The astonishing life of Bill Phillips
This is the latest video from the recording of my my radio series, “Pop Up Economics“. (Alternative link to watch.)
Tim Harford
The Undercover Economist
Highlights
From the geeks who took over poker to the nuclear safety experts who want to prevent the next banking meltdown, these are my favourite long-form articles.
Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger, and Dr Strangelove
The full video of the latest episode of Pop Up Economics (free podcast here). Enjoy and please spread the world. (You can also watch here.)
How to support innovations that matter
That was the topic of the first episode of “Pop Up Economics“, and here’s the video!
How to nurture innovations that matter – Tim Harford live at Wired 2012
Here’s my talk at Wired late last year. It was a really fun event. Enjoy!
(Note, incidentally, that Matt Parker has now moved from cycling to rugby.)
“The Undercover Economist” – a free chapter
The second edition of The Undercover Economist was published last year in the UK, and recently as an eBook in the US.
The biggest change from the first edition was a new chapter about the financial crisis. Lots of people have written to ask whether they can get this chapter without buying the entire book again. That seems only reasonable, and you can now download it here. Enjoy.
Regrets? I’ve had a few
Can failure really be a spur to success? By Tim Harford and Emma Jacobs
First published in FT Magazine 4 June 2011
One June evening in the summer of 2002, the Shubert Theatre in Chicago played host to a new ballet/musical, Movin’ Out. The show was an unlikely collaboration between Twyla Tharp, a dynamic and challenging choreographer, and the songwriter Billy Joel. It was scheduled to open on Broadway that October, but the critics hated it, offering reviews varying from “stupefyingly clichéd and almost embarrassingly naive” to “pile-driving and ill-conceived”.
So enthusiastic was the criticism that the New York paper Newsday broke with tradition to reprint one of the choicer reviews, well in advance of the Broadway opening. It was left to Twyla Tharp, who had dreamed up the project and directed and choreographed it, to somehow fix the multi-million-dollar mess.
Tharp’s experience, as related in her book The Creative Habit, exemplifies the textbook response to failure: she took the criticism on board, made the necessary changes to her show, and opened on Broadway to glowing reviews. The show won two Tony awards, one for Tharp’s choreography.
The story of Movin’ Out is striking not just because it offers an inspiring narrative of adversity and triumph, but because this sort of transformation is unusual. The idea that one should bounce back from failures is an old one. King Robert the Bruce’s eventually successful war against the English is said to have been inspired by a persistent spider spinning a web in the cave where he was hiding. This was eight centuries ago, yet suddenly the idea seems fashionable – perhaps because there is a lot of failure to go round these days.
In the abstract, learning from your mistakes is an easy and uncontroversial idea. In practice, the whole, facile concept is shot through with difficulty. Who is to say that a mistake has been made? Are the lessons to be learnt really so obvious?
We approached public figures – entrepreneurs, artists, politicians and, of course, bankers – associated with spectacular setbacks of one form or another, asking them to explain what effect the failure had had on them. There were few takers, and one of the refusals – from the former chief executive of a failed bank – was particularly colourful. It seems that these redemptive stories of “learning from mistakes” are less inspiring from the wrong end of the steamroller. Continue →
The Art of Economic Complexity – New York Times Magazine
New York Times Magazine – 15 May 2011 – Graphic by CÉSAR A. HIDALGO and ALEX SIMOES
These diagrams are the early fruits of a new approach to the most important unsolved problem of the last century: how to make a rich country out of a poor one. Development economists have many theories about how the trick is done but few proven answers. A compelling solution would be useful closer to home, too: understanding the process of economic development would help us work out whether it matters that service jobs are replacing manufacturing ones or whether there is anything the government can and should do to stimulate new industries like biotechnology or green energy.
Strip away the mathematical language of economists, and conventional theories of economic growth are rather crude. Economies produce “stuff,” and if you want more stuff to come out of the process, put more stuff in (like human capital, say). Yet economies do not produce stuff so much as billions of distinct types of goods — perhaps 10 billion, according to Eric Beinhocker of the McKinsey Global Institute — ranging from size 34 dark stonewash bootcut jeans to beauty therapies involving avocado. The difference between China’s economy and that of the United States is not simply that China’s is smaller; it has a different structure entirely…
Continued on NYTimes.com
Three things you need to know about failure
It’s “Adapt: The Movie.” Well, almost.
“Adapt” is being published in the US this week, so here’s a sneak preview of some of the ideas.
