Quotes from Tim Harford

asking about sampling errors and margins of error, debating if the number is rising or falling, believing, doubting, analyzing, dissecting—without taking the time to understand the first and most obvious fact: What is being measured, or counted? What definition is being used? Yet while this pitfall is common, it doesn't seem to have acquired a name. My suggestion is "premature enumeration.

The good stories are everywhere. They are not made memorable by their rarity; they are made forgettable by their ubiquity.

But many of us love the fact that Ricardo was able, nearly two hundred years ago, to produce insights that illuminate our understanding today. It's easy to see the difference between nineteenth-century farming and twenty-first-century frothing, but not so easy to see the similarity before it is pointed out to us. Economics is partly about modelling, about articulating basic principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects like the rent on farms or coffee bars.

The importance of the base rate was made famous by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who coined the phrase "the outside view and the inside view." The inside view means looking at the specific case in front of you: this couple. The outside view requires you to look at a more general "comparison class" of cases—here, the comparison class is all married couples. (The outside view needn't be statistical, but it often will be.)

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It's not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it's a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can't make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

Este capuchino secreto es, además, más barato. Entonces

To the economist, there is a story to tell about the contrast between the chaos of the traffic and the smooth running of the bookshop. We can learn something from the bookstore that will help us avoid traffic jams.

Psychologists call this "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice.11

The French satirist Molière once wrote, "A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one." Benjamin Franklin commented, "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

These examples should be models for communication, precisely because they inspire curiosity. "How does money influence politics?" is not an especially engaging question, but "If I were running for president, how would I raise lots of money with few conditions and no scrutiny?" is much more intriguing.

the diagram "is to affect thro' the Eyes what we may fail to convey to the brains of the public through their word-proof eyes.

He moved instead to an investment strategy that required no great macroeconomic insight. Instead, he explained, "As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.

whatever some Prius fans may believe, it turns out that Priuses do have a corporeal form, and a Prius in congested traffic will cause more emissions indirectly by slowing other cars down than it will emit directly.

The question is wether any environmental catastrophe, even severe climate change, could possibly inflict the same terrible human cost as keeping 3 or 4 billion people in poverty. To ask that question is to answer it.

Creemos que el valor que obtenemos de las escuelas y la policía es mayor de lo que nos cuestan en impuestos, pero no lo sabemos con certeza. Cosa que no ocurre con el capuchino.

In October 1949, less than two years after the trial began, Doll stopped smoking. He was thirty-seven, and had been a smoker his entire adult life. He and Hill had discovered that heavy smoking of cigarettes didn't just double the risk of lung cancer, or triple the risk, or even quadruple the risk. It made you sixteen times more likely to get lung cancer.

Testing a hypothesis using the numbers that helped form the hypothesis in the first place is not OK.15

That is why 'learn from your mistakes' is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.

Doing foolish things in an attempt 'to correct the past', like marrying the man whose baby you just aborted, isn't unusual at all. It's part of being human. What

The success of Google Flu Trends became emblematic of the hot new trend in business, technology, and science: big data and algorithms. "Big data" can mean many things, but let's focus on the found data we discussed in the previous chapter, the digital exhaust of web searches, credit card payments, and mobile phones pinging the nearest cell tower, perhaps buttressed by the administrative data generated as organizations organize themselves.

the scale of the trouble, the economist John Kay was pointing out the similarities between the crunch

Although the rig's crew had, in principle, shut down the flow of oil and gas to the platform, so much

did start paying attention to the unglamorous insights

and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles