Years ago, someone known to me who used to work in the merchant navy, told me a tit-bit that surprised me to no end. He said that the shipping industry has made transportation so cheap that if you catch a fish in the sea around Ireland and send it all the way to China and back for filleting; the process is still cheaper than employing Irish labourers to do the same. I was stunned for several moments, and it required me many more to even process this information sufficiently. Pondering upon it further, I released the importance of shipping in the formation of modern economic system. Surely it deserved some glory-filled pages. However, there were none to be. Apparently such glories were only afforded to cutting-edge and often glamorous inventions such as Hubble’s Telescope or something.
That is till I came across Tim Harford’s new book Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy. Tim Harford is probably among the most exciting voices on the Radio in Great Britain. His programme on Channel Four is not only one of the most heard programmes, but also probably the most loved. Harford is a trained economist who worked in that capacity before joining as a staff writer at the Financial Times. He later joined BBC as a presenter. Harford has written several books on economics, many of which I have read. However, this is surely his first book which has a crossdisciplinary feel.
What’s the scope of this book? While the title sounds selfexplanatory, it is actually not. In his own words, Harford says, “New ideas and inventions have woven, tangled or sliced right through the invisible economic web that surrounds us every day. From the barcode to double-entry bookkeeping, covering ideas as solid as concrete or as intangible as the limited liability company, this book not only shows us how new ideas come about, it also shows us their unintended consequences – for example, how the gramophone introducing radically unequal pay in the music industry, or how the fridge shaped the politics of developing countries across the globe.”
The selection of fifty things is very peculiar. And as mentioned above, it is an ode to some of those things that have been considered unglamorous. It ranges from things like the Plough, Barbed Wire, Robots, TV Dinners, The Pill, Video Games, Air Conditioning, Department Stores, The Dynamo, The Shipping Container and The Barcode to ideas such as The Welfare State, Market Research, Tradable Debt and Double-Entry Bookkeeping. You can very well see how eclectic the list looks if not outright eccentric.
However, it is through small stories that demonstrate their impacts on the human civilization in general and modern economic system in particular. Take for example TV Dinners, also known as packaged meal or ready-made meal. Harford informs us that TV Dinners had the biggest impact on women emancipation, at least in the developed world. Before packaged meals came into being, an average female in the western world used to spend an average of four hours a day cooking meals for the family. Packaged meal revolutionized the very process, bringing it down to an average of just 45 minutes a day. Cooking turned into a pleasure exercise to be done on the weekends. This was more revolutionary than for example washing machine that actually didn’t make much impact on women’s lifestyle contrary to the popular belief. For before washing machines came into being, people used to just leave clothes unwashed and stinking for a very long time. They apparently could not last that long without food. Hence TV Dinners over washing machine.
The wriTe-ups are divided inTo 50 chapTers, all of which are reader-friendly
Another interesting inclusion is Lifts. Now, when it comes to skyscrapers, we tend to give all credits to those engineers who first invented the civil engineering technology that made skyscrapers possible. However, it is actually our good old elevators that changed the landscape; often quite literally. For without elevators or lifts, these skyscrapers could not have been even imagined. Lifts changed the entire idea of a cityscape. Development started to happen vertically rather than horizontally. How that impacted economy is very clear.
Same goes for Passports,From the days of Napoleon, who considered it an abomination, to the days of refugee crisis in Europe; passport probably has always been the most important documents in the hands of humankind.
The write-ups are divided into 50 chapters – one each for a thing – all of which are extremely reader-friendly. There is no information overload, neither is there unnecessary preaching. What is there, however, are general knowledge titbits. For example, Harford informs us that the first use of a barcode was at a checkout in 1974 at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, when a ten-pack of 50 sticks of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit was scanned. The book is full of such interesting titbits.
I could scarcely find any flaw here. Anyone interesting in more in-depth understanding of a particular object can go for specialised book. The scope of this book is to give introductory knowledge on the impact of these things on global economic system, and it serves its purpose ably.
This makes the book as accessible for enthusiasts of science, technology and economics, as it is to those casual readers who are looking for capsules of information to impress upon family and friends at weekend parties. Or possibly at office water coolers.
