Top 50 Tim Harford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.”

— Tim Harford

2. “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

3. “Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time.”

— Tim Harford

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

— Tim Harford

5. “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

6. “British politicians used to be good at misleading people without actually lying.”

— Tim Harford

7. “There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.”

— Tim Harford

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

— Tim Harford

9. “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

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

— Tim Harford

11. “Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition,’ he.”

— Tim Harford

12. “A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether.”

— Tim Harford

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

— Tim Harford

14. “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

15. “It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.”

— Tim Harford

16. “The word “see” is often used as a direct synonym for “understand” – “I see what you mean.” Yet sometimes we see but we don’t understand; worse, we see, then “understand” something that isn’t true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words.”

— Tim Harford

17. “Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income.”

— Tim Harford

18. “Kahneman, Nobel laureate and one of the fathers of behavioral economics, calls overconfidence “the most significant of the cognitive biases.”

— Tim Harford

19. “Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It’s not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it’s a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can’t make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.”

— Tim Harford

20. “If the story you’re reading is about health, there’s one place you should be sure to look for a second opinion: the Cochrane Collaboration.”

— Tim Harford

21. “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

22. “As societies switched from foraging to agriculture ten thousand years ago, the average height for both men and women shrank by about six inches, and there’s ample evidence of parasites, disease, and childhood malnutrition. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, called the adoption of agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

— Tim Harford

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The.”

— Tim Harford

30. “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.”

— Tim Harford

31. “Failure in Innovation – it’s a price worth paying.”

— Tim Harford

32. “I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.”

— Tim Harford

33. “But many of us love the fact that Ricardo was able, nearly two hundred years ago, to produce insights that illuminate our understanding today. It’s easy to see the difference between nineteenth-century farming and twenty-first-century frothing, but not so easy to see the similarity before it is pointed out to us. Economics is partly about modelling, about articulating basic principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects like the rent on farms or coffee bars.”

— Tim Harford

34. “The food surplus enabled larger populations and societies with specialists – builders, priests, craftsmen, but also specialist soldiers.”

— Tim Harford

35. “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

36. “Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: it’s a price worth paying. We.”

— Tim Harford

37. “Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles.”

— Tim Harford

38. “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

39. “The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.”

— Tim Harford

40. “Managers could be tidy-minded simply because tidiness seemed like the right and proper way to be.”

— Tim Harford

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

— Tim Harford

42. “Reading accounts is dull; economic detective work is the easy way to get to the same conclusion.”

— Tim Harford

43. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can opt out of these decisions. Every policy the government adopts, and every individual choice you make, implies that a valuation has been made, even if no one has been honest enough to own up to it or even admit it to themselves.”

— Tim Harford

44. “We still don’t have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it ‘social capital, or maybe ‘trust’. Others call it ‘the rule of law’, or ‘institutions’. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it’s in most people’s interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.”

— Tim Harford

45. “A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research. And these claims will sound scientific, even rather wise. Yet they give a false and dangerous impression: that nobody really knows anything.”

— Tim Harford

46. “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

47. “Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.”

— Tim Harford

48. “To the economist, there is a story to tell about the contrast between the chaos of the traffic and the smooth running of the bookshop. We can learn something from the bookstore that will help us avoid traffic jams.”

— Tim Harford

49. “I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.”

— Tim Harford

50. “The experimental subjects found it much easier to argue against positions they disliked than in favor of those they supported. There was a special power in doubt. Doubt.”

— Tim Harford