes on to argue that this requirement for balance implies constraints on the demands humans can make in terms of both what they extract from the environment and what they discharge into it by way of pollution.

Others have gone further in this analysis, and used the concept of balance to develop a wholesale approach to environmental matters. Al-Mizan apparently also means balance, and is the name for an approach developed alongside more than 300 Islamic institutions and international partners. Making clear that this concept of balance is intimately associated in Islam with equity, fairness and justice, the Al-Mizan Covenant for the Earth was finalised in 2024 and sets out a fair and just approach to environmental matters.

Among other things, the Covenant asserts:

“The economic values of our faith are embodied in frugal moderation while taking joy in the sources of life for humankind and other living beings, respecting their inherent limits by forsaking wasteful excess for just, equitable sharing of their fruits, and forsaking exploitation of the Earth and its inhabitants for charity and cultivation.”

Given that the wealth of a number of Islamic nations arises from their role as fossil fuel producers, it is particularly notable that the Al-Mizan Covenant makes a call not just for a transition away from the burning of fossil fuels but for a wholesale phasing out of fossil fuel production. It does so while noting the need for a just transition for affected workers and communities. The Covenant also seeks sustainable and ethical farming practices, railing at the imbalances brought by monocultural industrial farming practices.

The Covenant’s commitment on the issue of indigenous people’s rights is particularly strong: “To remind leaders and decision makers that it is essential that people of all social and ethnic groups, traditional societies and indigenous people be consulted without discrimination, and that the weakest be held as strongest until their rights are fully secured, and the strongest held as weakest until they comply fully with the law.” The paper’s articulation of what is required by way of truly fair and empowered consultation of those who might otherwise be powerless is particularly striking.

The Covenant also argues strongly for enhanced education on environmental matters and for more community-led approaches to addressing environmental challenges. Again, this appears to be about empowering those whose power might otherwise be limited, and ensuring that there is a readier balance of power and influence in the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources.

While these ideas are clearly grounded in a specific religious perspective and culture, the lessons they teach are more general. Seeking to balance the interests of current generations with those to come, to balance the interests of the wealthy with the disempowered, seeking a balance in the level of exploitation of natural resources, are steps that are in our own interests as well as those less empowered or yet-to-be-born, they are fair. Ostrom, among others, shows clearly that we don’t need a faith-based approach to see that such a balance is fair to ourselves and others. However, we are sadly some distance from striking such a fair balance at present.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Fairness in Business and Investment, Paul Lee. Routledge, 2026

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Towards an Islamic Approach for Environmental Balance, Muhammed Ramzan Akhtar. Islamic Economic Studies, Vol 3 No 2, June 1996

Tafheem-ul-Quran [Towards Understanding the Quran], Syed Abu Al Ala Maududi

Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth. 2024

Contractual crowding out

There is good evidence that the level of detail in legal contracts may crowd out moral intentions in relation to the agreements that the contracts represent. And despite the evidence seen in my prior blog on the importance of fairness to the law (see Fairness piercing the veil, and filling gaps in the law), it seems that there are increasing moves to squeeze fairness out from legal considerations, at least in the US legal system. Unsurprisingly perhaps, that is only to the law’s detriment, and to society’s.

Pennsylvania law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan found that, generally, people are averse to breaching contracts, and typically believe that those in breach should make higher pay-outs than efficiency might indicate was necessary. Typically, contract law expects the wronged party to mitigate their loss – for example seeking an alternative provider of a contracted-for widget rather than just ceasing all production and blaming the delinquent supplier. But Wilkinson-Ryan finds that most people think that the delinquent supplier should be held accountable for more than this mitigated loss.

She also finds, however, that if a contract includes a liquidated damages clause, most people’s response to any contractual failure is less morally activated, and tends to accept that the damages built into the contract are appropriate. This particular consequence of the sense of fairness means that breach of contract becomes more acceptable: “it seems reasonable to conclude that subjects’ moral qualms deter efficient breach, but that the presence of a liquidated-damages clause in a contract reduces those qualms and, in turn, encourages breach”.

At its core, the finding is that: “it is not clear that breaching a contract with a liquidated-damages clause comes firmly within the category of breaking a promise”. Wilkinson-Ryan contrasts this attitude with that of a contractual breach that requires a lawsuit or the appointment of an authoritative body to assess what is the fair recompense for that breach. At such points, considerations of fairness and morality come into play; not so much if the contract has detailed an agreed level of damages.

A somewhat similar finding emerged from a sociological study considering trust in markets where contracts are complete or not complete. In this case, the quality of the relevant goods was variable. Where the contract enforced a level of quality, trust did not develop in supply relationships. However, in contrast, where the quality was not subject to contract, trust and fair treatment became vital parts of supply chain relations as the clear alternative provider of a degree of quality control. The development of such trusting and fair relationships had important and positive knock-on consequences: concern for one’s own reputation and considering others’ reputations, and a greater sense of commitment to trading partners. There are benefits from leaving space in contracts for fairness and trust to develop.

The long-term positives from such a commitment are shown in a second similar study, where again the quality of goods was either subject to contract or not capable of being contracted for. Where contracts were complete and included details on quality, trading relationships were less durable: 90% lasted less than 3 periods. In contrast, when trust and fair treatment were needed to fill the gaps in the contracts, trading relationships generally lasted much longer.

This consistent finding that deploying fairness rather than detailed legal agreements brings clear benefits makes the recent tendency in the US legal system to squeeze out fairness altogether still more concerning. In my forthcoming book, I highlight the way in which the US law in the areas of antitrust (rules against monopolist behaviours and other abuses of competitive position) and bankruptcy has been interpreted such that fairness no longer plays a part. Formerly, fairness featured heavily in the legal approach to both issues. The consequences of this shift aren’t great.

A key study considers recent changes to the US antitrust regime that have essentially meant it abandons considerations of fairness to consumers and focuses solely on narrow interpretations of the concept of economic efficiency. It argues that these changes mean that the law has failed “to control the nefarious consequences of unrestrained market power”.

With regard to bankruptcy, the key legal precedent was a Delaware Supreme Court decision in 2007, North American Catholic Educational Programming v Gheewalla. This essentially removed the previous prioritisation given to equitable treatment of creditors – an expectation of fairness – and required instead a strict contractual approach to be applied. Since that abandonment of fair treatment of creditors by failing companies, battles have ensued between different finance houses over their carcases (part of so-called ‘bankruptcy hardball’). Though the US Chapter 11 bankruptcy process in theory gives heavy weight to the post-bankruptcy survival and prosperity of the stricken business, often this battling between finance houses leaves little value within the business to give it any chance of later prosperity.

According to Harvard Law School professor Jared Ellias and Brown Rudnick lawyer Robert Stark, the consequences are profound:

“The slow moving trains of justice here have broader consequences than denying justice to one particular plaintiff or another. It emboldens the entire private equity industry to extract excessive dividends from portfolio firms, knowing that it might take more than a decade to litigate the fraudulent transfer action, by which time every employee currently at the private equity firm will be gone.”

Contracts are being written to crowd out fairness; the law (at least in the US) is often being understood to squeeze out fairness and lean instead on narrow contractual or economic readings. That isn’t good for the legal system, and it seems that it isn’t good for society either.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Michigan Law Review 108, 2010

The Emergence of Exchange Structures: An Experimental Study of Uncertainty, Commitment, and Trust, Peter Kollock. American Journal of Sociology, 100, No 2, 1994

Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions, Martin Brown, Armin Falk, Ernst Fehr. Econometrica 72, No 3, 2004

The antitrust F word: Fairness considerations in competition law, Sandra Marco Colino. Journal of Business Law, 2019

North American Catholic Educational Programming Foundation, Inc v Gheewalla, Delaware Supreme Court 930 A.2d 92 (Del. 2007)

Bankruptcy Hardball, Jared Ellias, Robert Stark. 108 California Law Review 745, 2020

Fairness piercing the veil, and filling gaps in the law

An extraordinary legal case was decided in the UK in April, and it has recently been determined that there can be no appeal from it. The court decision has led directly to the insolvency of a major property development group, and it illustrates the way in which fairness fills gaps in the law – indeed how fairness is a core element of how the law works.

The case is extraordinary because it deploys fairness effectively to overthrow a fundamental element of corporate law. The decision in effect enables the piercing of the corporate veil – the legal barrier that means the liabilities of a company stop at its doors and cannot be claimed from a parent, other group company, or shareholder. Limited liability, through this mechanism of the corporate veil, is generally regarded as a core element of capitalism, a protection of the shareholder providing capital, freeing them from the risk that they might lose more than their contribution to the company through their buying of shares. Because of this perceived centrality to the capitalist system, courts, and indeed legislators, are deeply wary of piercing the veil in the way this decision does.

However, there are certain policy aims that are so substantial that such effective veil piercing is seen as necessary. That is true of the policy underlying the law in the case in question, Crest Nicholson Regeneration v Ardmore Construction. It concerns Building Liability Orders, established under the Building Safety Act to ensure that appropriate contributions are made by those responsible for the remediation of buildings which since the terrible Grenfell Tower fire (see Power leads us astray: fairness lessons from Grenfell) are recognised as representing significant risks. Building Liability Orders (BLOs) allow the courts to extend the liability for remediation costs from the immediate company involved to associated companies where it is ‘just and equitable’ (what this blog would call fair) to do so.

Image from *KCTMO – Feeling the Heat!*, sadly prescient blog from Grenfell Action Group, March 14 2017

I deliberately say that this ‘in effect’ pierces the corporate veil, because it’s worth noting that there is some debate as to whether this is a full piercing, though to a non-specialist this may seem a debate on the head of a pin. As Christopher Veal of leading barristers’ chambers Pump Court explains:

“Whether this constitutes “piercing the corporate veil” in the traditional sense is contested: some courts and commentators treat BLOs as a distinct statutory remedy rather than classic veil-piercing, on the basis that the court is not disregarding the corporate structure but rather applying a legislative override. Others characterise the practical effect as functionally equivalent to piercing the veil. The distinction matters less in practice than the statutory test itself, which turns on whether it is just and equitable to extend liability.”

Even though there is this debate, the case makes clear that sometimes statute and policy considerations will take decisions to extend liability notwithstanding the perceived strong constraint of the corporate veil. This step was seen as particularly needed in the development sector, where there is a history of each individual development being built by a thinly capitalised subsidiary so as to protect the parent, and wider group, from exposures to any potential liability. The immediate subsidiary involved in the development, Ardmore Construction Ltd, had been put into administration on the day before the initial adjudication against it (the judge decided to accept the suggestion that this was coincidence), and the court also found that there had been a corporate restructuring with some intent to limit broader liability. The ruling means that this restructuring has failed: following the court’s decision to pierce the veil, the whole Ardmore Construction Group entered administration in mid-June, and other related companies have sought protection from creditors.

This application of fairness to close gaps in the law isn’t as infrequent as people might imagine. In many ways, it is a core element of the functioning of the common law, under which judges reach decisions that are not explicitly covered by legislation, applying broader judgement and higher principles to do so. Fairness is often one of those higher principles. Think about the famous 1930s case of the snail in the bottle of ginger beer, Donoghue v Stevenson. There would have been no need for the case to reach the House of Lords (then the UK’s highest court) if the drinker of the ginger beer in question had been its purchaser rather than her friend for whom she bought it. If the buyer had drunk it and suffered the consequences, contract law protections would have applied. In the absence of some form of contractual protection for the drinker, the House of Lords applied a more general duty of care to manufacturers and found that the Stevenson business could be seen to have negligently breached that duty of care. From this finding based in fairness has arisen the whole modern concept of the law of tort, whereby in certain constrained circumstances duties of care arise outside of contractual relationships.

In other situations, courts will imply fairness into contracts that on the face of it do not expect it. In her interesting book Fool Proof, law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan discusses the Massachusetts Supreme Court case Fortune v National Cash Register. Orville Fortune was employed at will and at a low salary, with his main pay opportunity through commission on sales – a portion paid at the point of sale and the rest on delivery and installation of the equipment. Fortune was sacked between landing a big sale and the point at which he would have received the second part of his commission from that sale. While on the face of the contract his employer could indeed do this, the courts implied a duty of good faith such that National Cash Regiester was not in fact permitted to exploit its worker in this way. Instead, it needed to treat Fortune fairly and allow him to take the fair benefit of the commission he had earned through his sale. The court stated bluntly:

“we are merely recognizing the general requirement in this Commonwealth that parties to contracts and commercial transactions must act in good faith toward one another. Good faith and fair dealing between parties are pervasive requirements in our law; it can be said fairly, that parties to contracts or commercial transactions are bound by this standard.”

Further, there is a whole section of the English legal system fully animated by fairness. It is not by chance that this is called ‘equity’, now formally combined with the rest of the legal system but with its origins in a mediaeval court system focused on delivering fairness. As Alastair Hudson states in the opening words of the seventh edition of his Understanding Equity & Trusts: “Equity is a means by which English law ensures fair outcomes in individual cases where the strict application of the common law or statute would otherwise generate injustice.” In practice, the concept of equity applies somewhat more narrowly than this assertion implies, but the intent is to identify the fair outcome when there is a lack of clarity in the common law or in statute. Equity lies at the heart of trust law, and so as I explore in my forthcoming book, the sense of fairness animates the fiduciary duties with which trustees are vested.

Hudson develops the thought further in his Great Debates in Equity and Trusts, recognising the need for the equity approach to soften the edge cases of common law and statute, so as to ensure that the legal system overall is “rounded”. He argues: “Clearly, there need to be rules … However, there will also be situations in which the ‘letter of the law’ will not necessarily produce an ideal response, or worse, a positively unfair response. There will be situations in which people need some flexibility in which to create new models which will work better for them personally or better in unanticipated situations. One future for the UK economy is likely to be in the creative field and in the new frontiers of technology. By definition, an innovative economy may need innovative legal models … to maximise its success. Therefore, non-rigid ways of thinking will be important.”

He concludes: “a legal system needs a synthesis of strict rules (of the sort typified by statute and by common law) and mechanisms for achieving fair outcomes when the strict rules will not achieve that”.

The extent to which fairness will require further substantive upendings of traditional legal understandings such as the Crest Nicholson Regeneration v Ardmore Construction piercing of the corporate veil remains to be seen. But it seems clear that fairness will continue to be needed to fill gaps in, and round off the edges of, the common law and legislation.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Crest Nicholson Regeneration v Ardmore Construction [2026] EWHC 789

Crest Nicholson v Ardmore [2026] EWHC 789 (TCC): A Landmark Decision on Building Liability Orders, Christopher Veal. Pump Court Chambers, 22 May 2026

Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562

Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes our Selves and the Social Order – and what we can do about it, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Harper Collins, 2023

Fortune v National Cash Register Co, 373 Mass 96 (1977)

Understanding Equity & Trusts, Alastair Hudson. Routledge, Seventh Edition 2022

Great Debates in Equity and Trusts, Alastair Hudson. Macmillan, 2014

Squid Game ‘fairness’ II

This blogpost follows Squid Game series (season) 3 and while it doesn’t contain specific spoilers it does assume some knowledge of the programme [readers may gather that I’ve been slow to catch its denouement]

Fairness lies at the core of the concept of Squid Game, Netflix’s dark Korean drama. The players induced to enter the game feel they have no options in a highly unequal society, and have often been cheated out of what little money they did have, in legal or illegal ways, or been caught cheating others and now have debts to repay. They take every risk in order to gain the chance of walking away with enough money to change their lives. In contrast, the so-called ‘VIPs’ are bored by the extent of their wealth and need fresh expensive thrills to stay even partially engaged and interested. Both groups have been dehumanised by unfairness – it’s not by chance that the VIPs wear golden animal masks. The sole individual not dehumanised is the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, who makes a particular point of insisting on his humanity as he departs from the scene.

However, as discussed in this blog’s original Squid Game ‘fairness’, the concept of fairness was considered only a little in the first series of Squid Game. Then, the organisers manipulated the idea of fairness as the basis to argue that it was right to punish those who had transgressed the rules of their own peculiar and dystopian world.

In the third series, the concept is deployed a little more overtly, particularly as part of a moving speech from the old lady, Jang Geum-ja (number 149) in the third episode, It’s not your fault. Jang deploys a cynicism about fairness that seems wholly appropriate to the cynicism of the programme overall:

“No matter how you look at it, life just is unfair. Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace. Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.”

The organisers also again deploy the sense of fairness as a tool to justify their actions. In this case, they use it in praise of their own – again, peculiar and dystopian – version of democracy. Early in the first episode, the announcer asserts while the players view the rebellious dead from the end of series 2: “You are witnessing the fate of those who refused the democratic process of voting and instead attempted to stop the game using violent means. We will not tolerate any irrational behaviour which attempts to destroy the fair rules of this game, and such actions will be punished in accordance with our strict standards. We thank you again for your cooperation.”

The irony of complaining about the use of violent means to subvert democracy shouldn’t be lost on viewers: after all, there is an openness to, even a welcoming of, bullying and violence as part of and following the regular public ballots that deliver that ‘democracy’ (there’s a key moment when the organisers surprise us all by barring further violence between the players, at least outside the arena itself). The labelling of individuals by how they have voted fosters this scope for bullying and violence further: the series as a whole reminds us of the importance of the secret ballot to the effectiveness of democracy, to each voter being free to express their own opinion without unfair interference. In the absence of secret ballots, Squid Game’s democracy is a sham. As highlighted in Democracy – playing fair, fairness, equality and freedom are all necessary elements for true democracy to work. It’s clear to the viewer that the ‘democracy’ in Squid Game isn’t truly fair, in spite of the announcer’s words.

Fairness matters, deeply, in Squid Game; just not in the ways that the organisers claim.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Being fair to oneself – and to others

We seem to be reminded on a regular basis that there are some individuals in our world who are largely immune from a sense of shame – indeed, any sense of embarrassment. Such people must be deeply painful to spend any time with, because this immunity must be a sign that they lack empathy and any ability to see themselves through others’ eyes.

Yet while occasional senses of shame and embarrassment are intensely human, and surely a positive, an ongoing and unshakeable feeling of shame can only be negative. This is termed ‘trait shame’ in a brief and thoughtful paper on Psyche from US clinical psychologists Michaela Swee and Susan Murray. Typically arising from bad experiences in formative years, sufferers feel that they do not deserve good things, that they are ‘bad’ or ‘broken’. Swee and Murray distinguish this from feelings of guilt because it is to do with the individual’s whole sense of themselves, not simply their feelings with regard to a specific act or behaviour.

The clinicians argue that the appropriate response to such shame is not to suppress it nor to avoid the feelings that arouse it, but to recognise and acknowledge it, and to be self-compassionate. In effect, they argue that we should learn to be fair to ourselves, acknowledge the feelings, recognise their underlying origins, and yet be honest about how unfair to ourselves that ongoing sense of shame is.

After all, such fairness should surely typify our response to those who are less fortunate than ourselves and who face negative life events. Very often, individuals’ decision-making is constrained by their circumstances and allows them to achieve only limited amounts or obliges them to take risks that may not come good. David Kinney, now an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Washington University in St Louis, has long studied causation and the limits to our understanding of it given real-world complexities. In another article for Psyche, Kinney considers these issues through the case of Kenny Chow, a New York immigrant from Myanmar, who in 2011 when made redundant after 20 years working for a jewellery firm chose to buy a taxi medallion for $750,000. Though for a short while this seemed like a good decision, the advent of ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft completely changed the economics of the taxi business. Chow started to struggle to make the repayments on his loan and eventually took his own life in 2018.

Kinney tries to make the mathematical case that we should be understanding in such situations. He argues that the complexity of decision-making ensures that it will be unknowable for most individuals to predict likely future scenarios and so assess whether they are making wise decisions. Having advised clients on scenario analysis when thinking about climate risk for investment portfolios, I well know that the best way of thinking about the process is not as an attempt to predict the future but rather to seek to gain insights into the range of possible outcomes so as to try to build resilience to the worst ones. As Kinney says, wisdom might lead to individuals not putting all their eggs in a single basket, limiting individual exposures as investment institutions and the wealthy certainly do – but such a mindset assumes that all have resources sufficient to spread their risks effectively. The ability to spread risks is itself a privilege not available to all. Kinney’s is a logical case, but it lacks the compassion that Swee and Murray might argue for, and that the cruelty of the Chow case probably invites.

Even setting aside compassion, in spite of the logic of Kinney’s case, many of us tend to assume that poor life choices lead individuals into these situations. Significant numbers of people – especially in the US – believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and poverty arises from a lack of effort. As we’ve seen previously, people in the US are particularly optimistic about the chances of people from the bottom quintile of wealth rising out of that during their lives. While those from other countries are more realistic (even pessimistic), the chances of rising from poverty are in most countries depressingly small – even though we love to hear those rare rags-to-riches tales.

Ironically, it is the central importance of fairness to who we are as humans that can lead us to lack compassion, to fail to be fair to ourselves and others. Just as the centrality of fairness to our human world-view leads us to believe in meritocracy in a largely misplaced way, so our view that the world is just means that we are prone to find post-hoc justifications for unfairness having happened to others. Psychologist Melvin Lerner called this the just-world hypothesis and found it makes people enter into intellectual contortions to make injustice make sense – to the extent of asserting that randomly chosen individuals from their own groups actually in some way deserved the mistreatment they received at the hands of experimenters. This sense was strongest for those that were unable to influence the mistreatment, suggesting that disempowerment plays a role in being willing to convince ourselves that iniquitous outcomes are in some way fair. That’s dangerous given how many people increasingly feel disempowered.

As law professor Tess Wilkinson-Ryan explains in her fascinating book Fool Proof, “There are enormous psychological consequences to believing that the world is unfair – it feels really destabilizing and depressing – and people will adapt their other beliefs to fit a story about a just universe. The feeling of living in a rigged or random system can feel terrifying and unsettling in a way that is worse than losing and feeling like you deserved to lose.” Lerner’s evidence is even stronger than Wilkinson-Ryan expresses it – the adaptions of beliefs are awakened not by the world as a whole proving unfair, but just that our world contains specific unfairnesses that we often cannot influence.

Unlike Stanley Kowalski (in Streetcar Named Desire), we don’t make our own luck. We are framed in the world around us, and not all options are available to all of us. Swee and Murray argue that we need to work to awaken our compassionate selves, so as to be more fair to ourselves. I’d argue we need to awaken our compassionate selves to be more fair to others too – and not be so fooled by our firm desires for a fair world that we think that all current outcomes must be the consequence of fairness.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

How to cope with shame, Michaela Swee, Susan Murray. Psyche, 2023

The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune, David Kinney. Psyche, 2021

Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead, Melvin Lerner, Dale Miller. Psychological Bulletin 85, No 5 (1978)

Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes our Selves and the Social Order – and what we can do about it, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan. Harper Collins, 2023