Top 17 Quotes by Tim Harford

Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.

It's difficult because we tend to overrate the pain of failure. We fear it too much. That's research that emerges from psychology. We think it's going to be worse than it really is. And, I think, as we get a bit older, really after we leave school or college, we quickly stop experimenting.

I think the association of economics with forecasting is unfortunate and is down to the fact that one great way to get an investment bank's name on business television is to hire a guy called a Chief Economist who will go and prognosticate.

In certain businesses, I would say 10 failures to one success is a perfectly acceptable ratio. Because the failures die pretty quickly, they're not that expensive, and the successes can be really huge.

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.

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.