Quotes from Tim Harford

Los reguladores descubrieron que librarse del dióxido de azufre era tan barato que poca gente estaba dispuesta a pagar demasiado por el derecho a seguir produciéndolo. Al

So bad decisions cast a long shadow. But the benefits of good decisions can last a surprisingly long time. And, for all the unintended consequences and unwelcome side effects of the inventions we've considered in these pages, overall they've had vastly more good effects than

If managers tend to have a bad reputation, what should we make of the people who tell managers how to manage?

Intellectual property has profoundly shaped who makes money in the modern world.

Esther Duflo, a leading randomista. 'Sometimes

When technology allows, firms with scarcity power may use highly sophisticated methods to target customers.

This book isn't an attempt to identify the fifty most economically significant inventions. It's not a book-length listicle, with a countdown to the most important invention of all. Indeed, some that would be no-brainers on any such list haven't made the cut: the printing press, the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the airplane, and the computer.

Yet the logic of academic grants and promotions tells you to publish at once, and for goodness' sake don't prod it too hard.

But the psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that good news tends to unfold slowly, while bad news is often more sudden.

La culpa no es de las leyes de la física, sino del sencillo hecho de que, a veces, lo que los modelos dejan fuera es más importante que lo que incluyen.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, puts it succinctly: "To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers."27

other tendency emerges because we rarely like the idea of standards that are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything, whether it's education, the road network or the coffee at

More abundance can lead to more competition. If ordinary people live at subsistence levels, powerful people can't really take much away from them—not if they want to come back and take more the next time there's a harvest. But the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate.

Anyone who insists that running a modern economy is a matter of plain common sense frankly doesn't understand much about running a modern economy.

el sistema no mercantil tiene la reconfortante ventaja de ocultar el hecho de que los pobres no reciben la misma calidad de educación que los ricos.

Agricultural abundance creates rulers and ruled, masters and servants, and inequality of wealth unheard of in hunter-gatherer societies. It enables the rise of kings and soldiers, bureaucrats and priests—to organize wisely, or live idly off the work of others.

even have our own catchphrase, the 'postcode lottery', to describe the scandal that standards vary from place to place. It is something of a national obsession. We want all of our public services to be like Coca-Cola: all identical, all good. And they can't be. If we are to take the 'variation

A third lesson is to constantly remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life.

It's my job to run the division, and it's your job to critique me.' Petraeus

Unfortunately, the selection mechanism is often some combination of beauty and shock value, rather than pertinence and accuracy.

La economía trata de quién consigue qué y por qué. En

it is not enough to tolerate dissent: sometimes you have to demand it. Galvin

La economía tiene que ver con la decisión de Yang Li.

These experiments tend to find that the benefits of receiving a small loan are quite modest, and temporary. Applying the same rigorous test to other approaches—for example, giving microentrepreneurs small cash payments along with advice from a mentor—finds that the cash-and-mentor scheme is more likely to boost the income from these tiny businesses than providing loans would.14