Tim Harford > Quotes

“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.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“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.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means—hard as it is to believe—that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“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.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

“I’ve laid down ten statistical commandments in this book. First, we should learn to stop and notice our emotional reaction to a claim, rather than accepting or rejecting it because of how it makes us feel. Second, we should look for ways to combine the “bird’s eye” statistical perspective with the “worm’s eye” view from personal experience. Third, we should look at the labels on the data we’re being given, and ask if we understand what’s really being described. Fourth, we should look for comparisons and context, putting any claim into perspective. Fifth, we should look behind the statistics at where they came from—and what other data might have vanished into obscurity. Sixth, we should ask who is missing from the data we’re being shown, and whether our conclusions might differ if they were included. Seventh, we should ask tough questions about algorithms and the big datasets that drive them, recognizing that without intelligent openness they cannot be trusted. Eighth, we should pay more attention to the bedrock of official statistics—and the sometimes heroic statisticians who protect it. Ninth, we should look under the surface of any beautiful graph or chart. And tenth, we should keep an open mind, asking how we might be mistaken, and whether the facts have changed.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“What, then, should you do? With an excellent hand, you should bet: You lose nothing if your opponent folds, while giving yourself a good chance of winning a big pot if he calls. But with a middling hand, you shouldn't bet: If he has a bad hand, he'll fold, and you'll win the ante, which is what you'd have won anyway by checking; but if he has a good hand, he'll call and win. It's heads he wins, tails you don't. You should check instead, and hope your middling hand wins the ante.

What about with a terrible hand? Should you check or bet? The answer is surprising. Checking would be unwise, because the hands will be compared and you will lose. It actually makes more sense to bet with these bad hands, because the only way he might drop out is if you make a bet. Perversely, you are better off betting with awful cards than with mediocre ones, the quintessential (and rational) bluff.

There's a second reason for you to bet with terrible cards rather than middling ones: Your opponent will have to call a little more often. Because he knows that your bets are sometimes very weak, he can't afford to fold too easily. That means that when you bet with a good hand, you are more likely to be called, and to win when you are. Because you are bluffing with bad cards, your good hands make more money.”
― Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“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”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“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.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”)”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“So the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“This sudden sharpening of our attention doesn’t just apply to pioneering artworks. It can be seen in an ordinary high school classroom. In a recent study, psychologists Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka Vaughan teamed up with teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents, reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense , the florid , or the zesty . These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down, and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.21 Most of us don’t have”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Whatever we’re trying to understand about the world, each other, and ourselves, we won’t get far without statistics – any more than we can hope to examine bones without an X-ray, bacteria without a microscope, or the heavens without a telescope.”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

“The algorithm seemed to be really good at distinguishing the two rather similar canines; it turned out that it was simply labeling any picture with snow as containing a wolf. An example with more serious implications was described by Janelle Shane in her book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: an algorithm that was shown pictures of healthy skin and of skin cancer. The algorithm figured out the pattern: if there was a ruler in the photograph, it was cancer.7 If we don’t know why the algorithm is doing what it’s doing, we’re trusting our lives to a ruler detector.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“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”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“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.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Van Meegeren wasn’t an artistic genius, but he intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“In 1770, for instance, a famine in Bengal clobbered the company’s revenue. British legislators saved it from bankruptcy by exempting it from tariffs on tea exports to the American colonies. Which was, perhaps, shortsighted on their part: it eventually led to the Boston Tea Party, and the American Declaration of Independence.7 You could say the United States owes its existence to excessive corporate influence on politicians.”
― Tim Harford, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy