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, humanity’s 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 disease, the pioneers who taught machines to think, and the dangerous ideologues who twisted data into a tool of control.

At once a grand narrative history, a guide to understanding the modern world and a bold vision of what comes next, this is a story about power — who has it, who loses it, and how data became the defining force of our age.

Thrilling, surprising and profoundly relevant, The Measure of Everything shows that the fate of societies has always belonged to those who understand the numbers behind them.

© Tim Harford 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027