Macroeconomics 8: Productivity & Getting Lit
Planet Money Summer School
How Much Does It Cost?
In the united states, in the pacific northwest, native americans used dried salmon. In the tropics, people would catch fireflies and try to make a kind of firefly lntern. These ways of making light were all a huge hassl they took a lot of work. The writer harriet beecher stowe said making candles from animal fat was seven times as bad as washing clothes. Bill northouse, an economist at yale a while back, got obsessed with this question. He decided he wanted to calculate how expensive light was thousands of years ago, and how that cost changed overtime.
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