"Trust me, I'm an Economist"

Coming soom, to a station near you - Economics TV! Hamish McRae informs us in the Sunday Independent that Tim Harford's new book The undercover Economist is being turned into a television programme: The dismal science gets into our heads

"Trust me, I'm an economist." Really? Well, yes.

One of the great things that has been happening to the study of economics in recent years has been the focus on the micro rather than the macro. We used to worry mainly about the big issues: GDP growth, interest rates, inflation and so on. We still do, of course. But beside that has been a new interest in what economics can tell us about the small things. Why do people behave as they do? What makes people happy? How do we fix the NHS? Actually those do not sound small at all, but they are concerned with the detail of the behaviour of millions of people, rather than the mass of an economy...more>>