Tim Harford Quotes

#1. Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time

Tim Harford

#2. enough pieces of cheese and you can be fairly sure that the

Tim Harford

#3. Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

#6. 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

#7. People today don't become economists to make the world a better place.

Tim Harford

#8. 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

#9. we don't ask what works, we simply gravitate to what sounds miraculous.

Tim Harford

#10. I think the association of economics with forecasting is unfortunate and is down to the fact that one great way to get an investment bank's name on business television is to hire a guy called a Chief Economist who will go and prognosticate.

Tim Harford

#11. gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We'll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We'll learn from a watchmaker,

Tim Harford

#12. and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles

Tim Harford

#13. 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

Tim Harford

#14. 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

#15. wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a

Tim Harford

#16. It's difficult because we tend to overrate the pain of failure. We fear it too much. That's research that emerges from psychology. We think it's going to be worse than it really is. And, I think, as we get a bit older, really after we leave school or college, we quickly stop experimenting.

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

#19. I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.

Tim Harford

#20. You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.

Tim Harford

#21. 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

#22. Isn't the initial loss that does for him, but the stupid plays he makes in an effort to deny that the loss has happened. The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk:

Tim Harford

#23. It was a dismal mismatch: Hitler had been single-mindedly building up his forces in the 1930s, while British defence spending was at historical lows. The Luftwaffe entered the Battle of Britain with

Tim Harford

#24. Failure in Innovation - it's a price worth paying.

Tim Harford

#25. British politicians used to be good at misleading people without actually lying.

Tim Harford

#26. Esther Duflo, a leading randomista. 'Sometimes

Tim Harford

#27. I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.

Tim Harford

#28. 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.

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

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

Tim Harford

#31. 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

#32. Swiss cheese model' of accidents. Imagine a series of safety

Tim Harford

#33. Norway has a relationship with the EU which is very close. It has to accept most EU rules. It has to pay EU membership fees. It has free movement of people just like other EU countries, but it's not actually in the EU.

Tim Harford

#34. 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

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

Tim Harford

#36. 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

#37. Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

Tim Harford

#38. 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