Planet Money
00:08:33 · William Nordhaus, Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum
[00:08:33] S7: I ran into a woman at Yale and she, believe it or not, it's just unbelievable actually, She actually had wage data and price data from the Babylonian era, so four four thousand years ago. [00:08:49] S1: So now he has these numbers, but he needs to know one other thing. How much light are people getting for their money? In ancient Babylon, people used lamps for light, so Nordhaus decided to make one. [00:09:02] S7: I did this in my dining room. Where else? [00:09:06] S1: He buys an ancient style lamp from a catalog. He gets it burning. To measure how bright it is, he borrows a light meter from a facility sky at Yale, and he does some science. [00:09:16] S7: And I would just measure it and write it down just just the way you see in the in the old movies as some guy with... In his lab coat writing down the measurements. [00:09:25] S5: Jacob, odd little note here. I happen to be taking Nordhaus' economics class right around this time, which I will say was a pretty serious, like, no nonsense class. And it is so funny for me to think that at night, he was going home and measuring ancient lamplight in his dining room with a light meter. [00:09:40] S1: So so he does this, the light meter and the ancient lamp, and he has his numbers. But now he has to figure out a way to compare the price of light over thousands of years.
00:09:40 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, William Nordhaus
[00:09:40] S1: So so he does this, the light meter and the ancient lamp, and he has his numbers. But now he has to figure out a way to compare the price of light over thousands of years. [00:09:50] S5: So here's one measure he uses. If you take a day's wages, you work all day, you take all the money you earn in that day, and you spend it on light. How many minutes could you light up a small room at night with as much light as you get from today's modern light bulb? Here's the answer for ancient Babylon. [00:10:07] S7: Maybe ten minutes. It was really expensive. [00:10:11] S5: An entire day's wages got you the equivalent of ten minutes of light from a kind of dim light bulb. Economists talk a lot about productivity. How much one person can produce with a day's labor? And back then, the answer was not much. I mean, was hard. Growing food was hard. Making candles, for instance, took hours, and it used up fat. Fat, which by the way was expensive because raising animals was hard. [00:10:35] S1: This was a world where when the sun went down, almost everyone lived in the dark. And this may sound sort of romantic, but basically, it was awful. The dark was not some beautiful thing you went out and explored. It was dangerous. It was something that trapped you. In Paris, at one point, there was actually a law that said every night, everybody has to give their keys to a magistrate, go home, and lock themselves in the house.
00:10:35 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum
[00:10:35] S1: This was a world where when the sun went down, almost everyone lived in the dark. And this may sound sort of romantic, but basically, it was awful. The dark was not some beautiful thing you went out and explored. It was dangerous. It was something that trapped you. In Paris, at one point, there was actually a law that said every night, everybody has to give their keys to a magistrate, go home, and lock themselves in the house. [00:10:58] S5: And for basically four thousand years, very little happens with light or with the economy in general. Most people work all day and that gets them enough to eat. The way things get better, the way an economy grows, the way people get richer is that someone comes up with a better way to do something. A way that takes a little less work. [00:11:17] S1: Over time, there are small improvements in life and in light. The Romans figure out how to make a lamp that's a little more efficient. People start to use whale oil. This, of course, is very, very bad for whales, but whales have a lot of fat. They were like these big swimming sources of fuel. Still, even when you get all the way to the seventeen hundreds, life still looks more like ancient Babylon than the modern world. People still travel the same way, by foot, by horse, by sailing ship. Most people are still subsistence farmers, usually living in some kind of hut, trying to grow enough food not to starve to death.
00:11:17 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, William Nordhaus
[00:11:17] S1: Over time, there are small improvements in life and in light. The Romans figure out how to make a lamp that's a little more efficient. People start to use whale oil. This, of course, is very, very bad for whales, but whales have a lot of fat. They were like these big swimming sources of fuel. Still, even when you get all the way to the seventeen hundreds, life still looks more like ancient Babylon than the modern world. People still travel the same way, by foot, by horse, by sailing ship. Most people are still subsistence farmers, usually living in some kind of hut, trying to grow enough food not to starve to death. [00:11:52] S5: Year after year, there are tiny gains in productivity, little bits of economic growth, but not a lot. And light, Light still comes from finding stuff that's lying around and just lighting it on fire. Again, economist Bill Nordhaus. [00:12:05] S7: As you look at the picture of what happened here, it's economic history in a nutshell. From Babylonian times to around 1800, there were even though there were improvements, as best we can tell, they were very modest. And then around 1800 in the lighting, you can see it so clearly in lighting. Just a enormous change in the pace of improvement. [00:12:29] S5: What happens in the eighteen hundreds is a few things. We start to really actively experiment. We try to discover stuff. And around 1850, a guy in Canada comes up with something that's not just a slightly better wick or a slightly more efficient lamp. It is this magical liquid. With the right techniques, you can get it from coal or oil.
00:12:29 · David Kestenbaum, Jacob Goldstein, Jane Brox, William Nordhaus
[00:12:29] S5: What happens in the eighteen hundreds is a few things. We start to really actively experiment. We try to discover stuff. And around 1850, a guy in Canada comes up with something that's not just a slightly better wick or a slightly more efficient lamp. It is this magical liquid. With the right techniques, you can get it from coal or oil. [00:12:49] S1: This big breakthrough, kerosene. Not cutting edge now, but back then, Jane Brox says, kerosene was a huge deal. [00:12:57] S2: When the first kerosene lamps came out, it was, as one historian said, it was the kind of oil people had dreamed about for centuries. [00:13:05] S1: It was brighter. It was cleaner. And importantly, it was much cheaper. [00:13:10] S7: You work a day, you get about an hour of whale oil. Kerosene, you get about five hours. Woah. So it's about five times more efficient kerosene lit the world and saved the whales. [00:13:29] S1: So if kerosene was so great, why did it take the world so long to find it? Science. This idea of professional scientists, this idea that there are lots of people who go to work every day at universities and do experiments. In the eighteen hundreds, this is still a new thing. [00:13:47] S5: If you happen to be president of Yale University, this is around the time when you're thinking, you know, maybe we should get one of those science departments. [00:13:54] S7: Why were why were they doing those experiments a century earlier? Well, Yale didn't have scientists a century earlier. They were teaching Greek and they were teaching logic.
00:13:54 · William Nordhaus, David Kestenbaum, Jacob Goldstein, Paul Israel, S6
[00:13:54] S7: Why were why were they doing those experiments a century earlier? Well, Yale didn't have scientists a century earlier. They were teaching Greek and they were teaching logic. [00:14:05] S5: Now all these scientists are working on better ways to make light. And light is getting cheaper. More people are using it. No more locking yourself in and huddling in the dark all night. Around this time, street lights start popping up, and people start going out at night. [00:14:18] S1: So we have kerosene. What's the next big advance after that? [00:14:21] S7: Okay. Next big advance after that is the electric lamp. [00:14:25] S4: The big one. [00:14:27] S7: Well, you might think so. [00:14:29] S5: You know, Jacob, I thought I knew the story of the light bulb. You know, Thomas Edison, the great inventor, story about science and innovation. You know, Edison trying all these different filaments, these different designs, and finally getting one that'll glow for hours. But this Eureka light bulb moment, it is not... It's not enough to get you to the world of really cheap light because Edison needed this other thing. He needed money. He needed lots and lots of money. [00:14:53] S1: After the break, how many bankers does it take to turn on a light bulb? One, JPMorgan, more or less. [00:15:02] S6: Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.