Tim Harford Quotes

Tim Harford — English Economist born on December 30, 1973,

Tim Harford is an English economist and journalist, residing in London. He is the author of four economics books and writes his long-running Financial Times column, "The Undercover Economist", which is syndicated in Slate magazine, revealing the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His new column, "Since you asked", offers a sceptical look at the news of the week... (wikipedia)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 Quotes

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