Undercover Economist

My weekly column in the Financial Times on Saturdays, explaining the economic ideas around us every day. This column was inspired by my book and began in 2005.

What Rishi Sunak got wrong about maths

As a professional nerd, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been asked what I think of Rishi Sunak’s enthusiasm for maths. It’s hard to know quite what to say. I agree with much of what Sunak said in his speech last month singing the praises of numeracy. Yet...

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Why we shouldn’t hold referendums

Citizens of democracies can be ill-informed and inconsistent, and this often feels like a tragedy or even a crisis. Occasionally, however, one reads something so absurd that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Consider a recent survey conducted by the...

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The never-ending brilliance of board games

What is the point of games? For Lizzie Magie, the idiosyncratic genius who inspired Monopoly, the answer was clear: she thought games are educational. Klaus Teuber, the equally brilliant designer of the board game Catan, had a different view: he thought games are fun....

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Has 21st century policy gone medieval?

Criminal justice has always been a source of knotty problems. How to punish the guilty while sparing the innocent? Trial by ordeal was a neat solution: delegate the decision to God. In the Middle Ages, a suspect who insisted on their innocence might be asked to carry...

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Lockdowns are over. WFH isn’t. Why?

Each February, the team at NPR’s fabulous Planet Money podcast announce their Valentines, nerdy love letters to under-appreciated data releases or obscure supply-chain trackers. This year, co-host Amanda Aronczyk revealed that her Valentine would be for . . . the...

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