Tim Harford famous quotes

03-25-2025

Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time
-- Tim Harford

#Mistake #Fixing #Firsts
Synthetic Worlds is a surprisingly profound book about the social, political, and economic issues arising from the emergence of vast multiplayer games on the Internet. What Castronova has realized is that these games, where players contribute considerable labor in exchange for things they value, are not merely like real economies, they are real economies, displaying inflation, fraud, Chinese sweatshops, and some surprising in-game innovations.
-- Tim Harford

#Real #Book #Player
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

#Phones #Cells #Ideas
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
-- Tim Harford

#Book #Economics #Backgrounds
People today dont become economists to make the world a better place.
-- Tim Harford

#People #Today #World
Failure is inevitable; it happens all the time in a complex economy.
-- Tim Harford

#Economy #Inevitable
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

#Thinking #Giving #Advice
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 throw more money behind it, to throw more emotional energy behind it... that's a real problem.
-- Tim Harford

#Real #Mean #Emotional
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 plan that seduces us into thinking failure is impossible and adaptation is unnecessary - a kind of â€˜Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg).
-- Tim Harford

#Thinking #Enemy #Firsts
You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.
-- Tim Harford

#Successful #Errors #Trials
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 every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans.
-- Tim Harford

#Motivation #Inspiration #Years
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

#Motivation #Inspiration #People
We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops.
-- Tim Harford

#Design #Trying #World
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

#Struggle #Mean #Errors
There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.
-- Tim Harford

#More To Life #Economist #Accounts
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

#Motivation #Boss #Pay
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

#People #Discipline #Challenges

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