One of my favourite books of the year was Randall Munroe’s What If? 2, which like its predecessor offers serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. For example, “What would happen if the solar system was filled with soup out to Jupiter?” The short...
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.
Storage is one of the least sexy words around. That’s a problem
In January 2020, the Harford family filled a spare cupboard with pasta and tinned food. Our “Brexit cupboard” was intended to protect us in case there were disruptions to trade after the UK left the EU on January 31. As I pointed out to my wife, it was probably...
Quitting is underrated
“I am a fighter and not a quitter,” said Liz Truss, the day before quitting. She was echoing the words of Peter Mandelson MP over two decades ago, although Mandelson had the good sense to speak after winning a political fight rather than while losing one. It’s a...
Struck by the power of the simple invention
“I was really taken aback,” Dr Dilip Mahalanabis recalled of arriving at Bangaon’s city hospital in 1971. Bangaon is now on the border between India and Bangladesh. At that time, though, it was in the middle of a refugee crisis and a vicious cholera outbreak...
The one thing we all get wrong when choosing Christmas presents
"Christmas is coming”, laments Ellen Stuart, “and I have got to think up presents for everybody . . . Dear me, it’s so tedious!” Her aunt sympathises and recalls her youth, a time before gift-giving became excessive. “Presents did not fly about in those days as they...
How to leave Twitter but keep your followers
Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation, a lot of people have taken to Twitter to declare that they are leaving Twitter. They will find it hard. This is not because Twitter is...
Farewell to cakeism, and welcome to the age of the possible
You can’t always get what you want, a young man once sang. It’s a simple aphorism, but one worth remembering. Boris Johnson was widely — and rightly — mocked in 2016 for announcing that “our policy is having our cake and eating it”. That was a dishonest refusal to...
How to tax (a guide for governments)
In 1789, an octogenarian Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter containing the famous opinion that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Franklin was mistaken. Many taxes are easily and legally avoided by the simple expedient of not...
Announcing my next book, The Truth Detective
Do you have what it takes to be a Truth Detective? Did you know that a toy spaceship can teach you about why prices keep rising? Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money? And that even the greatest minds have been fooled by fake news and...