Keeping warm is sometimes expensive, but even a caveman can cope with the technical challenge: pull on an extra bearskin and throw another log on to the fire. Keeping cool is a trickier business. The eccentric Roman emperor Elagabalus sent his slaves into the...
“He’s a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world”
Malcolm Gladwell
The Sunday Times number One Business Bestseller
How to Make the World Add Up
Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Is Published in North America as
The Data Detective
Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
Best Selling Author
Tim Harford
Tim is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of “The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less”, the iTunes-topping series “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, and the new podcast “Cautionary Tales”. Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honours of 2019.
Books
The Truth Detective
“Tim Harford is peerless at making sense of a complicated world and our place within it. This is a book that all children should read”
Matthew Syed
How to Make the World Add Up
“Tim Harford is our most likeable champion of reason and rigour… clear, clever and always highly readable.”
The Times, Books of the Year
The Next Fifty Things
“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises – exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”
Bill Bryson
Fifty Things
“Packed with fascinating detail… Harford has an engagingly wry style and his book is a superb introduction to some of the most vital products of human ingenuity.”
The Sunday Times
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back
“Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes the ‘dismal science’ seem like an awful lot of fun.”
Malcolm Gladwell
Adapt
“In a world that craves certainty, Harford makes a compelling case for why we can’t have it. A brilliant and oddly empowering book.”
Dave Gorman
Dear Undercover Economist
“The very best letters from the ‘Dear Economist’ columns from 2003-2008 in one handy book-sized package.”
The Logic of Life
“As lively as it is smart, charming, penetrating, and wise. If you are at all interested in knowing much more than you do about how the world works, you couldn’t ask for a better guide than Harford.”
Stephen J. Dubner
Articles
Cautionary Tales Live – We Are Not Machines, with Sarah O’Connor
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/live-we-are-not-machines-with-sarah-oconnor When the Luddites smashed factory frames in a bid to defend their craft and livelihoods, the machines came out on top. Today, AI and automation threaten to wipe...
The UK is stuck in a rollercoaster queue
For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the wrong solution to the wrong problem. One of Labour’s key policy goals was to...
Cautionary Tales – Treacle Tears: The Boston Molasses Disaster
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/treacle-tears-the-boston-molasses-disaster The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First...
The surprising power of simple predictions
For an academic researcher who first trained as a philosopher, then as a psychologist, Robyn Dawes was a practical fellow. He would tell a story from his time working in a psychiatric ward in the late 1950s. “There was a client who had this delusion, and the delusion...
Cautionary Tales – The Thief, the Jewels, and the Dublin Castle Conspiracy
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-thief-the-jewels-and-the-dublin-castle-conspiracy In the early 1900s, Sir Arthur Vickers keeps the magnificent Irish Crown Jewels safe under lock and key at Dublin Castle. When the jewels disappear, the King...
A guide to ‘greedflation’
We heard a lot about “greedflation” in the post-pandemic years, when prices were increasing at a rate of 8 or 9 per cent a year. We hear a lot less about the subject now, when inflation rates are almost normal. In fact, a Google Trends search for “greedflation” shows...
Cautionary Tales – The Dunning Canoe-ger Effect
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-dunning-canoe-ger-effect When John Darwin walks into a shop in London, it causes an instant stir. After all, John Darwin has been dead for five years. He claims to have amnesia, but everyone - from the police...
Data: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
What is the value of high-quality, trustworthy official statistics? Given the number of things that statistical agencies measure, we might expect that they have attempted to put a number on this too. In fact, they have often been rather coy. A UN report, “Promoting,...











