Tim Harford

Tim Harford's latest book is Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy.

From his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: Steam engines, silicon chips, social media, these are the sorts of inventions that people point to when asked what made the modern economy, but the undercover economist Jim Harford looks at the subject differently. He always puts a twist on any subject he covers and that's why I love reading his columns in the "FT" and his books.

His latest book is called "50 Inventions That Shape the Modern Economy."

Tim Harford, so you have figured out what are the 50 inventions that shaped the modern economy. Actually they are the fun ones. This is sort of--

TIM HARFORD: Yes. Yes. Not the steam engine, not the motor car, the ones that we don't appreciate, the ones that we overlook. The bar code or barbed wire or one of my favorites is paper. It's--

ZAKARIA: Paper? Explain that.

HARFORD: Well, when I started looking on this book, "50 Inventions," people said you must talk about the Gutenberg press, the movable type printing press that was revolutionary, it was disruptive, the novel, the newspaper, all of this was made possible by the printing press. And of course, that's true but the whole point of the printing press is it's a way of mass producing writing and there is no point in mass producing writing unless you can also mass produce a writing surface.

And that's paper, and if you try to use a printing press on, say, animal skin parchment or silk, you can do it, technically it works, economically completely impossible. So then paper was just a wonderful symbol to me of an invention that's very inexpensive, it's quite simple and it's disruptive, it's important because it's so inexpensive.

ZAKARIA: And the gramophone. Another strange invention to my mind, why do you think it defined or -- you know, the modern world?

HARFORD: Well, the thing about the gramophone is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Tim Harford's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

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Writers Read: Tim Harford (February 2014).

--Marshal Zeringue