The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is now out – do please order! Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject...
Other Writing
Articles from the New York Times, Forbes, Wired and beyond – any piece that isn’t one of my columns.
A free chapter of The Data Detective audiobook
My book The Data Detective is out today in the US and Canada. (The same book is called How To Make The World Add Up elsewhere in the world.) To celebrate publication, Riverhead Books have teamed up with Pushkin Industries to release the final chapter of the audiobook...
My fantasy dinner party: Florence Nightingale and juggling unicyclists
I don’t believe in keeping my guests waiting to eat, so it all starts with a first course to more than take the edge off the appetite: chips from Frituur No 1 in the centre of Antwerp, fried twice in beef tallow, scalding hot but cooled with mayonnaise. The fries...
We will not understand Covid until we give up debating it
Confused by the contradictory claims about the dangers posed by coronavirus? Cut through the fog with this one weird trick: stop trying to win an argument. I realise that such advice does not sit easily with the way culture has been going in Britain in general of...
Can the pandemic help us fix our technology problem?
We have a technology problem. By that, I mean that we currently lack the technology to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. We don’t have a cheap, easy, self-administered test. We lack effective medicines. Above all, we...
Book(s) of the Week 20: The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy
Okay, this week I'm plugging my own brand new book, The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy. At least, a little bit. But I have some other books to tell you about too. One of the joys of writing this book was to be able to pick up two or three wonderful...
The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy – book and talk
"Endlessly insightful and full of surprises -- exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford." Bill Bryson I'm delighted to announce the launch of my new book, The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy. It's a sequel to the original in which I presented a...
Why we fail to prepare for disasters
You can’t say that nobody saw it coming. For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable. The Houston Chronicle reported that 250,000 people would be stranded if a major hurricane struck, with the low-lying city left 20ft underwater. New Orleans’s...
Remembering Peter Sinclair
Peter Sinclair died yesterday, after many days in hospital with covid-19. It's a heavy blow. Peter was an inspirational economics teacher and a wonderfully kind man. Peter inspired a generation of great economists and economics journalists, including Dave Ramdsen...