Tim Harford can’t help himself. We are navigating our way to lunch in an unfamiliar city and I am momentarily disorientated by the mass of visual paraphernalia at a busy crossing. My hesitation is his cue for a story about the Dutch traffic engineer who found that getting rid of excess street furniture forced car drivers to take more responsibility, dramatically slashing the number of accidents.
Welcome to the world as seen by Harford, a man who made his name explaining the economic rationale behind everything that we do. His tale about the late Hans Monderman is illustrative. Later, over a tableful of dim sum, he adds: “The world is a constant source of ideas for someone who thinks like an economist.”
His bestselling “Undercover Economist” books have made him a founding member of the new tribe popularising the dismal science; not before time given the circumstances, you might add. His latest volume, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, subtitled How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy, is out this week. It tackles the recent “titanic” mess and is his first foray into macroeconomics, also known as the “bigger picture”.
“It’s my job to figure out an interesting way to talk about these things, and a different angle that’s fun and memorable and tells people something about how the economy works…. I’ve always been much more of a micro guy — individual behaviour and the psychological elements of game theory were always my thing, so when I started, it felt like a sense of duty. But halfway through, the subject had won me over.”
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As it happens, Harford, who turns 40 next month, didn’t intentionally study economics. His undergraduate PPE degree (philosophy, politics and economics) was the “classic Oxford degree for people who don’t know what to do”, and he spent his first year intending to drop economics at the end of it. Pressed by his tutor, after doing “really well”, he changed his mind and thus his life, not least because he met his wife while working at Shell, in the scenario planning team for a certain Vince Cable.
Despite starting out in a job that required forecasting, Harford is defensive of his profession, which is much maligned for not predicting the global crash. “Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can,” he says, pointing again to a Keynes quote, this time aligning economists and dentists. “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. We’ve allowed ourselves to become really bad weather forecasters, which is a shame.”
No one under the age of eighteen.
