Today’s economy is complex with many moving parts. Most participants in the world economy are unaware of the parts. Not just unaware of their importance; often people are unaware they exist.

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy by Tim Harford examines some of the most important factors in today’s global economy. Fifty Things contains 50 five-page essays about items Harford feels are most indispensable to the modern economy. Some are ancient. The plow permitted civilization to develop. Some, like the iPhone, are from the 21st century.

Harford collects the essays into larger themes, with similar inventions grouped together. Examples are Winners and Losers (inventions which enriched some while leaving others stranded), or Ideas about Ideas (which explores the concept of intangible inventions).

Some things Harford identifies are obvious. The shipping container, banking, and the various pieces required for electric power are examples. Without these we would not have a modern economy.

Others are less obvious, until Harford points them out. Then they seem blindingly obvious. One example is the S-bend pipe, the twist in a drainpipe which creates a water trap. The humble S-bend is the basis of modern sanitation. Imagine life in the big city with the various sewage stinks ever-present.

Harford shows how most of these inventions, including most inventions in the Winners and Losers category, improved our lives. Barbed wire fenced the prairies, and robots may be replacing unskilled labor, but the collective benefits left most people better off. Their benefits more than outweighs than the harm suffered by those hurt by these inventions.

Other inventions, such as the passport and leaded gasoline may have had negative overall consequences. Regardless, even negative invention shape modern life.

One of the most delightful things about this book is discovering inventions which are important, but might be unknown to most American readers. One example is M-pesa, a mobile money transfer system. Largely invisible in the United States, it has proved a critically valuable economic tool in the Third World.

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy is marvelous entertainment which manages to be as informative as it is entertaining.

Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, by Tim Harford, Riverhead Books, 2017, 336 pages, $28

I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) My review normally appears Wednesdays. When it appears, I post the review on Ricochet on the following Sunday.