This week’s episode is a Cautionary Questions special with Nate Silver (On The Edge) and Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff) of Risky Business.

Sixteen years have passed since Ferdinand De Lesseps’ catastrophic failure in Panama, and the dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal company. Now, President Theodore Roosevelt has picked up ...

The quest for the elusive Giffen good has taken economists to the depths of the Irish potato famine, to the poorest parts of rural China and to the cages of lab rats at Texas A&M University.

Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every other ...

Ferdinand De Lesseps, “the Great Frenchman”, was convinced that he was the man to build the Panama Canal. No, he wasn’t an engineer and no, he’d never actually been to Panama before. But he’d managed ...

In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an ...

It’s almost 13 years since the UK government raised £22.5bn in one of the biggest auctions of all time, for the right to use radio spectrum for 3G mobile phone services. The next big thing, 4G, has ...

Twenty years ago, economics was cool. Thanks in part to the publication of Freakonomics, economists were regarded as dispensers of brilliant and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. Whether ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...