The Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again

Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for each cobra skin, thus encouraging a thriving cobra-farming industry. The cobra story is probably an urban myth — or a policy wonk’s vers

https://timharford.com/2025/08/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-strikes-again/

Whose job is safe from AI?

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? “I’ve sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,” the FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf recently confessed. That seemed right. There are some things the computers just can’t do.

The next morning the FT published “The gardens that AI grew”, describing int

https://timharford.com/2025/07/whose-job-is-safe-from-ai/

The many tragedies of ending US aid

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic. If Stalin ever said such a thing, he wasn’t the first — but the ghoulish claim has stuck to him because he is one of very few politicians with more than a million deaths on his conscience.

The list of government actions that deliberately or negligently led to the deaths of more than a million

https://timharford.com/2025/07/the-many-tragedies-of-ending-us-aid/

Notes on the resistant reader

Smoking kills. A few people had suspected as much before the second world war, but it was not until 1950 that the scientific evidence began to accumulate that smokers were at dramatically higher risk of lung cancer than non-smokers. Other health risks of smoking would be identified over the years that followed.

Pity the poor smoker. Addicted to a popular product tha

https://timharford.com/2025/07/notes-on-the-resistant-reader/

Taco, the trade that ate itself

Does he always chicken out, or doesn’t he? Like all loyal listeners to the FT’s Unhedged podcast, I’ve been telling my friends about Rob Armstrong’s perfect new acronym: Taco — Trump Always Chickens Out. From this observation, the Taco trade logically follows: whenever President Trump announces something that causes markets to swoon, buy during the fainting spell and

https://timharford.com/2025/07/taco-the-trade-that-ate-itself/

Why is modern commerce corrosive?

You’re not imagining it. There is something shallow about modern life — a sense that traditional virtues, from craftsmanship to professionalism to loyalty, have somehow been hollowed out. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in the 21st century and believe that the world is a far better place in 2025 than it was in, say, 1975.

Still, there is something amiss. Yo

https://timharford.com/2025/07/why-is-modern-commerce-corrosive/

Can we ‘nudge’ our way to higher growth?

Can we “nudge” our way to a higher rate of economic growth? In a recent speech, David Halpern argued that we should at least try. Halpern was the founder of the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) that was so enthusiastically championed by then UK prime minister David Cameron, so it is no surprise to find him suggesting that policymaking informed by be

https://timharford.com/2025/06/can-we-nudge-our-way-to-higher-growth/

Am I boring you? Good

A good columnist is never unintentionally tedious, but this week’s effort is about obsolete telephone directories, binary counter overflow, and the alternating current waveform. The boredom is the point.

Start with alternating current. As most of us once learnt and have since half-forgotten, mains electricity is supplied by an oscillating current whose direction changes rapidly. In

https://timharford.com/2025/06/am-i-boring-you-good/

What does it take to stand up to tyranny?

When the thugs arrive — the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan — who stands up to them? That’s a question raised by Rutger Bregman in his new book, Moral Ambition. Bregman, who is Dutch, was fascinated by the example of Nieuwlande, a tiny Dutch town whose residents concealed almost 100 Jews from the Nazi occupiers. “The concentration of people in hiding w

https://timharford.com/2025/06/what-does-it-take-to-stand-up-to-tyranny/

The zero-sum mindset is no mystery

Twenty years ago, economics was cool. Thanks in part to the publication of Freakonomics, economists were regarded as dispensers of brilliant and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. Whether you were trying to catch terrorists or figure out which wine to serve with dinner, all you needed to do was ask an economist.

It is striking how popular the contr

https://timharford.com/2025/06/the-zero-sum-mindset-is-no-mystery/

Beware Giffen-ish vibes in the money markets

The quest for the elusive Giffen good has taken economists to the depths of the Irish potato famine, to the poorest parts of rural China and to the cages of lab rats at Texas A&M University. Now the Giffen good has been spotted at Disney theme parks. But what do Giffen goods really tell us about the way the world economy works?

Giffen g

https://timharford.com/2025/05/beware-giffen-ish-vibes-in-the-money-markets/

Seven truths about trade

Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every other country on the planet somehow constitutes an emergency, and enough U-turns to make a ballerina dizzy — it is easy to lose sight of a basic fact: even a modest and predictable tariff i

https://timharford.com/2025/05/seven-truths-about-trade/

The value of institutional memory

In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an easy day’s work. But what really had them stumped was a heavy iron chain on the canal bottom. After various attempts, they hooked the chain to their dredger. That did

https://timharford.com/2025/05/the-value-of-institutional-memory/

How to do without the Donald

Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.) If he is just a toddler having a full-blown meltdown, then the best

https://timharford.com/2025/05/how-to-do-without-the-donald/

Predictions aren’t always about the future

The Bodleian Library’s exhibition Oracles, Omens and Answers offers a rather different perspective on prognostication than the FT’s usual position. Instead of economists and political pollsters, the exhibition discusses predictions made using the stars, or children’s games, or, most strikingly, large Cameroonian spiders.

That last one work

https://timharford.com/2025/05/predictions-arent-always-about-the-future/

Elon Musk is wrong about GDP

Of all the dubious claims uttered recently by Elon Musk, I have yet to see a more interesting one than his tweet asserting that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending. Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.”

Whether or not he is serious, the idea is worth a closer loo

https://timharford.com/2025/04/elon-musk-is-wrong-about-gdp/

How to cure ‘premature enumeration’

John von Neumann — the man who created game theory, advanced many branches of mathematics and physics, and did more than anyone to design the modern computer — was someone who attracted a certain amount of mythology.

One story about von Neumann has a colleague setting him a fun puzzle. In this puzzle, two trains, 20 miles apart, chug slowly towards eac

https://timharford.com/2025/04/how-to-cure-premature-enumeration/

The Tao of Bad Buildings

The most interesting architecture story of recent months is neither Adrien Brody’s Oscar for playing an architect, nor Donald Trump’s executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. It was the revelation, late last year, that the first building to win the prestigious Stirling Prize is now scheduled to be demolished.

The building, the University of Salford’s

https://timharford.com/2025/04/the-tao-of-bad-buildings/

Life lessons from Donald “Shoup Dogg” Shoup

The death in February of an octogenarian named Donald Shoup did not make many headlines, but it did prompt a flood of admiring social media conversations among the “Shoupistas”, a small but fervent fan club of the man they called Shoup Dogg. Shoup was a tweed-wearing, extravagantly bearded economist. What had such a man done to inspire this

https://timharford.com/2025/04/life-lessons-from-donald-shoup-dogg-shoup/

The selfish guide to decarbonising

Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global emissions is less than 15 per cent. It is a sham

https://timharford.com/2025/03/the-selfish-guide-to-decarbonising/