Your absurd hypothetical questions, answered
One of my favourite books of the year was Randall Munroe’s What If? 2, which like...
Storage is one of the least sexy words around. That’s a problem
In January 2020, the Harford family filled a spare cupboard with pasta and tinned food. Our...
Quitting is underrated
“I am a fighter and not a quitter,” said Liz Truss, the day before quitting. She...
Struck by the power of the simple invention
“I was really taken aback,” Dr Dilip Mahalanabis recalled of arriving at Bangaon’s city hospital in...
The one thing we all get wrong when choosing Christmas presents
“Christmas is coming”, laments Ellen Stuart, “and I have got to think up presents for everybody . . . Dear...
How to leave Twitter but keep your followers
Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation,...
Farewell to cakeism, and welcome to the age of the possible
You can’t always get what you want, a young man once sang. It’s a simple aphorism,...
How to tax (a guide for governments)
In 1789, an octogenarian Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter containing the famous opinion that “in this...
Announcing my next book, The Truth Detective
Do you have what it takes to be a Truth Detective? Did you know that a...
Uncertainty delays investment. Please can the Conservative party take note?
Liz Truss overlooked it. So did poor Kwasi Kwarteng. So did the Nobel Prize committee in...
Five ideas that might actually boost UK growth
Last week, I made the case that economic growth matters and raising the rate of growth...
Liz Truss’s growth delusion
There is a fashionable line of attack against Liz Truss’s single-minded focus on growth: what about...
How much money will actually make you happy?
When I was a student, a friend of mine fantasised about earning £100 a day. It...
Economists must get more in touch with our feelings
Feelings matter. That is obvious enough. Less obvious is what social scientists and policy wonks should...
What we keep getting wrong about inflation
What is inflation? The answer seems obvious: when things get more expensive, that’s inflation, and it’s...