Marginalia

Adapt reviewed in “Nature”

I promise I’m not going to publish every review of Adapt on this RSS feed but the review in Nature is beyond an author’s wildest dreams:

Harford’s case histories are well chosen and artfully told, making the book a delight to read. But its value is greater than that. Strand by strand, it weaves the stories into a philosophical web that is neat, fascinating and brilliant. Like the best popular science, it advances the subject as well as conveying it, drawing intriguing conclusions about how to run companies, armies and research labs… It would be hard to improve Harford’s outstanding book.

Gosh. Full review here for Nature subscribers. I’m off to open something fizzy…

Adapt in the New York Times

Adapt was published yesterday in the United States, and an unexpected side-effect was that for the first time, I got to be interviewed by a Pulitzer Prize winner, David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Q. You briefly tell a story about the chef Jamie Oliver. He persuaded schools in one part of London to change their lunch menus to reduce fat, sugar and salt and to increase the number of fruits and vegetables. When two economists studied the children later, they found less illness and somewhat better school performance. That’s incredible. How much confidence should we have that the change in the menus caused the health and academic changes?
Mr. Harford: What really grabbed my attention about this incident was not, “Healthy meals help kids concentrate in school” – it was, “Wow, it takes a campaign by a TV chef to find out something like this.”
The research was carefully done by serious economists, but we could have more confidence in their findings if the project to improve school meals had been designed as an experiment. It wasn’t; it was designed for a TV show. After it started, Tony Blair, the British prime minister at the time, was falling over himself to endorse it. Yet it was a simple idea that Blair’s government could have tested out years before.
One of the main ideas of the book is that the world is full of interesting ideas that might help solve some of our big problems, but nobody really knows which of these ideas will work and which will fail. So policy makers, corporate leaders and social campaigners need to be much more open to all sorts of formal and informal experiments. Jamie Oliver created an accidental experiment. It would be nice if we spent a bit more energy doing this deliberately.

The full interview is here.

What’s new in the second edition of The Undercover Economist?

When I was first writing “The Undercover Economist” – mostly in 2002, although the first edition emerged in the US in 2005 – I would never have dreamed that almost a decade later I would be able to publish a new edition. I have a great deal of good luck and about a million readers to thank for that, and I am counting my blessings.

Since I wrote the book, the world has changed and so have I. But has the new edition?

I have tried to preserve as much as possible of the original book rather than surrendering to hindsight bias, but I have tried to update as many of the statistics and examples as possible as seamlessly as I can. (Occasionally I have used footnotes to highlight changes between the first edition and the second – especially if the changes have either proved me right, or made me look silly.)

A more substantial change has been to replace chapter six – which was originally about the dot-com bubble – with a new chapter about the banking crisis that began in 2007. The dot-com bubble, alas, now seems fairly benign in comparison with the banking crisis, and it felt impossible to publish a second edition without trying to make sense of it all.

The second edition will be published in the UK in April. Little Brown are the publishers, and it should be available around the world except North America. I’m currently discussing a second edition for the US and Canada.

The biggest confusion in British politics

Johann Hari has an article on “the biggest lie in British politics“. I tweeted that he could have done a better job of clearing up confusion between the debt and the deficit, and then received a few requests for elaboration. So here goes.

Johann’s argument is that the government is frightening us with tales of incredibly high debt, whereas in fact the debt is not high. And furthermore, that accumulating debt is a good idea right now because that will stimulate the economy. (I think he states the cases for stimulus with a certainty that the evidence doesn’t support, but I won’t say he’s wrong. He may be right.)

I certainly agree that UK government debt isn’t especially high. I may have missed something, but most of the government claims I’ve seen focus not on cutting debt but on cutting the deficit. Certainly nobody is envisaging cutting the debt any time soon.

What’s the difference? The deficit is the amount of new debt accumulated in a year, or alternatively, the amount by which government spending exceeds taxes.  Johann didn’t mention the deficit in his piece. If he had I am sure he would have said that while UK government debt isn’t high, the deficit is high – extraordinarily high. So Johann is getting what he wants: a massive fiscal stimulus by a government spending far more than it takes in in taxes.

The government’s position is that the deficit is so high that it must be cut back quickly. Markets may not be worried by absolute levels of debt, which are low to middling, but will worry if it seems that the government is utterly incapable of controlling spending. Although the deficit (and stimulus) will continue for a while, it’s going to be phased out. In a few years there will be no deficit and no stimulus, and debt will no longer be increasing.  I certainly hope the recession will be long over by then.  I’m making no promises.

A sensible alternative view is that while the deficit (and stimulus) cannot continue indefinitely it can continue for a while, and that cuts should come later. A separate alternative view is that that if the deficit has to be reduced it should be reduced by higher taxes and tighter enforcement, not by spending cuts. I suspect Johann would support both. Fine.

Facebooked

I have finally succumbed and created a Facebook page. If the technology works out, it should contain selected tweets plus the articles published on this site – and more to the point, suggestions and contributions from everyone else.

If you’d like to take a look, the page is: http://www.facebook.com/timharford1

Dear Economist: an announcement

All good things must come to an end, and this is the last “Dear Economist” to be published in FT Magazine, after a more-than-decent run of over seven years. That’s the bad news.

However, there’s also good news.

First, I’ll now be writing “Outside Edge” roughly once a month. Here’s today’s offering on robo-trading. Here’s one from a couple of weeks back on match-fixing in cricket.

Second, “Dear Economist” shall not die. I shall be taking my place alongside Will Self in Men’s Health. (Neither Will nor I will be displaying a washboard stomach.) The column will be published every month with a couple of letters, and we’ll see how it goes. The first appearance will probably be in the January edition, and after a decent interval I shall post the columns on timharford.com. (There’s an RSS feed at http://timharford.com/feed/ and you can always keep up to date on Twitter.)

Third, I’ll be writing more features in the new-look FT Magazine. It’s out next week, and my first feature will be coming soon.

My Big Decision

Grant Thornton did a photo-shoot and audio interview with me a few months ago about “My Big Decision”. I told them I don’t believe in big decisions, but for all three die-hard Tim Harford fans out there, here’s the interview.

Buy my book or the hedgehog gets it

Here’s the hedgehog. Here’s the book. Thanks to NPR and Planet Money for inviting me on!

Research assistant: situation vacant

I am looking for a research assistant, or assistants. This could be a fun position for someone studying for a degree and the work would be flexible enough to accommodate that. The work would be freelance and would likely be a few hours a week on a flexible schedule. I’m based in London but the successful candidates need not be.

The job description is likely to evolve over time – the main aim is simply to take some workload off me, whether working on columns, speeches or my next book – but is likely to entail:

- Tracking down and summarising relevant research and statistics;

- Fact-checking, proofing or editing my articles and new book;

- Occasional work on slides.

The ideal candidate would have a strong grounding in economics, good writing skills and an attention to detail. Interest in the economics of innovation, climate change, development, conflict or banking would be an advantage, as would a knowledge of PowerPoint.

Please apply with CV and covering letter – contact details at the bottom of this webpage -  by 31 October 2009.

Dear Undercover Economist on Freakonomics

I have a guest post up on the Freakonomics blog, taking readers’ questions. Here’s a sample:

Q. If a reasonably intelligent young person today is looking to make as big a contribution to society as possible, is he or she better off making a small impact on something very large (like federal policy) or picking one particular problem and spending a lifetime attacking it (like curing a disease or improving public education in a country or even city)? — Matt

The answer, with several others, is here.