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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...