“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
“There is much more to life than what gets measured in accounts. Even economists know that.”
― Tim Harford
"Of course nobody cares what the people who actually do the work might want or need. Chief executives exult in bold architectural statements, and universities find it easier to raise money for new buildings than for research."
—Tim Harford
"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 ‘Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg)."
― Tim Harford
"We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops."
― Tim Harford
"People today dont become economists to make the world a better place."
― Tim Harford
"British politicians used to be good at misleading people without actually lying."
― Tim Harford
"You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error."
― Tim Harford
"Success Comes Through Rapidly Fixing our Mistakes Rather than Getting Things Right the First Time."
― Tim Harford
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.”
― Tim Harford
“The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.”
― Tim Harford
“The evolutionary algorithm — of variation and selection, repeated — searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works.”
― Tim Harford
“Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: it’s a price worth paying.”
― Tim Harford
"Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out."
― Tim Harford
"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