I apologise. This blog seems to be mutating from "Tim Harford talks about everyone else" to "everyone else talks about Tim Harford". It is just a passing phase, I assure you. I almost didn’t link to this nice profile by David Smith, economics editor of the Sunday Times, but perhaps readers of this blog might be interested:

Tim Harford, despite his jacket, jeans and baseball boots, still looks like the Oxford economics tutor he used to be. But now he has become a bestselling author, and he has done it by applying the economics he used to teach his students to real life…
His second book, The Logic of Life, is published next week by Little, Brown. Harford is one of life’s nice guys, so it is a bit of a shock to open the new book and go straight into oral sex, apparently the rational choice of American teenagers worried about Aids or abortion. But like its predecessor it is never short of interest.

Update: While we’re at on the subject of The Logic of Life, a nice long piece by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit in the New York Post, entitled "Milton Friedman explains Mr Big". And Marginal Revolution’s book forum continues.

Marginal Revolution is hosting a book forum on "The Logic of Life". The last such forum - on Greg Clark’s "Farewell to Alms" - was superb. I have high hopes for this one. The first expert reviewer is Bryan Caplan of George Mason University. Comments are closed in order to realise economies of scale - if you’d like to join in the discussion, Marginal Revolution is the place.

I am delighted that the London School of Economics is hosting my public lecture on "The Logic of Life", with the excellent Hamish McRae in the chair.. All are welcome, the details are here.

Date: Wednesday 6 February 2008
Time: 6:30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Tim Harford
Chair: Hamish McRae

From teenage sex to the scourge of racism, Tim Harford explains why economics can provide the answers other disciplines cannot reach.

Tim Harford is the author of The Undercover Economist, is a member of the Financial Times editorial board and writes a regular column for the FT magazine.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. If you are planning to attend this event and would like details on how to get here and what time to arrive, please refer to Coming to an event at LSE

I have a piece up in Wired:

As a columnist (which is fancy for "journalist in jammies"), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?
If distance really didn’t matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren’t. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of "superstar cities," which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.
Maybe it’s because society hasn’t wholeheartedly accepted the idea of working remotely. Or perhaps communications technology just isn’t all it’s hyped up to be. After all, the journalists and consultants who tell us that location is insignificant are biased. Like me, they’re the people whose lives have been most transformed by the Internet and cell phones.
But I think the truth is more profound than either of those glib explanations: Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work…

The full piece is here, subscription-free. The research on Google I wrote about in Saturday’s FT Magazine was published after Wired went to press, but it strongly supports the argument, I think.

I don’t know how I managed to miss the gig in my former home town of Washington DC, but I’m delighted to say I’ll be speaking there in Politics and Prose, this Thursday, 24 January, at 7pm.
I’ve updated my events schedule adding the P&P event plus talks in Singapore and New Zealand. I’ve also posted some early reviews here.

Update: Marginal Revolution’s book club discussion begins on Wednesday. I’ll be on my US tour by then but will do my very best to contribute.

The Gladstone Hotel Gallery, 1214 Queen St West, Toronto Thurs Jan 31; 7:30 pm (doors 7pm) free

UPDATE: This event is cancelled. Very sorry about this; I’ve been routed back to New York to do TV there instead & will arrive in Toronto too late for the planned event. I apologise.

Slate is publishing two excerpts from “The Logic of Life“. Here’s the second one:

Perhaps a more positive way to express the trend is that women’s entry into high-powered careers has given them the option to get divorced if the marriage isn’t working out; and the recognition that that option is important is one of the factors encouraging women’s entry into high-powered careers.
That may sound a little abstract, but economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discovered a chilling example of the way that the increased availability of divorce empowered women. As states passed “no fault” divorce laws, women acquired a credible threat to walk out of the marriage. (The statistics suggest that many of them did not, actually, do this. But the threat is enough.) Stevenson and Wolfers show that the new laws had an unexpected—but rational—effect: by giving women an exit-option, they gave men stronger incentives to behave well inside a marriage. The result? Domestic violence fell by almost a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners fell by ten percent. Female suicide also fell. It is a reminder that the binding commitment of marriage has costs as well as benefits…

Read the whole thing. The first extract is about how the pill turned men into slackers.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be touring the US, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, and will also be giving talks in several UK cities. Please drop in and say hello! Public events, many of them free, are now listed here.

Slate is publishing two excerpts from "The Logic of Life". Here’s the first one:

 

Ever since John von Neumann’s game theory promised to help us understand love and marriage, economists have been interested in how people choose their partners and how relationships work.

 

It takes two to tango, and it also takes two to get married. Marriage therefore requires you to go out and find someone you want to marry, and persuade them to marry you. It’s a matching problem, and it is not unique to marriage. Getting a job is emotionally a different proposition to finding a wife or husband, but in some ways it’s similar: you need to consider a range of jobs, work out which ones you prefer, and persuade the employer that he likes the match as much as you do. And just as in the job market, who matches up with whom, and on what terms, will depend on what the competition is offering…

Read the whole thing.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ll be back blogging in the New Year. Even an undercover economist has to take a break…