More About Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a renowned behavioural economist, an acclaimed writer, and investigator of data and statistics. Often called “Britain’s Malcolm Gladwell”, he was once spoken of as “a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world” by the aforementioned Gladwell.

TIM HARFORD | IN THE MEDIA

Tim’s popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less delves into the truth behind the statistics and figures that pervade the news, from the numbers politicians use to business claims and social media hype.

He also hosts How to Vaccinate the World (produced during the Covid-19 pandemic), Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, and Cautionary Tales;

How to Vaccinate the World: How to Vaccinate the World has been a repeatedly useful tool for understanding the virus, the vaccine and the politics around it. Harford presents each show both deftly and with a lightness of touch” – The Big Issue

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy: A series of short stories exploring the way new ideas and inventions have woven, tangled, or sliced right through the invisible economic web that surrounds us every day.

Cautionary Tales: Stories of human error and the lessons learnt from big and small mistakes, with guests including Alan Cumming and Russell Tovey.

He has also worked for the BBC on Trust Me, I’m an Economist, and 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, as well as on Newsnight, Planet Money, The One Show, and The Colbert Report.

Tim’s writing has been featured in Forbes, Esquire, Wired, The Guardian, New York Magazine, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

TIM HARFORD | BOOKS

Tim is a prolific author of business and economic books, including:

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich are Rich, the Poor are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car (2005): This engaging book is part field guide to economics and part expose of the economic principles lurking behind daily events.

The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything (2009): “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

Dear Undercover Economist: The Very Best Letters From the Dear Economist Column (2010): This book should be required reading for every elected official, business leader, and university student.” – Steven D. Levitt

Adapt; Why Success Always Starts With Failure (2011): “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 Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run – or Ruin – an Economy (2014): “Every Tim Harford book is cause for celebration. He makes the ‘dismal science’ seem like an awful lot of fun.” – Malcolm Gladwell

Messy: How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World (2016):“It’s a very, very good book, full of wise counterintuitions and clever insights.” – Brian Eno

Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy (2017): “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

The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy (2020): “Endlessly insightful and full of surprises – exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.” – Bill Bryson

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules For Thinking Differently About Numbers (2020): “Fabulously readable, lucid, witty and authoritative. Every politician and journalist should be made to read this book” – Stephen Fry

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics (2021): “Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day.” – David Epstein

The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up (2023): A book packed with tips and tricks to show kids aged 9+ how to be smart and savvy about everything in life.

TIM HARFORD | AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

Tim’s expertise has won him many awards, accolades, and honours over the years. He holds a membership at Nuffield College; was the first journalist to be an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; a two-time recipient of the Bastiat Prize for Economic Journalism; honoured as Science and Data Commentator of the Year and Economics Commentator of the Year; the Royal Statistical Society Prize for Journalism; and the Business Economist’s Writing Prize.

TIM HARFORD | KEYNOTE TALKS

The Pandemic: Lessons and Prospects: Tim was at the heart of the BBC and Financial Times coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, and has interviewed guests like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci on his podcast How to Vaccinate the World. He is well placed to reflect on current affairs through the lens of the pandemic.

What Disasters Teach Us: Tim had written extensively on the psychological and organisational responses to crisis and this talk looks at the questions we ask ourselves: why do we struggle to prepare? How can we adapt? How can we find opportunity in crisis? And why are we surprisingly resilient and altruistic in a crisis?

How Not to Spread the Misinformation Virus: Tim looks at how we should think about the claims buzzing about in the mainstream media and on social media; why are we so quick to believe? He looks at the latest attempts and public information, misinformation, and deliberate disinformation.

Hope in the Darkness: Experts often call it “the disaster myth”, the idea that in a crisis, humanity falls apart and mob rules. This primal fear comes up again and again, and yet while the media focusses on a few “antisocial idiots”, most people are decent and heroic in a crisis.

Making Sense of Data: Data visualisation is all the rage, but how does it lead us astray, and when does it achieve real change? Tim provide a visually striking statistical survival guide.

Argue With Algorithm: When Tim explained some of the fallacies behind the big data boom in The Financial Times, it was the newspaper’s most-read article that year. He argues that big data will only fulfil its potential if we can avoid statistical traps.

How to Make the World Add Up: Drawing on his bestselling book Tim argues that statistics are a powerful tool, and that most of us should have more confidence that we can make sense of the numbers. He offers simple rules that will help us think more clearly about data and the world.

Don’t Fool Yourself: Wishful thinking is everything in business, politics, and wider life. If we want to stop fooling ourselves, we need to understand. Tim presents an astonishing story of forgery, coupled with the latest research on wishful thinking.

How to See Into the Future: Two of the greatest economists in history failed to see the Wall Street Crash coming – yet one died a millionaire and the other died poor and alone. Tim explores the latest thinking on forecasting, and what to do if the forecasts don’t work out.

The Ostrich Effect: Why do we bury our heads in the sand? Why do we unprepared for predictable disasters. The pandemic is just the latest example, but it is by no means the first. For example, Hurricane Katrina – there was a clear risk, it had been flagged up repeatedly and yet ignored. Why do we fail to prepare as individuals and organisations? What are the psychological obstacles and what can we do about it?

The Art of Adapting: We are so often told to learn from our mistakes that it’s become a bit of a cliché. But why is it so hard? How can we do a better job? With stories from psychology and behavioural economics, Tim describes the art of good mistakes.

How Frustration Makes Us Creative: Tim’s most popular TED talk is about creativity, and the unexpected benefits of obstacles, interruptions, and distractions.

Ideas That Matter: We talk a lot about innovation but what do we really mean? Tim believes we have become fixated on a narrow idea of innovation. Ranging from high-performance cycling to genetic engineering and military innovation, this is one of his most popular talks.

Why Organisations Waste Good Ideas: Blitzkrieg was not invented by the German army but by the British; Kodak patented the digital camera; the oil companies were ahead of the curve on solar power. Why do companies turn opportunities into labialise when faced with disruptive technological change? Tim explores the challenges of innovating in the face of new technology.

What We Get Wrong About Technology: It’s not about the printing press, it’s about the paper. We’ve always been dazzled by the latest technological miracle, but Tim argues that we keep making the same simple mistakes when we think about how new inventions transform the world around us.

Why Slow-Motion Multitasking Works: To do two things at once is to do neither. That’s what we’re old. But nobody seems to have told Albert Einstein, who produced four earth-shaking ideas simultaneously in 1905. Tim argues that we’re thinking about multitasking all wrong. If instead we do our multitasking in slow motion, we can make creative breakthroughs.

Why Collaboration is Messy: There are few more important questions than what it takes to make a team work together to solve problems. Tim argues there is a reason we find this hard: the most effective teams are often the teams with high levels of social friction. Drawing upon research and case studies, Tim talks about how even a team can overcome the most dramatic internal tensions and turn it into triumph.

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