Introduction

Kalahari Bushmen may not want to take up the plow, but modern civilization still offers them some other potentially lucrative opportunities: a small bottle of cold-pressed mongongo nut oil currently retails for $32.00 on evitamins.com, courtesy the Shea Terra Organics company.¹ Apparently, it’s very good for your hair.

Mongongo nut oil thus counts as one of the approximately 10 billion distinct products and services currently offered in the world’s major economic centers.² The global economic system that delivers these products and services is vast and impossibly complex. It links almost every one of the planet’s 7.5 billion people. It delivers astonishing luxury to hundreds of millions. It also leaves hundreds of millions behind, puts tremendous strains on the planet’s ecosystem, and, as the financial crash of 2008 reminded us, has an alarming habit of spinning into the occasional crisis. Nobody is in charge of it. Indeed, no individual could ever hope to understand more than a fraction of what’s going on.

How can we get our heads around this bewildering system on which our lives depend?

Another one of those 10 billion products—this book—is an attempt to answer that question. Have a closer look at it. (If you’re listening to an audiobook or reading on a tablet, you’ll have to summon up a memory of what a paper book feels like.) Just run your fingers over the surface of the paper. It’s remarkable: It’s flexible, so that it can be bound into a book, the pages turning easily without an elaborate hinge. It’s strong, so that it can be made in slim sheets. Just as important, it’s cheap enough for many uses that will be more short-lived than this book. Cheap enough to use as a wrapping material, cheap enough to make newspapers that will be out of date within hours, cheap enough to use to wipe . . . well, to wipe anything you might want to wipe.

Paper is an amazing material, despite being throwaway stuff. In fact, paper is an amazing material in part because it’s throwaway stuff. But there’s more to a physical copy of this book than paper.

If you look at the back of the jacket, you’ll see a bar code, possibly more than one. The bar code is a way to write a number so that a computer can read it easily, and the bar code on the jacket of this book distinguishes it from every other book that has ever been written. Other bar codes distinguish Coca-Cola from industrial bleach, an umbrella from a portable hard drive. These bar codes are more than just a convenience at the checkout. The development of the bar code has reshaped the world economy, changing where products are made and where we’re able to buy them. Yet the bar code itself is often overlooked.

Near the front of the book there’s a copyright notice. It tells you that while this book belongs to you, the words in the book belong to me. What does that even mean? It’s the result of a meta-invention, an invention about inventions—a concept called “intellectual property.” Intellectual property has profoundly shaped who makes money in the modern world.

Yet there’s an even more fundamental invention on display: writing itself. The ability to write down our ideas, memories, and stories underpins our entire civilization. But we’re now coming to realize that writing itself was invented for an economic purpose, to help coordinate and plan the comings and goings of an increasingly sophisticated economy.

Each of these inventions tells us a story, not just about human ingenuity, but about the invisible systems that surround us: of global supply chains, of ubiquitous information, of money and ideas and, yes, even of the sewage pipe that carries away the toilet paper we flush out of sight.

This book shines a spotlight on the fascinating details of the ways our world economy works by picking out specific inventions—including paper, the bar code, intellectual property, and writing itself. In each case, we’ll find out what happens when we zoom in closely to examine an invention intently or pull back to notice the unexpected connections. Along the way, we’ll discover the answer to some surprising questions. For instance:

• What’s the connection between Elton John and the promise of the paperless office?
• Which American discovery was banned in Japan for four decades, and how did that damage the careers of Japanese women?
• Why did police officers believe that they might have to execute a London murderer twice in 1803—and what does that have to do with portable electronics?
• How did a monetary innovation destroy the Houses of Parliament?
• Which product was launched in 1976 and flopped immediately, yet was lauded by the Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson alongside wine, the alphabet, and the wheel?
• What does Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen have in common with the great Mongolian-Chinese emperor Kublai Khan?

Some of these fifty inventions, such as the plow, are absurdly simple. Others, such as the clock, have become astonishingly sophisticated. Some of them are stodgily solid, like concrete. Others, such as the limited liability company, are abstract inventions that you cannot touch at all. Some, like the iPhone, have been insanely profitable. Others, like the diesel engine, were initially commercial disasters. But all of them have a story to tell that teaches us something about how our world works and that helps us notice some of the everyday miracles that surround us, often in the most ordinary-seeming objects. Some of those stories are of vast and impersonal economic forces; others are tales of human brilliance or human tragedy.

This book isn’t an attempt to identify the fifty most economically significant inventions. It’s not a book-length listicle, with a countdown to the most important invention of all. Indeed, some that would be no-brainers on any such list haven’t made the cut: the printing press, the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the airplane, and the computer.

What justifies such an omission? Simply that there are other stories to tell. For example, the attempt to develop a “death ray” that led, instead, to radar, the invention that helps keep air travel safe. Or the invention that came to Germany shortly before Gutenberg invented the printing press, and without which printing would be technically feasible but economic suicide. (You’ve guessed it: paper.)

And I don’t want to throw shade at the computer, I want to shed light. But that means looking instead at a cluster of inventions that turned computers into the remarkable multipurpose tools they are today: Grace Hopper’s compiler, which made communication between humans and computers much easier; public-key cryptography, which keeps e-commerce secure; and the Google search algorithm, which makes the World Wide Web intelligible.

As I researched these stories, I realized that some themes emerged over and over again. The plow illustrates many of them: for instance, the way new ideas often shift the balance of economic power, creating both new winners and new losers; how economic impacts can be bound up with impacts on the way we live, such as changing relationships between men and women; and how an invention like the plow opens up the possibility for further inventions—writing, property rights, chemical fertilizer, and much more.

So I’ve interspersed the stories with interludes to reflect on these common themes. And by the end of the book, we’ll be able to draw these lessons together and ask how we should think about innovation today. What are the best ways to encourage new ideas? And how can we think clearly about what the effects of those ideas might be, and act with foresight to maximize the good effects and mitigate the bad ones?

It’s all too easy to have a crude view of inventions—to see them simply as solutions to problems. Inventions cure cancer. Inventions get us to our holiday destination more quickly. Inventions are fun. Inventions make money. And of course it is true that inventions catch on because they do solve a problem that somebody, somewhere, wants to be solved. The plow caught on because it helped farmers grow more food with less effort.

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.

These fifty inventions shaped our economy. But they didn’t shape it by just producing more stuff, more cheaply. Each invention tugged on a complex web of economic connections. Sometimes they tangled us up, sometimes they sliced through old constraints, and sometimes they weaved entirely new patterns.