My recent "lunch with the FT" with Richard Thaler (Nobel laureate, author of Nudge and Misbehaving) was a lot of fun. I don't do these formal sit-down interviews often but over the years I've racked up a few. At the end of the lunch I mentioned to Thaler the other...
The Anthologist doesn’t serve cashew nuts, so I order a bowl of smoked almonds instead. When they arrive, caramelised and brown as barbecue sauce, I ask for them to be put right in front of Richard Thaler. He protests that the waiter isn’t in on the joke. The readers...
The year 2011 was a big one for me. My son was born. We moved to a new city. I published a book. But something else happened that was in some ways more significant: on February 9 2011, I bought my first smartphone. It didn’t feel like a milestone in my life at the...
J F C Fuller did not invent the tank. That distinction should probably fall to E L de Mole, an Australian who approached the British war office in 1912 with a design that was — in the words of historians Kenneth Macksey and John Batchelor — “so convincingly similar to...
Given that The Cost-Benefit Revolution (UK) (US) has emerged from the pen of the co-author of Nudge (UK) (US) — the 2008 book that showed how to pull the levers of behavioural science to persuade us to eat less, save more and donate our kidneys — we should start with...
I'm delighted to report that "Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy" is out in paperback in the UK this week. (The US edition - Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy - is out at the end of August. Sorry you have to wait...) I had such fun writing this...
“You have the instinct for it,” says Rutger Bregman, as I haul myself up an indoor climbing wall, nestled under the arches at Vauxhall station in London. “Shit, this is some talent!” he bellows, as I reach the top. I am inwardly delighted, even though I realise the...
"The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card.” That’s the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack’s bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card...
Jerry Z Muller’s latest book is 220 pages long, not including the front matter. The average chapter is 10.18 pages long and contains 17.76 endnotes. There are four cover endorsements and the book weighs 421 grammes. These numbers tell us nothing, of course. If you...