“Endlessly insightful and full of surprises — exactly what you would expect from Tim Harford.”
Bill Bryson
I’m delighted to announce the launch of my new book, The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy. It’s a sequel to the original in which I presented a selection of fifty radical inventions that changed the world – in the form of surprising, instructive and untold stories about the people and ideas behind these technologies.
Now, in this new book, I’m back with another array of remarkable, memorable, curious and often unexpected ‘things’ – inventions that teach us lessons by turns intimate and sweeping about the complex world economy we live in today.
They range from the brick, blockchain and the bicycle to fire, the factory and fundraising, and from solar PV and the pencil to the postage stamp.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before you can stroll into a bookshop and pick up a copy, but you can also pre-order online at Amazon, Blackwell’s, Hive and Waterstones.
More? You want more? Okay. I’ll be speaking at the Hay Festival online on Monday 25 May at 4pm UK time. Because of the times we live in I’ll focus in particular on What the Pandemic Teaches Us About Innovation. Come along!
At the moment the book is not available in the US – sorry – but you can always pick up the first in the series, the US title being Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy.