Tim Harford: belief

Transcript context

…I’m not sure that could happen now. But what did you learn at the IFC? What did I learn at the IFC? Well, the country risk analysis was intriguing. It was one of those things where we were trying to figure out, how do we rate the risk of different countries that the IFC is supposed to be lending to projects? What’s the political risk of lending to projects in Bolivia? What’s the political risk of lending to projects in Venezuela? So there was this meeting that I had to chair where lots of smart people would say, “Well, here’s what I know about Venezuela. ” I realized that this was a very weird process because in the end, we were all sitting in a room in Washington. The people who I was talking to were well-informed, but still, how much could you really know about what’s going on in Venezuela from a room in Washington when you’re trying to follow the whole of Latin America? Yet, the organization needed a number. And if the organization needed a number, we had to produce a number. So we did the best we could. It was an interesting education there in the weirdness of quantifying when there wasn’t really any point in quantifying. It was very, very different from the experience of having done scenarios at Shell. But I also worked on the outskirts of the Doing Business Team who were doing, I think, fantastic work, quantifying regulations around the world. That was just much more engaging because you really felt people were measuring something that mattered and producing genuinely new information for the world to digest. That was an interesting thing to be. I don’t want to claim any credit for it, but I was on the fringes of that team. And I found it fascinating to see them operating. And throughout your life, do you feel you’ve taken a long-term perspective or a short-term perspective with your decisions in your career?…

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