Charles Darwin was stumped by peacocks. According to his theory of evolution, some creatures were better equipped to survive in their particular environment than others. It explained a lot - but it didn't explain the peacock's brightly coloured tail feathers, which...
“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
If I want to get fitter, should I wear a fitness watch?
We have a tendency to sleepwalk into adopting new technologies, and my new fitness-tracking watch is no exception. Ever the late adopter, I bought an entry-level model with a single aim: helping me pace myself on my Saturday morning Parkrun. But oh, the bells and the...
Trick questions, first instincts, and the benefits of thinking twice
A first impression suggests that there is nothing to be gained from reading Alex Bellos’s new book of puzzles, Think Twice (Puzzle me Twice in the US), except an hour or so of pleasant diversion. But as the book makes clear, first impressions can be misleading. ...
Cautionary Tales – Murder at Halloween: The Edinburgh Body Snatchers
In 1827, Edinburgh, Scotland was a world centre for anatomical study, but there was a shortage of cadavers for medical students to dissect. Two men, William Burke and William Hare, spotted a grim business opportunity. They began sourcing bodies - by any means...
Should everyone earn their pay rise?
Mozart and Haydn were composing string quartets a quarter of a millennium ago, when the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Since then, the scale of the world economy has increased at least a hundredfold and material living standards in western Europe have grown...
My biggest productivity mistake
From time to time, my editor will suggest that I write a column about how to be more productive. It’s a sure way to trigger imposter syndrome because, whether or not I appear productive from the outside, I certainly don’t feel productive on the inside. In fairness to...
Cautionary Tales – The Poet who Toppled the British Empire
India, 1930. Sarojini Naidu is marching towards a British-controlled saltwork; behind her is a long column of protestors all dressed in white. The great campaigner for India's Independence, Gandhi, is now in jail. In his place, he's chosen Naidu to lead this...
How a mind-boggling device changed economic history
At the London School of Economics, a few weeks before Christmas, in 1949, the Lionel Robbins seminar was about to begin. The prestigious event was at the razor’s edge of postwar economic thought: Robbins, a giant of economics, had made the LSE a rival to John Maynard...
What we can and can’t say about what we do and don’t know
Earlier in the summer, the Democratic party and its supporters faced a difficult decision: should they gently but firmly sideline President Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket? There were plenty of reasons to agonise over the decision: loyalty to Biden; the daunting...










