Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 5d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Pushkin.

This cautionary tale is based with permission on David Epstein's book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.

Let's start with the idea, and the man whose idea it was.

His name was Mark Peratt.

Peratt was a man with a vision of a technology so powerful it would catalyse a new age of civilisation.

That doesn't happen often.

Thousands of years ago, the plough was a technology that unleashed the agricultural age.

In the 1760s, the first practical steam engine started the industrial age.

And what comes next?

The information age, of course.

We know that now.

Half a century ago, it wasn't so obvious.

But Mark Peratt saw it back in 1976 in his doctoral research.

Here he is a few years later, presenting his own primetime PBS documentary.

It's called The Information Society.

That was 1980.

The information age was just getting started.

Where would it go?

What would people do as computers became more and more powerful, more and more ubiquitous?

Mark Peratt knew.

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