Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale - a thorough biography of a remarkable woman, less well-known for her work as a statistician, data-visualisation pioneer and public health campaigner than she should be. One of the founders of evidence-based medicine, she is...
I'm delighted to announce that Season Two of "Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy" is up and running. Our first episodes included our Christmas special, followed by the Langstroth Beehive, Cellophane, and the Gyroscope - with more appearing on the feed on a...
I had a treat over Christmas avoiding Twitter and reading pre-releases of books about maths. The joys! Two particular pearls are about to be released. The Art of Statistics (US) (UK) by Sir David Spiegelhalter should be self-recommending, but this is a really first...
The self-help genre gets a bad press, and not without reason, but there are a few self-help books that I've read, enjoyed, and felt wiser as a result. The Tao of Pooh (UK) (US) by Benjamin Hoff is a wise, funny meditation on life that changed the way I looked at the...
My FT Magazine cover story tomorrow is "Why Big Companies Squander Good Ideas", and I wanted to give some pointers to further reading, because I learned a lot and had a lot of fun writing this piece. (I'll post the feature article on this website in due course.)...
The fine folk over at Planet Money's The Indicator (an excellent podcast) recently spent five episodes discussing five of their favourite fun-to-read economics and business books. It's a good list, in my humble opinion, and not just because it includes... (drum roll)...
My list of five of the best introductions to economics wasn't exactly the usual suspects, but I wanted to stray a little further off the obvious territory and recommend six books you might want to read to give you an unusual introduction to economics. A couple of...
My favourites are: NPR’s Planet Money remains an outstanding show, with stories, humour, very clear explanations and high production values. But - horrors! - they've poached the amazing Cardiff Garcia from the FT, and Cardiff is co-presenting (with Stacey Vanek...
James Surowiecki's modern classic The Wisdom of Crowds (UK) (US) set a very high bar for the field. (Why has James not written another book?) This is one of those books that gets talked about a lot, with the emphasis on the idea that the average opinion of the crowd...