David McWilliams is an economist, author, journalist, documentary-maker and broadcaster. He is Adjunct Professor of Global Economics at the School of Business Trinity College Dublin. David is ranked 5th most influential economist in the world.

He has devoted his entire professional life to the objective of making economics as widely available and easily understandable on as many platforms and to as many people as possible –and is having a laugh doing it.

As a result, he co-founded the world’s only economics and stand-up comedy festival Kilkenomics – described by the FT as “simply, the best economics conference in the world”.

He also founded Ireland’s leading literary and ideas shindig, the Dalkey Book Festival. The WEF at Davos debased their currency profoundly by making him a Young Global Leader a few years back.

As well as writing a weekly economics column in the Irish Times, he is active on social media and was named Ireland’s “most influential Twitter user” in 2016. David uses new ways to explain our economic world for example Punk Economics and a new venture with the FT, Punk FT, deploy cartoons to make economics digestible for normal, non-nerdy, punters.

David has written four bestsellers The Pope's Children (Macmillan 2006) which became the bestselling nonfiction ever published in Ireland The Generation Game (Macmillan 2007),  Follow the Money, (Gill 2009) The Good Room (Penguin 2012) and Renaissance Nation: How The Pope’s Children Rewrote the Rules for Ireland published by Gill in 2018.  His writing style is described by Bloomberg’s head of economics Stephanie Flanders, as having “a great knack for bringing a complex economics story to life. He is also funny. In economics, that’s a rare and persuasive combination.”

David’s latest book Money: A Story of Humanity was published by Simon & Schuster UK on 12 September 2024. In this illuminating, sometimes irreverent, and often surprising journey, McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money – from a tally stick in ancient Africa to coins in Republican Greece, to mathematics in the medieval Arab world, from innovation in Gutenberg's Germany to the French Revolution and from the emergence of the US dollar, right up to today’s cryptocurrency and beyond. Along the way, we meet a host of characters who have innovated with money, disrupting society and changing the way we live, in an ongoing monetary evolution that has, for the last 5,000 years, animated human progress.

Praise for Money: A Story of Humanity

“A breathtaking, expansive and imaginative ride through the history and future of money from an author who truly understands it”

Professor Brian Cox

“Exceptional”

Financial Times

“A Cracking Book That Is As Enjoyable As It Is Readable”

Peter Frankopan

“Equally entertaining and insightful”

Yanis Varoufakis

“David McWilliams is the best explainer of economics I know”

Simon Kuper

“A timely, fascinating account of how money has powered life on our planet”

Mariella Frostrup

“If, as David McWilliams complains, economists take the fun out of money, then he is the exception that proves the rule: a man who could not write a boring sentence if he tried”

Tom Holland

“Compelling, funny and original”

Katja Hoyer

“A tour de force of economic history'”

Gillian Tett

Listen to David talk about Money: A Story of Humanity on RTE, Radio 1

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22430287/

Rights Sold

The Pope's Children Macmillan (Ireland, UK and Commonwealth) which became the The Generation Game Macmillan (Ireland, UK and Commonwealth

Follow the Money, (Gill) (Ireland, UK and Commonwealth)

The Good Room (Penguin) (Ireland, UK and Commonwealth)

Renaissance Nation: How The Pope’s Children Rewrote the Rules for Ireland (Gill Ireland, UK and Commonwealth)

Money: A Story of Humanity

UK/Ire  (Simon & Schuster UK), Canada (Simon & Schuster), Bulgaria (Kibea Books)

Brazil   (Editora Sextante), China Simplified  (Citic Press Corporation), Croatia  (Koncept izdavaštvo j.d.o.o), Czech   (PROSTOR nakladatelství s.r.o), Germany (Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH), Italy (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore S.R.L), Korea (Poten-Up Publishing Co), Poland (Wydawnictwo Marginesy Sp. z o. o., ul), Portugal  (Desassossego), Romania (SC Publica COM SRL), Serbia (Publik Praktikum d.o.o), Slovak (N Press, s.r.o), Spain (Grupo Planeta S.A)

Western European enquiries to Vicki Satlow Literary Agency

David McWilliams TED talk The Power Of Unconventional Thinking

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mcwilliams_the_power_of_unconventional_thinking

https://richtopia.com/top-lists/economists-2020/

http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie