Tim Harford Quotes

“If there’s a profitable deal to be done between somebody who has something unique and someone who has something which can be replaced, then the profits will go to the owner of the unique resource.”

“It is not polite to say so, but it is obvious that paying people to be unemployed encourages unemployment. Yet, if a government scrapped unemployment benefit, there would still be jobless people, and supporting the jobless is something that every civilized society should do. The truth is that we have a trade-off: it is bad to encourage unemployment but good to support those without incomes.”

“The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.”

“We should aim to make ours a world where people feel free to do things they enjoy, even if others are mildly inconvenienced, but also one where we all refrain from harming other people if the effort involved to avoid harming them is small.”