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...

“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
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...
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....
Cautionary Tales – The Man Who Bet His House on a Pop Song (A Eurovision Tale)
You can gamble on horses or on the turn of a card - but Daniel Gould made a living betting on the outcome of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Daniel made a profit because he studied the voting history of the competition, as well as the cultural and geo-political...
Why is the field of economics still so elitist?
There is no shortage of white men in economics. That is clear enough from a glance down the very male, very white list of winners of the discipline’s Nobel memorial prize. There are a few exceptions: the black Caribbean-born scholar Sir Arthur Lewis won in 1979; the...
Does winning the lottery actually ruin your life?
At the start of the graphic novel Bloke’s Progress, our everyday hero Darren Bloke isn’t coping with the everyday stresses of life. He has a tedious job, a grinding commute, squalling children and too many bills to pay. Then he wins the lottery — and his troubles...
Cautionary Tales – The Dark Money Behind Mother’s Day
Anna Marie Jarvis wanted a national holiday to honor the dedication and sacrifice of America's mothers. She wasn't the first person to propose a Mother's Day - but her campaign caught the imagination of the people and the ears of the politicians. Congress officially...
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...
What Mystic Meg can teach economists about forecasting
Economist Ezra Solomon once quipped that “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”. I’m not sure if the astrologer “Mystic Meg” was ever respectable, but she was certainly much loved. “Britain’s most famous astrologer by a...