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SUMMER SCHOOL 8: Productivity & Getting Lit
Planet Money
What Happened With Light?
An entire day's wages got you the equivalent of ten minutes of light from a kind of dim light bulb. Growing food was hard making candles for instance took hours and it used up fat. Year after year there are tiny gains in productivity but not a lot. From Babylonian times to around 1800 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. It's just an enormous change in the pace of improvement.
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