Tim Harford - Economy

Cautionary Tales – “Captain Kirk forgot to put the machine on stun.” | Tim Harford

This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. Lying on the cold metal table, Voyne Ray Cox knew the d

Cautionary Tales – Cleared For Take-Off? (Tenerife Air Disaster 1) | Tim Harford

“Evacuate the airport, we’ve planted bombs,” a terrorist tells the telephone operator at the airport in Gran Canaria, in 1977. By the end of that day, 583

What vaccine hesitancy teaches us about politics | Tim Harford

Robert F Kennedy Jr is a man best known for his years of tireless work undermining public confidence in vaccines, and repeating long-debunked claims about their

High growth doesn’t tell the story of the US economy | Tim Harford

Bill Clinton’s election strategist James Carville wanted his 1992 presidential campaign to focus on three simple messages. But one of them has transcended its

Cautionary Tales – Do NOT Pass Go! (Classic) | Tim Harford

Cautionary Tales returns with brand new episodes on January 10th. Lizzie J. Magie (played by Helena Bonham Carter) should be celebrated as the inventor

Why are governments so bad at problem solving? | Tim Harford

The democratic world is stuck in a self-destructive, self-reinforcing loop: unforced policy errors lead to desperate gambles both by politicians and voters, lea

Cautionary Tales – Demonising Dungeons and Dragons (Classic) | Tim Harford

When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm in 1979, one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the c

What can we learn from fraud and folly? | Tim Harford

The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, for work that “makes you laugh, then makes you think”, came and went this year, with a clutch of worthy winners. I must report,

The games I’ll be playing this Christmas | Tim Harford

There are at least two kinds of games, the religious scholar James Carse explained: “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played f

Cautionary Tales – Captain Coward and the Blame Game | Tim Harford

Off the coast of an Italian island, an enormous cruise ship - seventeen floors high, three soccer pitches long - is tilting noticeably to one side. The local ma

My epic, 40-year Dungeons & Dragons odyssey | Tim Harford

Editor’s note: This story is presented in a choose-your-own-path style. If you happen to have a D20 on hand, feel free to roll for your choices. In 1984,

‘Known unknowns’, or how to plug the gaps in public research | Tim Harford

In 1979, Archie Cochrane published an essay chastising (not for the first time) his fellow doctors. “It is surely a great criticism of our profession,” he w

Where to find me these days | Tim Harford

The simplest and most reliable way to see everything I create is here on this blog, via RSS or email. (I don't share your email or use it for any other purpose.

Cautionary Questions – RoboPod and the Perpetual Money Machine | Tim Harford

Thanks for your questions - fielded this time with the able assistance of Jacob Goldstein, the author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing.

How to give a good speech | Tim Harford

There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management

Beard taxes and other lessons for Rachel Reeves | Tim Harford

When Ernest Borgnine auditioned for the title role of Marty, he knew this could be his big break. Typecast as a bit-part thug, Borgnine was nearly 40, losing hi

If I want to get fitter, should I wear a fitness watch? | Tim Harford

We have a tendency to sleepwalk into adopting new technologies, and my new fitness-tracking watch is no exception. Ever the late adopter, I bought an entry-leve

Cautionary Tales – Darwin’s Grandpa and the Art of Sex Appeal | Tim Harford

Charles Darwin was stumped by peacocks. According to his theory of evolution, some creatures were better equipped to survive in their particular environment tha

Trick questions, first instincts, and the benefits of thinking twice | Tim Harford

A first impression suggests that there is nothing to be gained from reading Alex Bellos’s new book of puzzles, Think Twice (Puzzle me Twice in the US), except

Should everyone earn their pay rise? | Tim Harford

Mozart and Haydn were composing string quartets a quarter of a millennium ago, when the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Since then, the scale of the w

Cautionary Tales – Murder at Halloween: The Edinburgh Body Snatchers | Tim Harford

In 1827, Edinburgh, Scotland was a world centre for anatomical study, but there was a shortage of cadavers for medical students to dissect. Two men, William Bur

My biggest productivity mistake | Tim Harford

From time to time, my editor will suggest that I write a column about how to be more productive. It’s a sure way to trigger imposter syndrome because, whethe

How a mind-boggling device changed economic history | Tim Harford

Cautionary Tales – The Poet who Toppled the British Empire | Tim Harford

India, 1930. Sarojini Naidu is marching towards a British-controlled saltwork; behind her is a long column of protestors all dressed in white. The great ca

What we can and can’t say about what we do and don’t know | Tim Harford

Earlier in the summer, the Democratic party and its supporters faced a difficult decision: should they gently but firmly sideline President Joe Biden from the 2

Misinformed about misinformation | Tim Harford

After a spasm of concern about the role of misinformation in fuelling racist riots in England, don’t expect things to calm down: the US election is approachin

Cautionary Tales – Reason, Wrath and Rebellion on the High Seas | Tim Harford

Early morning, April 1789. Captain Bligh is abruptly dragged from his cabin. Wrists bound, bayonet pressed to his chest, he and a few loyal sailors are forced i

Cautionary Tales Live at the Bristol Festival of Economics | Tim Harford

Next Wednesday, 7pm at the Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building. We'll be recording an episode live on stage; it will be fun! Tickets available here - come along!

How to stay curious while avoiding distraction | Tim Harford

My wife doesn’t even bother to roll her eyes any more when I fail to complete the simplest of household tasks. “Did you get distracted?” she will ask, although she knows the answer. Thankfully, now I have cover, because if there is one person in the household more likely to stop halfway through putting on…

The real questions posed by counterfeit clobber | Tim Harford

Travel broadens the mind, especially if the destination is the cradle of the Renaissance. However, the Florentine masterpiece on display that caught the attention of Harford Jr was not Ghiberti’s bronze baptistery doors, nor Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, but some extraordinarily expensive accessories in the window of the Louis Vuitton store. Who would pay €2,000…

Cautionary Tales – Steel and Kindness: The Clash of the Skyscrapers | Tim Harford

Paul Starrett has just won a major building contract. If everything goes according to plan, this will be the tallest building in the world. But will everything go according to plan? This prestigious new project will have his biggest workforce yet. Everyone will need to pull together, but labour relations in the United States have been rough.…

Cautionary Tales – The Nice Guy, the Bully, and the Kiss | Tim Harford

Leo Durocher would stop at nothing to win. The baseball player-turned-manager was a skilled tactician and famously tough. But he also cheated, intimidated umpires and was violent; he was even known to beat up fans. Durocher was famous for coining the phrase "nice guys finish last" - but is that really true? Tim Harford and…

What geeks can learn from sport | Tim Harford

For those of us who love sport, the Euros followed by the Olympics have given us a vintage summer. For those of us who love geeking out over data, even more so — because sport, like life itself, is ever more quantified, a world in which metrics are thoroughly analysed in the hope of finding…

The strange, illusory rise in UK inequality | Tim Harford

It’s only natural that a Labour government would want to concern itself with inequality, not least because that’s what many voters want. According to the Resolution Foundation, the share of the public citing poverty and inequality as one of the most important issues facing the UK rose from 7 per cent in 2010 to 19…

Cautionary Tales – Tim’s Tolkien obsession and Amazon Prime’s “The Rings of Power” | Tim Harford

Tim Harford's life has been building up to this moment. In this Cautionary Conversation, he discusses the works of his favourite author J.R.R. Tolkien and the social science at play in Amazon Prime's series The Rings of Power. What do elves and whistleblowers have in common? How can evil hide in plain sight? And where…

Gamification: Like fun, but more hellish | Tim Harford

There are few more depressing scenes than the one painted by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in her book Addiction by Design. She describes slot-machine players in Las Vegas so absorbed in their gambling that, when one of them collapses after suffering a cardiac arrest at the slots, others neither notice nor make space for…

Cautionary Tales – The Human Guinea Pigs of of Camp Lazear | Tim Harford

Young doctor Jesse Lazear has deadly Yellow Fever. He thrashes around and convulses in his sick bed, and his vomit is black. He is just 34 when he dies. Curiously, mosquito expert Lazear was researching the disease when he became ill. Some historians think his infection wasn't an accident, and that he was secretly experimenting on…

AI has all the answers – even the wrong ones | Tim Harford

Can large language models solve logic puzzles? There’s one way to find out, which is to ask. That’s what Fernando Perez-Cruz and Hyun Song Shin recently did. (Perez-Cruz is an engineer; Shin is the head of research at the Bank for International Settlements as well as the man who, in the early 1990s, taught me…

Cautionary Tales – The Panama Canal Series | Tim Harford

Panama Disaster 1: Ferdinand De Lesseps, "the Great Frenchman", was convinced that he was the man to build the Panama Canal. No, he wasn't an engineer and no, he'd never actually been to Panama before. But he'd managed to dig the Suez Canal, and everyone had said that would be impossible too. How hard could…

Counting the cost of my ‘major keying error’ | Tim Harford

Receiving a demand for a parking fine is always annoying. Even more so when you know you paid for a ticket. But there it was, the letter from Euro Car Parks demanded payment, and they had photographs to prove it. It took 10 minutes for me to send evidence showing that at the time and…