The shortest history of economics By AndrewLeigh. Old Street Publishing. 2024. pp. 228. £14.99 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐1913083496. £4.99 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐1913083502

The Shortest History of Economics doesn't properly deliver on its title. When I originally read the title and a little bit about it, I was expecting to be informed about how economic science has developed from the Ancients until today. Instead, this short book is actually an economic history of the world regularly peppered with insights into economic theory along the way. And as an economic history of the world, it does an okay job at covering the great expanse of time from the prehistoric to the present. A few of its stories warrant being told, and a few criticisms of it warrant being mentioned too. Andrew Leigh, a former professor of economics at the Australian National University, begins his economic history with the story of how light has got so incredibly cheap compared with its cost in the distant past. During our days as hunter gatherers, it would have taken 58 hours of foraging for wood to produce a fire which would give off the same amount of light as a modern light bulb does for an hour today. Thanks to minor improvements – though people had to work for only 41 hours in Babylonian times (around 1750 BC) to get the same amount of light, and just five hours in the 1700s with candles. In the Victorian age the invention of gas lamps reduced this figure down to only a couple of hours. Now an individual need work only a second to get an hour of use from a modern light bulb. “Measured in terms of artificial light, the earnings from work are 300,000 times higher today than they were in prehistoric times” (p. 2). Another little story which interested me concerns the introduction of ‘general purpose technologies’ such as steam power in the late eighteenth century and electricity in the late nineteenth century. According to Leigh, such technologies “often take time to have an impact”; indeed, “British factories were still using three times as much water power as coal power” in 1800 despite James Watt's first profitable dual cylinder steam engine coming to market in 1776 (p. 48). The same slow process occurred with the introduction of the electric motor, which came about in the 1880s but was not properly established in economies until the 1920s. In the same chapter we get a tiny history of the reaction to these general purpose technologies via Ned Ludd, “the fictional figurehead of the Luddites” (p. 55) as well. I was not aware that the British government at the time took the riots so seriously that they made the breaking of textile machines a capital offence. Skipping forward about 160 years, Leigh explains how the introduction of freer markets by Deng Xiaoping in China lifted ten million people out of poverty every year from 1978 onwards. And on the next page we are returned to the Western world and told how Thatcher and Reagan also pursued a privatisation agenda: an agenda Leigh takes to have been “overhyped” (p. 128) due to many of the privatised state entities being natural monopolies. Generally, the political angle taken by Leigh in the book is that of a social democrat who is sympathetic to free markets in most places. Now, should this review read in a rather scattergun fashion, I should add this simply reflects the nature of the book, which skips about the globe and various topics without much gelling of them together. Reading it felt very disjointed; and this leads me to the main issue I have with it. It attempts to do too much. The small book claims to outline “the story of capitalism”, then “the story of the discipline of economics”, and, finally, “the story of how economic forces have shaped world history” (p. 3). Due to this ambition everything feels far too surface-level in its analysis. Take the discussion of the dispute between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek. The exposition of their respective theories of the business cycle runs to three paragraphs. We are then treated to two paragraphs, almost equal in length to the aforementioned exposition, about how Hayek “had only three close male friends in his life” and how Keynes “kept diaries of his sexual exploits (with men and women)” (p. 89). In a book with 194 pages of text, 17 pages of indented asides – on the gender pay gap, the economics of sport, and how beauty pays, among other things – really disrupt its narrative too, and this is in a book with three stories, which already makes it very disjointed anyway. I would perhaps recommend this book to a student about to take A-level Economics or an adult who wanted to slowly read something commuting on a train on which they could devote little attention. For everyone else, though, I would not recommend reading it.