The Data Detective and How to Make the World Add Up

“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.

FAQ
Tim Harford

Books

The Next Fifty

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

Fifty Things

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

The Next Fifty Things

“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises – exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”

Bill Bryson

Fifty Things

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

Messy – How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-minded World

Messy

“It’s a very very good book, full of wise counterintuitions and clever insights.”

Brian Eno

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

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

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

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

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

The Undercover Economist

The Undercover Economist

“This book should be required reading for every elected official, business leader, and university student.”

Steven D. Levitt

Articles

What Rishi Sunak got wrong about maths

As a professional nerd, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been asked what I think of Rishi Sunak’s enthusiasm for maths. It’s hard to know quite what to say. I agree with much of what Sunak said in his speech last month singing the praises of numeracy. Yet...

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Why we shouldn’t hold referendums

Citizens of democracies can be ill-informed and inconsistent, and this often feels like a tragedy or even a crisis. Occasionally, however, one reads something so absurd that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Consider a recent survey conducted by the...

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The never-ending brilliance of board games

What is the point of games? For Lizzie Magie, the idiosyncratic genius who inspired Monopoly, the answer was clear: she thought games are educational. Klaus Teuber, the equally brilliant designer of the board game Catan, had a different view: he thought games are fun....

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Has 21st century policy gone medieval?

Criminal justice has always been a source of knotty problems. How to punish the guilty while sparing the innocent? Trial by ordeal was a neat solution: delegate the decision to God. In the Middle Ages, a suspect who insisted on their innocence might be asked to carry...

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