Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
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.
“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
“Tim Harford is our most likeable champion of reason and rigour… clear, clever and always highly readable.”
The Times, Books of the Year
“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises – exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”
Bill Bryson
“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
“It’s a very very good book, full of wise counterintuitions and clever insights.”
Brian Eno
“Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes the ‘dismal science’ seem like an awful lot of fun.”
Malcolm Gladwell
“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
“The very best letters from the ‘Dear Economist’ columns from 2003-2008 in one handy book-sized package.”
“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
“This book should be required reading for every elected official, business leader, and university student.”
Steven D. Levitt
Every Sunday, in 1937, people all across American tune in to a strange broadcast. The Zenith Foundation is attempting an ambitious parapsychology experiment to test whether telepathy is real. The results are extraordinary: listeners score far better than chance can...
A miscellany for your delectation. "Tomorrow, I will be going across channels with zero views, going into their chat, and pumping people up." But it might not end up quite how you expect... Amygdala, a short film by Joe Edmundson Foot and Stella Harford....
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/when-aliens-landed-in-wiltshire-halloween-season In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are...
Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”. Discipline means that sooner or later, uneconomic ideas fail. Pluralism means that many different ideas are attempted, the economy...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-mummys-curse-halloween-classic One hundred years ago, on 16th February 1923, the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutenkhamun was officially opened. Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian pharaohs is known to incur a...
There are some ideas so self-evidently bad that as you see the seeds being sown, it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from staging an intervention. So it was with Bad Girl Books, which earlier this year announced plans to open a short distance away from Oxford’s...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/when-muhammad-ali-met-henry-s-hammer Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was known as the “Louisville Loud-mouth”, as famous for his sharp taunts and poetic put-downs as he was for his skills in the...
In the genius’s playground that was Bell Labs in the 1950s, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built an outguessing machine. The machine’s task was simple: a human would choose one of two levers, left or right, and the machine would guess which lever...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/how-a-broken-arm-improved-my-french-with-david-epstein Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints. Was General Magic really...