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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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 – 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…
Cautionary Tales – Buried by the Wall Street Crash (Classic) | Tim Harford
Two of the greatest economists who ever lived, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, thought they could predict the future and make a killing on the stock market. Both of them failed to see the Wall Street crash, the greatest financial disaster of the age – and arguably, of any age. Yet having made the same forecasting…
Elon Musk is wrong about GDP | Tim Harford
Of all the dubious claims uttered recently by Elon Musk, I have yet to see a more interesting one than his tweet asserting that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending. Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.” Whether or not…
How to cure ‘premature enumeration’ | Tim Harford
John von Neumann — the man who created game theory, advanced many branches of mathematics and physics, and did more than anyone to design the modern computer — was someone who attracted a certain amount of mythology. One story about von Neumann has a colleague setting him a fun puzzle. In this puzzle, two trains,…
The Tao of Bad Buildings | Tim Harford
The most interesting architecture story of recent months is neither Adrien Brody’s Oscar for playing an architect, nor Donald Trump’s executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. It was the revelation, late last year, that the first building to win the prestigious Stirling Prize is now scheduled to be demolished. The building, the University of…
Cautionary Tales – “I love being the person who doesn’t know anything” | Tim Harford
20 years ago, a book called Freakonomics became an instant bestseller and worldwide sensation. Tim Harford got his hands on the first copy that Steve Levitt ever signed... and promptly sold it on eBay. In this Cautionary Conversation, the pair are reunited to discuss the Freakonomics phenomenon, why Levitt left the hostile world of academia,…
Cautionary Tales – Derek Bentley Must Hang | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. An amateurish burglary in 1950s London ends in murder. One of the men involved is a 19-year-old named Derek Bentley. Bentley has the understanding of a child - and he wasn't the killer. But the British justice system seems determined…
Life lessons from Donald “Shoup Dogg” Shoup | Tim Harford
The death in February of an octogenarian named Donald Shoup did not make many headlines, but it did prompt a flood of admiring social media conversations among the “Shoupistas”, a small but fervent fan club of the man they called Shoup Dogg. Shoup was a tweed-wearing, extravagantly bearded economist. What had such a man done…
Cautionary Tales – The Old Man and the Wrecking Crew | Tim Harford
When Britain entered its first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, many found comfort in evoking the British wartime spirit. A timely hero emerged - Captain Tom Moore, a WWII veteran who walked up and down his garden to raise money for frontline nurses. But when the fundraising switched to a new charity, did anyone think to…
Cautionary Tales – Houdini: The phone call from the coffin (Part 3) | Tim Harford
Fearing for his life, Harry Houdini leaves secret codes with his loved ones that he promises to use in any post-mortem messaging. In 1926, Houdini's death shocks the world, but the news that follows is even more astounding. A report of the impossible: contact has been made. This is the final part in a three-part…
The selfish guide to decarbonising | Tim Harford
Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global…
Cautionary Tales – Houdini’s detective and her 1500 dead husbands (Part 2) | Tim Harford
Harry Houdini finds an ally in his fight against spiritualism, a brilliant detective called Rose Mackenberg, who'll do whatever it takes to expose a fake. Together, the two head to Washington to try and get lawmakers to criminalise mediums. The hearing that follows will be violent, sensational and leave Houdini fearing for his life. This is…
An alternative take on Trump’s favourite word | Tim Harford
Since nothing seems to be off the table when it comes to trade policy, I thought I might put forward a modest two-step trade policy reform to make America great again. Step one, levy a substantial tax on all exports, from aeroplanes to soyabeans. Such a tax will squeeze America’s most internationally competitive industries. That’s…
Cautionary Tales – Houdini: A message from the spirits (Part 1) | Tim Harford
Harry Houdini is remembered today for his legendary escapes and illusions, but he also had a lifelong obsession with the paranormal. After dabbling in fake seances himself, Houdini made it his mission to uncover fakes and expose mediums. This put him on a collision course with his spiritualist friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, and left him fearing for his life.…
What Elon can learn from the original Doge | Tim Harford
As a tourist, the only reasonable response to Venice’s all-consuming beauty is to gasp in admiration after rounding every corner. As an economist, another response occurs: once upon a time, this city must have been incredibly wealthy. From Bruges to Kyoto, being eclipsed after making it rich has long been a reliable way for cities…
Cautionary Tales – True Lies and Genuine Fakes | Tim Harford
This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. In 1998, an art gallery gets a mysterious phone call. The caller claims they have been fooled by a master forger and that many of their prized paintings are fakes. Or are they? This is the story of the life…
Cautionary Tales – Would You Trust a Gangster Nanny? | Tim Harford
Do we trust our fitness trackers too much? How do fraudsters gain our faith? Why do people trust podcasters? And would you trust a drug dealing nanny with a tambourine? Tim Harford is joined by trust expert Rachel Botsman to answer your questions. Rachel lectures in trust at Oxford University and her new audiobook How To Trust…
The case for ‘late bloomers’ | Tim Harford
Highbrow pleasure recently: the Royal Opera House, and Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa. The opera was first performed when the composer was 50, and it was followed by an outpouring of new music, better than anything he had managed in his supposed prime. My favourites include Sinfonietta and Glagolitic Mass, both composed shortly before his death at…