Quotes from Tim Harford

Census taking is among the oldest ways of collecting statistics. Much newer, but with similar aspirations to reach everyone, is "big data." Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Oxford's Internet Institute, and coauthor of the book Big Data, told me that his favored definition of a big dataset is one where "N = All"—where we no longer have to sample, because we have the entire background population.[18

the PlayPump problem: there is a strong incentive in development to focus on projects that look good and sound good. As

We are glad you didn't follow our advice.

Adolf Hitler despised smoking. The Führer was no doubt pleased when German doctors discovered that cigarettes caused cancer. For obvious reasons, though, "hated by Nazis" was no impediment to the popularity of tobacco.

and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgement. And that is

The counterintuitive result is that presenting people with a detailed and balanced account of both sides of the argument may actually push people away from the center rather than pull them in. If we already have strong opinions, then we'll seize upon welcome evidence, but we'll find opposing data or arguments irritating. This biased assimilation of new evidence means that the more we know, the more partisan we're able to be on a fraught issue.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgement. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without

Doctors persisted with bloodletting for three hundred years after Van Helmont challenged them to prove that their technique worked. In

purchase of the long-distance ticket would contribute to the airline's decision about how many future flights it should run on this route. Unless bus routes are entirely insensitive to passenger demand – which is, one must admit, a possibility – then the same argument applies to

I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for — people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works.

Ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. … It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans.

There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.

Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply treat life as a psychedelic trip through a series of novel sensations.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.

The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.

The evolutionary algorithm--of variation and selection, repeated--searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works.

The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure.

The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work with the aim of being promoted to what he has.

Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income.

Ten rules of thumb are still a lot for anyone to remember, so perhaps I should try to make things simpler. I realize that these suggestions have a common thread—a golden rule, if you like. Be curious.

Someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic, now commonly applied to economists Imagine

And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won't get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.

Fight scarcity power and corruption; correct externalities; try to maximise information; get the incentives right; engage with other countries; and most of all embrace markets, which do most of these jobs at the same time.