UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST FEATURE Undercover economist
We talk to economist, writer and broadcaster Tim Harford about his work, developments in economics and his advice on starting out on a career in economics and policy
How has the ESRC supported your career? The ESRC paid for me to study economics in a two- year Master’s degree at Oxford University. Without that start, there’s no way that my career would have taken the twists and turns that it has. What’s striking is that the sum of money
involved wasn’t really very big; in principle I could have borrowed the money. But it doesn’t look that way to a young student: for me, a few thousand pounds from the ESRC was the difference between diving into serious study, or giving up. What do you see as the most important contributions of social science to society? Well, social science is the study of us – how we make decisions, individually and as groups; how we allocate or mis-allocate resources; why some of us struggle and some do not, and what to do about that. We’re difficult to study! But making progress is vital if we want to understand the societies we live in and how to make them better.
Can you tell us about a particularly interesting development in contemporary economics? There’s always something fascinating going on! We’re still working through the implications of behavioural economics – the attempt to include more psychologically realistic behaviour in economic models, even though that makes them harder to analyse. That has led to a better design of pension systems, smarter regulations, and I think there’s plenty of insight still to be gleaned from the field. More recently it’s become clear that a new frontier in economics is the use of big, messy data- sets. For example, we can now get high-resolution photographs of anywhere on the planet at least once a day, and use machine learning to analyse what we’re looking at. (Is that road well-maintained? Are those avocados ripe? How full is that oil tanker?) Obviously that is going to transform real-time economic analysis and economic forecasting. There are even people using Spotify streaming data to try to read the ‘mood’ of the economy; I’m not so sure about that one, but it gives you a sense of how much data is out there.
What do you think would help us better understand and address the UK’s productivity puzzle? Better measurement of output, particularly services. They’re hard to measure. You are an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society – what is your favourite or most surprising statistic? I’ve never been very interested in sound-bite statistics. They rarely tell you anything until you ask a bit more, so my favourite statistics are the ones that provoke questions rather than seem to clinch an argument.
For example: in the UK, people are having less sex than in the 1980s. That seems to be true, according to the high-quality research study Natsal (which, by the way, had public funding vetoed by Margaret Thatcher). But it raises questions: how do they ask reliable questions about how much sex is going on? What should we make of the fact that heterosexual women and men give very different answers? Why are people having less sex? Who is having less sex – everyone, or just some important subset of people? Is this a global phenomenon or just here in the UK? The numbers should always be a starting point for further inquiry.
What gives you most satisfaction in your career: is it being an economist, a writer, presenter or broadcaster? And why? I enjoy them all, and they all reinforce each other, but writing books is probably the most satisfying activity because it’s the hardest to do well. What advice would you give to someone just starting a career in research or policy? Think about how to clearly communicate what
you’re doing and why it matters to someone outside your field. Communication is important anyway – but it may also help you do a better job, because if you can’t explain what you’re doing and why, it may be that you don’t really understand it yourself. n
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Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster, and author of Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, Messy, and the million-selling The Undercover Economist. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less and radio/iTunes series Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy.
WINTER 2018 SOCIETY NOW 19
Photograph: Fran Monks
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