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...
Other Writing
Articles from the New York Times, Forbes, Wired and beyond – any piece that isn’t one of my columns.
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...
How not to lose your mind in the Covid-19 age
here are as many responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as there are people to respond. Some have of us have children to home-school. Some of us have elderly relatives to worry about; some of us are the elderly relatives in question. Some of us have never been busier;...
Book of the week 11: Uncharted by Margaret Heffernan
“The sagacious businessman is constantly forecasting,” said the great economist Irving Fisher, a man thoroughly convinced of the power of data to make the future legible. Fisher transformed economics and made millions as an entrepreneur, but died in penury. He is now...
The changing face of economics
Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate economist, says he had long been “bothered” by the fact that most people — even educated people — “had no clear idea of what economics is, and what economists do”. Solow was born in Brooklyn in 1924, to what he has described as a...
Extreme Economies – disaster zones with lessons for us all
In the 17th century, a boy named Hugh Montgomery fell from his horse and lost part of his rib cage; doctors replaced it with a metal plate and he survived — with a living heart that could be inspected by the pioneering doctor William Harvey. Phineas Gage survived a...
Why we fall for cons
There may be times and places where it’s a good idea to talk back to a military officer — but Germany in 1906 wasn’t one of them. So the young corporal didn’t. The corporal — let’s call him Muller — had been leading his squad of four privates down Sylterstrasse in...