To Tivoli Gardens in the heart of Copenhagen, one of the world’s oldest amusement parks. It was founded 180 years ago, and its creator George Carstensen secured the land by petitioning King Christian VIII, arguing, “When the people are amusing themselves, they do not...
Imagine a person whose desire for the easy life is stronger than their sense of ethics. And imagine that this person gets hold of a cutting-edge computer app that can produce fast answers to hard questions. Then imagine that person is given a hard question. Instead of...
Say what you like about Lord Byron, he knew how to turn a phrase. Here he is, speaking in the House of Lords in 1812. His topic is the foolishness of the factory-storming, machine-breaking Luddites: “The rejected workmen, in the blindness of their ignorance, instead...
You’d think it would be hard to miss half a million people, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) managed it nevertheless. Realisation of this problem dawned just over a decade ago, when the results of the 2011 census were published. The census revealed that...
In a laboratory in College Station, Texas, in 1990, six lab rats pressed levers and lapped at tubes as root beer and tonic water were released. They were participating in the quest for an elusive quarry: the Giffen good. Robert Giffen was born in Lanarkshire in 1837,...
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...
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...
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....
There is no shortage of white men in economics. That is clear enough from a glance down the very male, very white list of winners of the discipline’s Nobel memorial prize. There are a few exceptions: the black Caribbean-born scholar Sir Arthur Lewis won in 1979; the...