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Cautionary Tales – Disaster Favours the Daring: Shipwreck at Honda Point | Tim Harford
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast/ https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/disaster-favours-the-daring-shipwreck-at-honda-point/ In 1923, legendary navigator Captain Dolly Hunter led a squadron of warships into America’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe. The mission was supposed to be a speed trial, a display of the squadron’s skill. But it ended in a maritime pile-up, with some destroyers stranded on rocks, others sinking fast, and deadly oil leaking…
Cautionary Tales – Paradise Poisoned: How Utopias Fall Apart | Tim Harford
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast/ https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/paradise-poisoned-how-utopias-fall-apart/ Dore and Friedrich make an unconventional couple, united by their contempt for shoes, root vegetables and, above all, society. In 1929 they leave Germany and begin anew on the deserted Galapagos island of Floreana. At first, it feels like a paradise, but soon cracks begin to show. Parasitic fleas, bombastic interlopers, and buried…
How a well-timed kind word can change everything | Tim Harford
Can a kind word change your life? I know from experience that it can. More than three decades ago, during the summer vacation at the end of my first year at university, I received a handwritten letter from my economics tutor, the effervescent and much-missed Peter Sinclair. I’d been planning all along to drop economics…
Cautionary Tales – “Genius Still Unrecognised”; The Worst Poet in the World | Tim Harford
William McGonagall's poems are something else. The jarring meter, the banal imagery, the awkward rhymes: they made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day. How does someone get that bad at poetry? Or have we been misunderstanding McGonagall all along? [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] Further reading and listening…
What Jimi Hendrix teaches us about Generative AI | Tim Harford
Johnny Echols, lead guitarist for the 1960s rock band Love, is a fount of stories. In a podcast interview with superstar producer Rick Rubin a few years ago, he talked about happy accidents in the recording studio, rivalries within the band, meeting The Beatles when they were still The Quarrymen and his friendship with The…
Cautionary Tales – “And it went click”: Dawn of the Working Dead | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. Robert Propst is more than an inventor: he is a visionary, an innovator dreaming up how to make the perfect office workstation. When he reveals his bold design for a creative, flexible 'cockpit of tomorrow', he comes into conflict…
Cautionary Tales – Office Hell: The demise of the playful workspace (Classic) | Tim Harford
In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They would sweep away corner offices and cubicles and replace them with zany open spaces, as well as innovative portable computers and phones. A brand new era of “hot-desking” had arrived. Problems quickly…
The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again | Tim Harford
Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for each cobra skin, thus encouraging a thriving cobra-farming industry. The cobra story is probably an urban myth — or a…
Cautionary Tales – Number Fever: How Pepsi Nearly Went Pop (Classic) | Tim Harford
Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap – promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might mean corporate bankruptcy. Businesses and customers alike are sometimes blinded by the big numbers in such PR stunts – but it’s usually the…
Whose job is safe from AI? | Tim Harford
As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? “I’ve sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,” the FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf recently confessed. That seemed right. There are some things the computers just can’t do. The next morning the FT published “The gardens…
Cautionary Tales – “Captain Kirk forgot to put the machine on stun” | Tim Harford
Lying on the cold metal table, Voyne Ray Cox knew the drill. This was his ninth round of cancer treatment - which is why he was certain that what happened next couldn't be right. He heard a sizzling sound and saw a blue flash. And then - agony. It was like someone had thrust a…
Notes on the resistant reader | Tim Harford
Smoking kills. A few people had suspected as much before the second world war, but it was not until 1950 that the scientific evidence began to accumulate that smokers were at dramatically higher risk of lung cancer than non-smokers. Other health risks of smoking would be identified over the years that followed. Pity the poor…
Cautionary Tales – Fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club (Update) | Tim Harford
Why did audience members fail to flee a deadly fire… despite being told to escape? Flames are spreading through a Cincinnati hotel. The staff know it, the fire department is coming, and the people in the packed cabaret bar have been told to evacuate… and yet people hesitate to move. Why don’t we react to…
The many tragedies of ending US aid | Tim Harford
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic. If Stalin ever said such a thing, he wasn’t the first — but the ghoulish claim has stuck to him because he is one of very few politicians with more than a million deaths on his conscience. The list of government actions that…
Taco, the trade that ate itself | Tim Harford
Does he always chicken out, or doesn’t he? Like all loyal listeners to the FT’s Unhedged podcast, I’ve been telling my friends about Rob Armstrong’s perfect new acronym: Taco — Trump Always Chickens Out. From this observation, the Taco trade logically follows: whenever President Trump announces something that causes markets to swoon, buy during the fainting…
Cautionary Tales – “I get in trouble when I say things like this”… Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried | Tim Harford
Acclaimed author Michael Lewis discusses his time with Sam Bankman-Fried and why he thinks both high finance and Effective Altruism shaped the 'Crypto King's' worldview, ultimately landing him in jail. Plus, we hear about the people fighting terrorism, cave-ins and brain-eating amoeba from Michael's new book Who Is Government?. Michael Lewis's book about Sam Bankman-Fried is Going…
Cautionary Tales – The Angels, The Stones, and The Dead | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. In the final days of the Sixties, The Rolling Stones join forces with other rock legends to plan a free concert at Altamont that will rival Woodstock.The "bad boys of rock" don't have the best relationship with the police, so…
Cautionary Tales – Grand Theft Automated: How To Save A Trillion Lives | Tim Harford
A radical thought experiment transforms the lives of a new breed of philanthropists, as they follow the logic of altruism to extraordinary lengths. The most famous convert to the Effective Altruism movement, Sam Bankman-Fried, is either a humanitarian hero, or a con artist at an astonishing scale, or most bafflingly, both. [Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher] Further reading The…
Why is modern commerce corrosive? | Tim Harford
You’re not imagining it. There is something shallow about modern life — a sense that traditional virtues, from craftsmanship to professionalism to loyalty, have somehow been hollowed out. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in the 21st century and believe that the world is a far better place in 2025 than it was in, say,…
Cautionary Tales – The Man Who Solved Kindness | Tim Harford
George Price is on a mission to prove that human kindness is real. He's seen the latest research suggesting any altruism is ultimately selfish and finds it deeply depressing. George decides to learn the mathematics he needs to prove that research wrong, and throws his career, and life, into the quest for complete kindness. [Apple]…
Can we ‘nudge’ our way to higher growth? | Tim Harford
Can we “nudge” our way to a higher rate of economic growth? In a recent speech, David Halpern argued that we should at least try. Halpern was the founder of the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) that was so enthusiastically championed by then UK prime minister David Cameron, so it is no surprise to find him…
Am I boring you? Good | Tim Harford
A good columnist is never unintentionally tedious, but this week’s effort is about obsolete telephone directories, binary counter overflow, and the alternating current waveform. The boredom is the point. Start with alternating current. As most of us once learnt and have since half-forgotten, mains electricity is supplied by an oscillating current whose direction changes rapidly.…
Cautionary Tales – The Shark That Ate Hollywood | Tim Harford
Steven Spielberg thought his career was finished. He was behind schedule, his actors were fighting, the crew were mutinous and worst of all, his shark was broken. It looked like Jaws was destined for failure, but the movie that came out defined the Hollywood blockbuster. In this special episode celebrating 50 years of Jaws, we take…
What does it take to stand up to tyranny? | Tim Harford
When the thugs arrive — the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan — who stands up to them? That’s a question raised by Rutger Bregman in his new book, Moral Ambition. Bregman, who is Dutch, was fascinated by the example of Nieuwlande, a tiny Dutch town whose residents concealed almost 100 Jews from the Nazi…
Cautionary Tales – Le Mans 55: The Deadliest Race | Tim Harford
The annual Le Mans 24 Hour race brings in hundreds of thousands of spectators to watch the giants of motor racing put their endurance to the ultimate test. Every year, technology improves and the cars get a little faster. In 1955, that push for ultimate speed results in a catastrophe that changes the sport forever. [Apple]…
Cautionary Tales – Liar, bigamist, brute: How Isaac Singer liberated women | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. The sewing machine was once thought to be an impossible invention. It was such a complicated contraption that it would take more than one inventor, with more than one good idea, to make it work. Each of these inventors,…
The zero-sum mindset is no mystery | Tim Harford
Twenty years ago, economics was cool. Thanks in part to the publication of Freakonomics, economists were regarded as dispensers of brilliant and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. Whether you were trying to catch terrorists or figure out which wine to serve with dinner, all you needed to do was ask an economist. It is striking…
Cautionary Tales – The Nazis, the Bomb, and the Woman that Science Forgot | Tim Harford
Lise Meitner has fought for her entire life to be seen as a scientist, slowly building a career as a nuclear physicist in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler rises to power, the small gains she's made are snatched away. As a Jewish woman, Lise has a critical decision to make: is her passion for science worth…
Beware Giffen-ish vibes in the money markets | Tim Harford
The quest for the elusive Giffen good has taken economists to the depths of the Irish potato famine, to the poorest parts of rural China and to the cages of lab rats at Texas A&M University. Now the Giffen good has been spotted at Disney theme parks. But what do Giffen goods really tell us…
Cautionary Tales – Panama Disaster 2 | Tim Harford
Sixteen years have passed since Ferdinand De Lesseps’ catastrophic failure in Panama, and the dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal company. Now, President Theodore Roosevelt has picked up the task. “No single great material work,” Roosevelt tells Congress, “is of such consequence to the American people.” The Americans have their work cut out. Enter…
Seven truths about trade | Tim Harford
Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every other country on the planet somehow constitutes an emergency, and enough U-turns to make a ballerina dizzy — it is easy to lose sight of a…
Cautionary Tales – Panama Disaster 1 | Tim Harford
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 it be? This…
The value of institutional memory | Tim Harford
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an easy day’s work. But what really had them stumped was a heavy iron chain on the canal bottom. After various attempts,…
Donald Trump vs Mr Market | Tim Harford
Who can predict what he will do next? Back in 1987, one of the world’s most celebrated experts opined: “Sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors . . . At other times he is depressed and can see nothing but trouble ahead.” It might…
How to do without the Donald | Tim Harford
Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.)…
Cautionary Tales – Lab Leak: Could Smallpox Come Back? | Tim Harford
In 1978 the world is on the brink of declaring victory over smallpox. No cases have been seen for months, and it looks like the end for a deadly, painful disease. When a photographer in Birmingham begins to feel ill, doctors are mystified: it looks like smallpox, but how could she have caught it? As they…
Cautionary Tales – Homo deceptus: Science’s Dirty Little Secret | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years, and countless scientific articles later, a man at the Natural History Museum gets a chance…
Cautionary Tales – “Dangerously near to absolute perfection” | Tim Harford
In 1900, two friends in the flourishing Arts and Crafts Movement in London share a vision: to print the ultimate edition of the Bible. Together they create The Doves Press, and its unique font, Doves. But in their quest to make something beautiful, the friends spiral towards an act of incredible ugliness. Further reading Marianne Tidcombe…
Predictions aren’t always about the future | Tim Harford
The Bodleian Library’s exhibition Oracles, Omens and Answers offers a rather different perspective on prognostication than the FT’s usual position. Instead of economists and political pollsters, the exhibition discusses predictions made using the stars, or children’s games, or, most strikingly, large Cameroonian spiders. That last one works like this. The spider is presented with a…