Quotes from Tim Harford

if there's a profitable deal to be done between somebody who has something unique and someone who has something which can be replaced, then the profits will go to the owner of the unique resource.

We should aim to make ours a world where people feel free to do things they enjoy, even if others are mildly inconvenienced, but also one where we all refrain from harming other people if the effort involved to avoid harming them is small.

Van Meegeren wasn't an artistic genius, but he intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled.

Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles

Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition,' he

Consider the situation: Money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly.

It is not polite to say so, but it is obvious that paying people to be unemployed encourages unemployment. Yet, if a government scrapped unemployment benefit, there would still be jobless people, and supporting the jobless is something that every civilised society should do. The truth is that we have a trade-off: it is bad to encourage unemployment but good to support those without incomes.

So the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.

In Iraq, the Army discovered that if the official hierarchy was on a disastrous course, it was vital to bypass it in order to adapt. Petraeus

Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.

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.

A lot of international companies invest in the U.K. as a base for doing business with the rest of the European Union.

We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops.

Failure is inevitable; it happens all the time in a complex economy.