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
For certain kinds of questions, there are answers that are simple, elegant and wrong. Take the most famous example of the genre, the “bat and ball” question: if a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball...
In Goiânia, Brazil, a junk dealer acquires an old medical device from two scrap-metal scavengers. The device itself isn't useful, but it comes with precious lead which will fetch him good money. There's something else inside the device, too: a curious, crystal-like...
Not long ago, I heard a Tory grandee giving a speech in support of a political rookie. As the occasion demanded, he offered some advice. Life in politics would be hard, he warned, but success was possible: just look at Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster...
/p> Cautionary Conversation: Just before Christmas 1799, President George Washington was riding around his country estate, Mount Vernon, when it began to snow. When he arrived home, guests were waiting for him. Known for his punctuality, he hurried to entertain them -...
Why do women still tend to earn less than men? There is nobody better placed to answer that question than economic historian Claudia Goldin, the winner of the 2023 Nobel memorial prize in economics. Her answer tells us how to fight unfairness, but also how to create...
William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from. 900 years later, the BBC began its own Domesday project, sending school...
It’s the sheer variety of emails that bewilders. A forwarded review of a fried-chicken shop, suggesting it as a venue for a date. A heartfelt break-up letter, one that could have been written on paper in the 1960s. A note from Joe to his friend Brian suggesting a way...
One of the modern classics of economics is an article from 2006 with the self-explanatory title “Paying Not to Go to the Gym”, in which researchers Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied the behaviour of nearly 8,000 gym members and found it “difficult to...
My book for younger readers (to be honest, most adults also seem to prefer it) is The Truth Detective. Everything you need to think more clearly about statistics with the aid of everyone from Darth Vader to a pooping cow... Anyway: for a limited time only it's 99p on...