The Measure of Everything

The Measure of Everything is the epic story of how data created the modern world and why our future depends on learning to use it wisely.

For thousands of years, humanitys greatest breakthroughs have begun with a deceptively simple act: counting. Counting harvests and armies. Births and deaths. Money and trade. From the first marks scratched into clay tablets to the algorithms driving artificial intelligence, data has quietly shaped empires, transformed medicine, fuelled financial booms, won wars and changed the fate of nations.

Now, in his most ambitious book yet, bestselling author Tim Harford uncovers the hidden history of the numbers that made civilisation. Sweeping across centuries and continents, The Measure of Everything brings to life an extraordinary cast of visionaries, obsessives and revolutionaries: the medieval merchants who invented modern capitalism, the scientists who learned to predict the spread of