In 1726, during a long voyage from London to Philadelphia, a young printer hatched the idea of using a notebook to systematically chart his efforts to become a better man. He set out 13 virtues — including industry, justice, tranquillity and temperance — and his plan...
We have more data — and the tools to analyse and share them — than ever before. So why is the truth so hard to pin down? In January 2015, a few months before the British general election, a proud newspaper resigned itself to the view that little good could come from...
Modern life now forces us to do a multitude of things at once — but can we? Should we? Forget invisibility or flight: the superpower we all want is the ability to do several things at once. Unlike other superpowers, however, being able to multitask is now widely...
If Britain’s top economists were in charge, what policies would they implement? Tim Harford sets the challenge It’s often said that economists have too much influence on policy. A critic might say that politicians are dazzled by data-driven arguments and infatuated...
Billions of dollars are spent on experts who claim they can forecast what’s around the corner, in business, finance and economics. Most of them get it wrong. Now a groundbreaking study has unlocked the secret: it IS possible to predict the future – and a new breed of...
Five years ago, a team of researchers from Google announced a remarkable achievement in one of the world’s top scientific journals, Nature. Without needing the results of a single medical check-up, they were nevertheless able to track the spread of influenza across...
The past decade has been a triumph for behavioural economics, the fashionable cross-breed of psychology and economics. First there was the award in 2002 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to a psychologist, Daniel Kahneman – the man who did as much as anything...
While delivering his Nobel lecture in 2007, Al Gore declared: "Today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer." It's a powerful example of the way we tend to...