Ehsan Masood – författare

The fascinating story of one of the twentieth-century's most influential and dangerously addictive ideas, told through the lives of those who invented it.The world’s principal measure of the health of economies is gross domestic product, or GDP: the sum of what all of us spend every day, from the contents of our weekly shopping to large capital spending by businesses. GDP also includes the myriad things that our governments pay for, from libraries and road-line painting to naval dockyards and nuclear weapons. The Great Invention reveals how in just a few decades GDP became the world’s most powerful formula: how six algebraic symbols forged in the fires of the 1930's economic crisis helped Europe and America prosper, how the remedy now risks killing the patient it once saved, and how this fundamentally flawed metric is creating the illusion of global prosperity—and why many world leaders want to be able to ignore it but so far remain powerless to do so. Drawing on interviews, firsthand accounts, and previously neglected source materials, The Great Invention takes readers on a journey from Capitol Hill to Whitehall—on the trail of theories made in Cambridge, tested in Karachi, and designed for global application—into the minds of unworldly geniuses seduced by the allure of power and the demands of politics.

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston.Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

'[A] tale of cloak and dagger intrigue, intense rivalries and political machinations you'd expect in a spy thriller.' Engineering & TechnologyGross Domestic Product is failing. For decades it has rewarded environmental destruction and obscured inequality. Its formula can be-and has been-gamed to the detriment of developing countries.In this powerfully argued book, now updated with a new chapter, science writer Ehsan Masood shows how GDP fell from the path envisaged by its architects, and how its long-term misapplication has kept large parts of the world in poverty, while helping accelerate global warming and biodiversity loss.As the world rebuilds after the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying global recession, our need for a more sustainable and inclusive measure of economic growth has never been greater. Change must come if we are to break the cycle. With clarity and passion, Masood shows how we can update GDP for a better future.[previously published as The Great Invention in North America]