Highlights

“”But that’s rational!” spluttered one venerable journalist, when I told him about this. Well, yes–it seems so, doesn’t it?”

An extract from my debate with Dan “Predictably Irrational” Ariely.  It’s the first debate to be hosted by Amazon’s “Omnivoracious” Blog - check it out.

Here’s a sample:

The book surveys shelf after shelf of the economics literature but in such skilful hands it does not feel like a dutiful trip to the library. Economists are often too beguiled by elegant theories, but Mr Harford wisely confines himself to ideas that have been carefully tested against real life. Only thorough research could discern that residents of high-rise buildings are more likely to be victims of crime, because stacked tenants make for poor monitors of the surrounding streets. Even the excellent chapter on game theory has a practical hero: the card player, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, who applied its lessons to win the poker world championship in 2000.
Mr Harford, who works at the Financial Times, is an amiable guide for the non-specialist reader, neither too lofty nor dumbed-down. The book’s tone is breezy, but his command of the subject is such that even a well-schooled economist will discover much that is new.

The whole thing is here; I’m collecting reviews here.

I have a new video section on the site; notable links include a serious talk at Google and a not-so-serious appearance on The Colbert Report. More reviews are coming in, too.

I have a piece up at Forbes in part inspired by chapter 8 of “The Logic of Life”. It asks why governments are so determined to back losers rather than winners in industrial policy:

There’s a more sinister logic behind the pattern of government favoritism. Namely, firms in emerging, competitive industries have virtually no incentive to lobby for government hand-outs, while firms in aging, shrinking industries have the most to gain.

Read the rest of this entry »

First published in Waterstones Book Quarterly

Life often seems to defy logic. When a prostitute agrees to unprotected sex, or a teenage criminal embarks on a burglary, or a heavy drinker downs another whiskey, we seem to be a million miles from rational behaviour. None of it makes any sense – or does it?
Using some remarkably clever techniques and imaginative perspectives, a bold new breed of economists is busily demonstrating that life makes more sense than anyone would have thought. Using every clue that comes to hand, from a laboratory brain scan to the hidden patterns in old maps, they are discovering that there is a surprisingly rational basis to the seemingly irrational world around us. Read the rest of this entry »

Feature story, FT Magazine, 26 January 2008

In 1737, John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire, stunned London’s scientific establishment by presenting an idiosyncratic solution to the most important and notorious technological problem of the 18th century. He was hoping to win a then-fabulous prize of £20,000 (about £5m today) for anyone who could devise a way for a ship’s navigator to determine its longitude and therefore its position at sea. Harrison’s approach was to build a clock that would keep Greenwich time faithfully; by comparing local time (measured using the position of the sun) with the time in London, the navigator would know how far east or west the ship had sailed. The theory was sound, but given the rolling of ships and changing temperature and humidity, the leading scientists of the day – including Sir Isaac Newton – reckoned that a sufficiently accurate clock would be impossible to build. Harrison proved otherwise.

The longitude prize, sponsored by the British government, was not unique. Prizes were also offered in France for a functional water turbine, and for a method of preserving food for Napoleon’s armies. The latter prize quickly inspired the tin can, more of a blessing than food snobs might acknowledge.

But such prizes then fell out of fashion. For commercial innovations, we now rely on patents to encourage and protect innovators. Basic research is funded not by prizes but by grants.

And yet two centuries after tinned fish hit the market, the way we look for solutions has come full circle. Governments, private foundations and even corporations are rediscovering the value of offering prizes for good ideas. Rather than paying for scientific and engineering effort as they have done for the past 200 years, idea-hungry patrons are returning to the 18th century, and paying for results. Read the rest of this entry »

The Times (London) has published two nice extracts from the Logic of Life, plus me reading from the book. Read the rest of this entry »