A Lit-up World — 4,000 Years of Economic Growth in Seven Minutes

Image credit.

Writes David Kestenbaum, prefacing the transcript of a panel exchange at npr: 

You can trace 4,000 years of economic growth through the history of light. The ways we got from a candle, made from of animal fat, to the LED lights we have today tell a lot about our modern economy.

...

ISRAEL: So at 3 P.M on September 4th [1882], Edison flicked on the switch here at JP Morgan's office.

GOLDSTEIN: And what happened?

ISRAEL: It went on...

...

ISRAEL: ...and as did lights all over the district. About a square mile of Lower Manhattan suddenly was lit by electricity.

GOLDSTEIN: To light a square mile of Lower Manhattan, Edison needed a whole financial system. He needed patents, a way to protect his ideas so no one would steal them. He needed a company, a way a bunch of different investors could come together and risk money - a lot of money - to build a power plant and lay wires so you could try this crazy thing, light without fire. Edison came along at a time when all this financial machinery - patents, corporations, banks - was in place.

KESTENBAUM: So the Babylonians worked a day to get 10 minutes of light.

GOLDSTEIN: Four thousand years later, in the 19th century with kerosene lamps, a day's labor got you five hours of light.

KESTENBAUM: By the time Bill Nordhaus does his light study in the 1990s, if you work a day, how many hours of light do you get?

NORDHAUS: Maybe 20,000.

KESTENBAUM: Twenty thousand hours?

...

NORDHAUS: Twenty thousand hours, yeah. Not bad.

The source.