Electricity is one of the most interesting technologies for social scientists. Paul David’s brilliant essay, The Computer and the Dynamo, uses it as an example to illustrate why it can take years or decades for the productivity effects of new technologies to appear – because of the need not only for initial investment but vast complementary investments. The social and economic institutions and incentives to deliver a consistent supply need to be just so – many countries have never managed it and the most advanced can have frequent failures. Think power cuts in California, or potential shortages in the UK given the absence of enough new investment in generation in the past, only now starting to be fixed.

Anyway, that’s by way of saying I am already *loving* Then There Was Light about the rural electrification scheme in Ireland in the mid-20th century. It was a hard sell at first, to conservative, and poor, famers. “By all accounts, farmers were slow to see beyond the costs, until they were asked by young ladies at dances whether they had ‘got the electricity in?'” Everyday cost-benefit analysis. Brilliant. With a moral perhaps for rural roll-out of superfast broadband?