by Tim Harford
This book caught my eye in our library catalog and so I managed to read a book the same year it was published. This is a pretty easy book to read in small snippets and, while thought-provoking at times, isn't the kind of complicated book that requires reading before children are awake or after they've gone to bed. It explores sometimes surprising effects of inventions most of us take for granted today.
But we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming that inventions are nothing but solutions. They're much more than that. Inventions shape our lives in unpredictable ways--and while they're solving a problem for someone, they're often creating a problem for someone else.Unfortunately, those problems often seem to fall disproportionately on the poor.
The selected fifty inventions are grouped into broad categories: Winners and Losers (like barbed wire), Reinventing How We Live (like the birth control pill), Inventing New Systems (like the bar code), Ideas About Ideas (like double-entry bookkeeping), Where Do Inventions Come From? (like chemical fertilizer), The Visible Hand (like antibiotics in farming), and Inventing the Wheel (like paper money).
Each short chapter presents the story of an invention and an exploration of the myriad ways it has spread its influence through our current global economy. Some of these inventions were ones I hadn't much considered, like property registers. The author also points out how these inventions or their repercussions impact problems we still see in the world like trade deficits and developing countries (in an already developed world).
It's reasonable to assume that future inventions will deliver a similar pattern: broadly, they will solve problems and make us richer and healthier, but the gains will be uneven and there will be blunders and missed opportunities.Overall, this was a fascinating read and quite enjoyable, even if I don't agree with all the author's assertions. I did appreciate the extensive endnotes. I also added a whole slew of notations in my Book of Centuries.
