Here’s a holiday quiz question for you: what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? The answer is at the bottom of this column. Let’s try an easier question first. In Santa’s workshop, if it takes five elves five minutes to wrap five presents, how long...
By Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist
How to Make the World Add Up
Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Stephen Fry
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 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
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
In praise of the humble products all around us
Tom Kelley is a sensitive soul. Shortly after sending the manuscript of his first book, The Art of Innovation, to his publisher, he visited Kepler’s, his local bookshop in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. “I literally started to cry,” he confessed to a group of authors...
Gaming inspiration
I think we could all use some help in escaping to other worlds with our friends. I've taken the Christmas holiday as an opportunity to read some good gaming books, some of which were kindly placed in my stocking by Father Christmas... Without further ado, Return of...
My New Year’s resolution
I occasionally listen to the oddly-named but excellent "Art of Manliness" podcast, and a recent episode brought me up short. It was an interview with Gregg Krech, author of "Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese art of self-reflection". Krech suggested a practice...
Things (I think) I was wrong about this year
A few weeks ago, Toby Young, the editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: “New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that ~50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of <0.1%.” There...
Christmas in an alternate 2020
Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest...
A brief history of commercialising Christmas
There are those who will have you believe that Santa Claus wears red and white in honour of the colours of the Coca-Cola brand. This is nonsense. The great man was seen clad in red and white some years before Haddon Sundblom’s iconic 1930s advertisements. What’s more,...
Working from home: when the cracks start to show
One consequence of working from home is that mistakes are made. People miss messages; spinning plates fall to the ground; the falcon cannot hear the falconer; a New Yorker journalist broadcasts his genitals to everyone else on a Zoom call. Much has rightly been...
Would you send a Christmas card to a complete stranger?
People used to send more seasonal greetings cards in times gone by, but in December 1974, Phil and Joyce Kunz received a particularly bountiful crop. Some were simple offerings of “Happy Christmas” but others contained long letters. There was also a complaint from the...