Tim Harford Quotes

18 quotes in 409 categories

• 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.…
• Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time
• We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops.
• 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…
• Ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. ... It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don't disappear…
• You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.
• There's nothing wrong with a plan, but remember Von Moltke's famous dictum that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The danger is a…
• 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…
• 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…
• Failure is inevitable; it happens all the time in a complex economy.
• Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply…
• 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…
• There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.
• How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a…
• 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…
• 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…
• I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
• Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

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