Tim Harford quotes

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can. You don't expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you'll have when you're 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems. (Tim Harford)
Failure is inevitable; it happens all the time in a complex economy.
Tim Harford
How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.
Tim Harford
People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.
Tim Harford
Failure in Innovation - it's a price worth paying.
Tim Harford
Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side.
Tim Harford
Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.
Tim Harford
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
Tim Harford
If the whole process of learning from failure means discarding stuff that's not working, but in fact, our natural reaction is to keep going, to throw more money behind it, to throw more emotional energy behind it... that's a real problem.
Tim Harford
The supermarket chain Whole Foods has quite a radical employee empowerment program, where employees get to decide whether another employee can work in their team or not. If they think this person's a slacker, doesn't have good ideas, they can vote and say, no, we don't want this person to be working with us on the vegetable aisle.
Tim Harford
In certain businesses, I would say 10 failures to one success is a perfectly acceptable ratio. Because the failures die pretty quickly, they're not that expensive, and the successes can be really huge. (Tim Harford)
We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops.
Tim Harford
Love may be boundless and abundant, but time isn't. Time is finite.
Tim Harford
British politicians used to be good at misleading people without actually lying.
Tim Harford
There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.
Tim Harford