Quotes from Tim Harford

In the end economics is about people ... And economic growth is about a better life for individuals - more choice, less fear, less toil and hardship. ... Yang Li tried factory work and decided that it wasn't for her. Now she says that 'I can close the salon whenever I want.' Economics is about Yang Li's choice.

The word "see" is often used as a direct synonym for "understand"—"I see what you mean." Yet sometimes we see but we don't understand; worse, we see, then "understand" something that isn't true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words.

A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether.

As societies switched from foraging to agriculture ten thousand years ago, the average height for both men and women shrank by about six inches, and there's ample evidence of parasites, disease, and childhood malnutrition. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, called the adoption of agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

We're kidding ourselves if we think we can opt out of these decisions. Every policy the government adopts, and every individual choice you make, implies that a valuation has been made, even if no one has been honest enough to own up to it or even admit it to themselves.

trust is easy to throw away and hard to regain.

The experimental subjects found it much easier to argue against positions they disliked than in favor of those they supported. There was a special power in doubt. Doubt

Specifically, Kahan identified "scientific curiosity." That's different from scientific literacy. The two qualities are correlated, of course, but there are curious people who know rather little about science (yet), and highly trained people with little appetite to learn more.

curious person, however, enjoys being surprised and hungers for the unexpected.

Kahneman, Nobel laureate and one of the fathers of behavioral economics, calls overconfidence "the most significant of the cognitive biases.

A more plausible explanation is that we are drawn to surprising news, and surprising news is more often bad than good.

We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.

we should ask who is missing from the data we're being shown, and whether our conclusions might differ if they were included.

Managers could be tidy-minded simply because tidiness seemed like the right and proper way to be.

we should keep an open mind, asking how we might be mistaken, and whether the facts have changed.

A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research. And these claims will sound scientific, even rather wise. Yet they give a false and dangerous impression: that nobody really knows anything.

Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.

The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Yes, it's easy to lie with statistics—but it's even easier to lie without them.*

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.")

If the story you're reading is about health, there's one place you should be sure to look for a second opinion: the Cochrane Collaboration.

Trump made sure both the media and his opponents reacted on his terms. He wasn't always perfectly prepared, but his preference for speed over perfection ensured that opponents were always scrambling to figure out a response. •

the "curse of knowledge" is a constant obstacle to clear communication: once you know a subject fairly well, it is enormously difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know it.