Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation, a lot of people have taken to Twitter to declare that they are leaving Twitter. They will find it hard. This is not because Twitter is...
There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic. How did the creatures come to be added to the medieval...
You can’t always get what you want, a young man once sang. It’s a simple aphorism, but one worth remembering. Boris Johnson was widely — and rightly — mocked in 2016 for announcing that “our policy is having our cake and eating it”. That was a dishonest refusal to...
I'm not the only one to have hopped from Twitter over to Mastodon in the past few days, I know. But perhaps these three thoughts will be useful to others. First: it's not that hard! Come on in, the water's lovely! I've seen quite a lot of scary-seeming stuff about the...
For those switching over to Mastodon - or experimenting with doing so - I'm at @TimHarford@econtwitter.net. Feel free to give me a friendly wave and a follow! I'm not sure how much I'll be active there, to be honest. Let's see. As always the best way to keep up with...
In 1789, an octogenarian Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter containing the famous opinion that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Franklin was mistaken. Many taxes are easily and legally avoided by the simple expedient of not...
Do you have what it takes to be a Truth Detective? Did you know that a toy spaceship can teach you about why prices keep rising? Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money? And that even the greatest minds have been fooled by fake news and...
Thomas Midgley's inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn't set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer...
Liz Truss overlooked it. So did poor Kwasi Kwarteng. So did the Nobel Prize committee in awarding Ben Bernanke a share of the Nobel prize in economics last week. The “it” is an elegant and underrated academic paper that Bernanke published in 1983 titled...