The Best of Tim Harford

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 t…

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 Christi…

The aesthetic of our age was shaped in Paris in 1992, in the Hotel Regina. The occasion was carefully stage-managed by a team of technicians fussing over a huge colour projector that cost as much a…

What is inflation? The answer seems obvious: when things get more expensive, that’s inflation, and it’s bad. But an alternative view is Milton Friedman’s. In a talk in 1963, the hugely influential …

“The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see,” declares Apollo Robbins, the world’s most famous theatrical pickpocket. “The things you look at every day, that you’re blinded to.” A…

When I was a student, a friend of mine fantasised about earning £100 a day. It felt like an incomprehensibly large sum of money; he simply could not conceive of spending enough to exhaust such rich…

In my defence, I didn’t get into financial trouble immediately after finishing my master’s degree in economics. It took months. I had a decently paid graduate job and was living within my means, so…

“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 aft…

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 o…

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 A…

At the start of the graphic novel Bloke’s Progress, our everyday hero Darren Bloke isn’t coping with the everyday stresses of life. He has a tedious job, a grinding commute, squalling children and …

I’ve been thinking recently about three debates. In the first, which took place in January 2016, two Harvard students, Fanele Mashwama and Bo Seo, proposed that “the world’s poor would be justified…

«McRaney suggests that most people believe what they believe based on social cues and that this is a reasonable way for social primates to conduct themselves.»

Switching to a new phone is easy enough these days. The wheezing older model formed a huddle with the shiny oversized new thing, and within a few minutes had effected a near-complete digital handov…

«“At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”»

I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across Gare du …

If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…

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 …