Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Tim is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of “The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less”, the iTunes-topping series “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, and the new podcast “Cautionary Tales”. Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honours of 2019.
“Tim Harford is peerless at making sense of a complicated world and our place within it. This is a book that all children should read”
Matthew Syed
“Tim Harford is our most likeable champion of reason and rigour… clear, clever and always highly readable.”
The Times, Books of the Year
“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises – exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”
Bill Bryson
“Packed with fascinating detail… Harford has an engagingly wry style and his book is a superb introduction to some of the most vital products of human ingenuity.”
The Sunday Times
“It’s a very very good book, full of wise counterintuitions and clever insights.”
Brian Eno
“Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes the ‘dismal science’ seem like an awful lot of fun.”
Malcolm Gladwell
“In a world that craves certainty, Harford makes a compelling case for why we can’t have it. A brilliant and oddly empowering book.”
Dave Gorman
“The very best letters from the ‘Dear Economist’ columns from 2003-2008 in one handy book-sized package.”
“As lively as it is smart, charming, penetrating, and wise. If you are at all interested in knowing much more than you do about how the world works, you couldn’t ask for a better guide than Harford.”
Stephen J. Dubner
“This book should be required reading for every elected official, business leader, and university student.”
Steven D. Levitt
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-weight-of-fame-a-hollywood-tragedy Talented and beautiful, Molly O'Day is a rising star in 1920s Hollywood. But when Molly's teenage...
Four hundred years ago, in a Stockholm shipyard, work began on Vasa, the pride of the Swedish navy. King Gustavus Adolphus was at war, and gave orders to his shipwrights to build something impressive. In accordance with the king’s instructions, Vasa was ambitiously...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/arsenic-and-lace-the-trial-of-the-yorkshire-witch-with-maddy-pelling Mary Bateman lived in York in the late 18th Century, an age that prized rational thought. Many people still longed to believe in the old ways...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-doors-of-death-the-herald-of-free-enterprise? The Herald of Free Enterprise is a new class of ferry that allows cars to drive directly into the ship. The doors protecting the ship must be closed before every...
How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way. In February...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/what-a-bloody-mess-were-in-britains-redacted-accident? Windscale is supposed to be Britain’s big leap into the nuclear Age, bringing science fiction to life in 1950s Northern England. But in the race to catch up...
He didn’t go to sample the Dolcetto d’Alba, I’m fairly sure of that. John Lombe’s mission was industrial espionage. He travelled to Piedmont with the goal of learning the Piedmontese art of spinning silk into strong yarn. Nobody was likely to teach him — that would...
Chargin' Charlie Beckwith is an American colonel who expects nothing less than perfection from his squad. When hostages are seized during the 1979 Iranian revolution, Chargin' Charlie is given the chance to lead the rescue operation - and to show what a leader who...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/attack-of-the-night-people If you tuned in to late-night WOR radio in 1950s New York, you'd enter the secret world of Jean Shepherd. Shepherd's nonconformist style, off-beat humour and love of pranks gathered a...