Features

What the Dog Saw, your forthcoming book, is a collection of writing for the New Yorker. You describe it as an attempt to understand the contents of other people’s minds. What do you mean? 
One of the great continuing source of mystery and excitement for human beings is the understanding we reach at a very young age is that other people’s minds are different from our own, and what we think is not what the world thinks. I think in one form or another the fascination that the world looks different through the minds of others continues indefinitely. In my writing I’m often trying to put myself into the mind of someone who has some kind of specialised perspective.

My favourite article is about Million Dollar Murray: it’s both an unforgettable story and a powerful idea about the statistics of social problems. When you’re writing this kind of essay, what comes first – the story or the theory?
In that case it was the theory. I had been chatting with homelessness advocates and came across this argument they were making that it costs more to neglect homelessness than to cure it. Now it seems obvious, but it had never occurred to me. Once I had that extraordinary fact it was just a matter of finding Murray. But since almost all chronically homeless have the same problems as Murray, finding Murray was no great feat.

You’ve become famous for your public lectures. How do the lectures and the writing influence each other?
The lecture is a great laboratory for storytelling. The lessons you learn fit beautifully in your writing. I recently gave a lecture in Glasgow and it didn’t quite work; then I gave the talk in Brighton and I fixed it. There’s no way that if you’re writing you can do that. If I was writing I would just have handed in the Glasgow draft and never had a chance to improve.

In both your lectures and your books, you’ve tried to inject the values of fiction – storytelling, entertainment, emotional impact – into the form of nonfiction. Is that a fair description?
It’s a very, very fair description. I’m interested in engagement. I’m not interested in persuasion – I mean, if I persuade people I’m happy, but that’s not the main goal. And fiction is like that. Rarely is it the intention of a novelist to ram a particular argument down your throat. 

John Maynard Keynes once said, 'When the facts change, I change my mind.' Has the financial crisis made you change your mind about anything?
Yes, it has. I’ve been quite reverential in my writing towards expertise. Much of my writing is based on going to people who have specialised knowledge. The financial crisis has reminded me that there are diseases associated with expertise that are as dangerous as those associated with incompetence. There was a fever where we became overly worshipful of those who we thought had the requisite amount of experience. We need to be a lot more cautious.

Further reading...

What the Dog Saw
by Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane
Buy now

Tim Harford's latest book is Dear Undercover Economist