Notes

1. The Plow

1. For a deep exploration of this scenario, see Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World After an Apocalypse (London: Vintage, 2015).

2. James Burke, Connections (BBC TV documentary, 1978).

3. James Burke, Connections (London: Macmillan, 1978), 7; Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, ed. Stephen Macedo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

4. Morris, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, 153.

5. Ibid., 52. Morris uses consumption of energy (in food and other forms) as his measure of income—reductive, but given that we’re talking about prehistory here, not unreasonable.

6. Burke, Connections (documentary). In The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage, 1970), Jane Jacobs sets out an alternative view: The city came first, in the form of a trading settlement that gradually grew to something more complex and permanent. Only then did agricultural technologies such as the plow and domesticated animals and crops arrive. Either way, the plow appeared early in civilization and has been essential ever since.

7. Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Measuring Ancient Inequality,” NBER Working Paper No. 13550, October 2007.

8. Dartnell, The Knowledge, 60–62.

9. Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 39–57.

10. Morris, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, 59.

11. Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987, http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.

12. Morris, Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, 60.

13. Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

Introduction

1. See, for instance, https://www.evitamins.com/uk/mongongo-hair-oil-shea-terra-organics-108013, accessed January 17, 2017.

2. This is an educated guess courtesy of Eric Beinhocker, director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University.

I. Winners and Losers

1. Walter Isaacson, “Luddites Fear Humanity Will Make Short Work of Finite Wants,” Financial Times, March 3, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/9e9b7134-c1a0-11e4-bd24-00144feab7de.

2. Tim Harford, “Man vs Machine (Again),” Financial Times, March 13, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/f1b39a64-c762-11e4-8e1f-00144feab7de; Clive Thompson, “When Robots Take All of Our Jobs, Remember the Luddites,” Smithsonian, January 2017, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-robots-take-jobs-remember-luddites-180961423/.

3. Evan Andrews, “Who Were the Luddites?” History, August 7, 2015, http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/who-were-the-luddites.

2. The Gramophone

1. “The World’s Highest-Paid Musicians of 2015,” Forbes, December 8, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2015/12/08/the-worlds-highest-paid-musicians-of-2015/#3ceee81a2264.

2. A print after the painting, Mrs. Billington, as St. Cecilia, is in the collection of the British Museum; see http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1597608&partId=1. See also Chrystia Freeland, “What a Nineteenth-Century English Soprano Can Teach Us About the Income Gap,” Penguin Press blog, April 1, 2013, http://thepenguinpress.com/2013/04/elizabeth-billington/.

3. W. B. Squire, “Elizabeth Billington,” Dictionary of National Biography, 1895–1900, vol. 5, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Billington,_Elizabeth_(DNB00).

4. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890; 8th ed. 1947), cited in Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” The American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (December 1981), 857. “Marshall’s Principles was published in many editions over the years, the first one in 1890. Chrystia Freeland, in “What a Nineteenth-Century English Soprano Can Teach Us About the Income Gap,” dates Marshall’s Mrs. Billington passage to 1875.

5. “Oldest Recorded Voices Sing Again,” BBC News, March 28, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7318180.stm.

6. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 35.

7. Richard Osborne, Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012).

8. Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” 857.

9. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3456453/Mind-gap-Premier-League-wages-soar-average-salaries-2014-15-season-1-7million-rest-creep-along.html.

10. Cited in Alan B. Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World,” Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section Working Paper 484, April 2004; subsequently published in Journal of Labor Economics 23, no. 1 (January 2005).

11. Alan B. Krueger, “Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” speech delivered at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, June 12, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/hope_and_dreams-final.pdf.

3. Barbed Wire

1. Alan Krell, The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 27.

2. Ian Marchant, The Devil’s Rope, BBC Radio 4, January 19, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048l0s1.

3. Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History, trans. Jonathan Kneight (London: Profile Books, 2002).

4. http://www.historynet.com/homestead-act and http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ag.011.

5. See Joanne Liu’s map (from her book Barbed Wire: The Fence That Changed the West) at “The Devil’s Rope,” 99% Invisible, episode 157, March 17, 2015, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/.

6. “The Devil’s Rope,” 99% Invisible, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/.

7. Razac, Barbed Wire, 5–6.

8. Texas State Historical Association, “Fence Cutting,” https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/auf01.

9. Alexander E. Sweet and J. Armoy Knox, On an American Mustang, Through Texas, from the Gulf to the Rio Grande (Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton, 1883), https://archive.org/stream/onmexicanmustang00swee/onmexicanmustang00swee_djvu.txt.

10. Morag Barbara Arneil, “‘All the World Was America’: John Locke and the American Indian,” Ph.D. dissertation, University College London, 1992, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317765/1/283910.pdf, 264.

11. See Cory Doctorow, “Lockdown: The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing,” http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html; “Matt Lieber Goes to Dinner,” Reply All podcast, episode 90, March 2, 2017, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/90-matt-lieber-goes-to-dinner/.

12. Marchant, The Devil’s Rope.

4. Seller Feedback

1. “One Driver Explains How He Is Helping to Rip Off Uber in China,” Bloomberg, June 28, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-28/one-driver-explains-how-he-is-helping-to-rip-off-uber-in-china.

2. https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/meet-the-buyer-of-the-broken-laser-pointer/.

3. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/chesters.html.

4. https://player.vimeo.com/video/130787986.

5. Tim Harford, “From Airbnb to eBay, the Best Ways to Combat Bias,” Financial Times, November 16, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/7a170330-ab84-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122; Benjamin G. Edelman, Michael Luca, and Daniel Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-069, http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/16-069_5c3b2b36-d9f8-4b38-9639-2175aaf9ebc9.pdf, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (forthcoming).

5. Google Search

1. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Six Searches That Show the Power of Google,” BBC News, April 26, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36131495.

2. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2006), 104.

3. Ibid., 78.

4. http://www.statista.com/statistics/266472/googles-net-income/.

5. Battelle, The Search, chap. 5.

6. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120916/14454920395/newspaper-ad-revenue-fell-off-quite-cliff-now-par-with-1950-revenue.shtml.

7. McKinsey & Company, “The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search,” July 2011, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/client_service/High%20Tech/PDFs/Impact_of_Internet_technologies_search_final2.ashx.

8. See “Lost in a Cab,” Reply All podcast, episode 76, September 8, 2016, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/76-lost-in-a-cab/.

9. http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/.

10. http://seo2.0.onreact.com/10-things-the-unnatural-links-penalty-taught-me-about-google-and-seo.

11. Kira Radinsky, “Data Monopolists Like Google Are Threatening the Economy,” Harvard Business Review, March 2, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/03/data-monopolists-like-google-are-threatening-the-economy.

6. Passports

1. Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Canterbury, England: Queen Anne’s Fan, 2008), 63.

2. Ibid., 3.

3. Ibid., 200.

4. Ibid., 3.

5. Ibid., 18, 95.

6. Ibid., 18, 95–96.

7. Jane Doulman and David Lee, Every Assistance & Protection: A History of the Australian Passport (Annandale, Australia: The Federation Press, 2008), 34.

8. Lloyd, The Passport, 95.

9. Ibid., 70–71.

10. Ibid., 96–97.

11. http://time.com/4162306/alan-kurdi-syria-drowned-boy-refugee-crisis/.

12. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/aylan-kurdi-s-story-how-a-small-syrian-child-came-to-be-washed-up-on-a-beach-in-turkey-10484588.html.

13. Joel Gunter, “Alan Kurdi Death: A Syrian Kurdish Family Forced to Flee,” BBC News, September 4, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34141716.

14. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/visit/visas-all.asp.

15. Kim Gittleson, “Where Is the Cheapest Place to Buy Citizenship?” BBC News, June 4, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27674135.

16. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/six-out-of-10-migrants-to-europe-come-for-economic-reasons-and-are-not-refugees-eu-vice-president-a6836306.html.

17. Amandine Aubrya, Michał Burzyńskia, and Frédéric Docquiera, “The Welfare Impact of Global Migration in OECD Countries,” Journal of International Economics 101 (July 2016), 1–21, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002219961630040X.

18. Mr. Tebbit was actually relating a story about his own father’s search for work. But most people inferred that he was telling jobless people in general to get on their bikes. See Michael Wild, “On Your Bike . . .” BBC News, May 16, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/6660723.stm.

19. http://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/.

20. Lloyd, The Passport, 97–101.

7. Robots

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA12i3ODFyM.

2. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/hitachi-developing-dual-armed-robot-for-warehouse-picking.

3. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538601/inside-amazons-warehouse-human-robot-symbiosis/.

4. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150603-science-technology-robots-economics-unemployment-automation-ngbooktalk/.

5. http://www.robotics.org/joseph-engelberger/unimate.cfm.

6. http://newatlas.com/baxter-industrial-robot-positioning-system/34561/.

7. https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/world-robotics-report-2016.

8. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/03/28/made-in-the-u-s-a-again/.

9. http://www.techinsider.io/companies-that-use-robots-instead-of-humans-2016-2/#quiet-logistics-robots--quickly-find-package-and-ship-online-orders-in-warehouses-2.

10. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/9-jobs-robots-already-do-better-than-you-2014-01-27.

11. https://www.wired.com/2015/02/incredible-hospital-robot-saving-lives-also-hate/.

12. http://fortune.com/2016/06/24/rosie-the-robot-data-sheet/.

13. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/04/qa-the-future-of-sense-and-avoid-drones.

14. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

15. http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are-taking/.

16. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/.

17. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva; World Economic Forum, 2016).

18. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150603-science-technology-robots-economics-unemployment-automation-ngbooktalk/.

19. https://www.ft.com/content/da557b66-b09c-11e5-993b-c425a3d2b65a.

8. The Welfare State

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/women-warriors.html.

2. Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins—Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).

3. http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/work-versus-welfare-trade-europe.

4. http://economics.mit.edu/files/732.

5. https://inclusivegrowth.be/visiting-grants/outputvisitis/c01-06-paper.pdf.

6. Lane Kenworthy, “Do Social Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment,” Social Forces 77, no. 3 (March 1999), 1119–1139, https://lanekenworthy.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/1999sf-poverty.pdf.

7. Koen Caminada, Kees Goudswaard, and Chen Wang, “Disentangling Income Inequality and the Redistributive Effect of Taxes and Transfers in 20 LIS Countries over Time,” September 2012, http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/581.pdf.

8. For the UK, see the Institute for Fiscal Studies presentation on Living Standards, Poverty and Inequality 2016, https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/conferences/hbai2016/ahood_income%20inequality2016.pdf. The World Wealth and Incomes Database, at http://www.wid.world/, collects information on the income share of the top 10 percent and top 1 percent in various countries.

9. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/field/field_document/20150917WelfareStateEuropeNiblettBeggMushovel.pdf.

10. Benedict Dellot and Howard Reed, “Boosting the Living Standards of the Self-Employed,” RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) report, March 2015, https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/boosting-the-living-standards-of-the-self-employed.

11. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/19/eu-deal-what-david-cameron-asked-for-and-what-he-actually-got/.

12. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bruce-bartlett-conservative-case-for-welfare-state.

13. Martin Clark, Mussolini (Abingdon, England, and New York: Routledge, 2014).

14. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c7ba87e-229f-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html.

15. Evelyn L. Forget, “The Town with No Poverty: Using Health Administration Data to Revisit Outcomes of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment,” February 2011, https://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf.

16. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c7ba87e-229f-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html.

17. Megan McArdle, “Universal Basic Income Is Ahead of Its Time (to Say the Least),” June 6, 2016, Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal-basic-income-is-ahead-of-its-time-to-say-the-least.

18. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/why-dont-we-have-universal-basic-income.

II. Reinventing How We Live

1. Luke Lewis, “17 Majestically Useless Items from the Innovations Catalogue,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/majestically-useless-items-from-the-innovations-catalogue?utm_term=.rjJpZjxz4Y#.fjJXKxp6y7.

9. Infant Formula

1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1816-the-year-without-summer-excerpt/.

2. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/132/7/2092S.full.

3. William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

4. Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

5. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6a6660e6-e88a-11e1-8ffc-00144feab49a.html.

6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/.

7. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/72/1/241s.full.pdf.

8. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT.

9. Marianne R. Neifert, Dr. Mom’s Guide to Breastfeeding (New York: Plume, 1998).

10. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/.

11. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2379896/pdf/canfamphys00115-0164.pdf.

12. Geoff Talbot, Specialty Oils and Fats in Food and Nutrition: Properties, Processing and Applications (Cambridge, England: Woodhead, 2015), 287.

13. Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz, “Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2, no. 3 (2010), 228–255.

14. https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2013/nov/29/parental-leave-rights-around-world.

15. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/11/23/why-mark-zuckerberg-taking-paternity-leave-really-matters/?utm_term=.c36a3cbfe8c0.

16. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3387873/.

17. http://www.who.int/pmnch/media/news/2016/lancet_breastfeeding_partner_release.pdf?ua=1.

18. Ibid.

19. http://www.slideshare.net/Euromonitor/market-overview-identifying-new-trends-and-opportunities-in-the-global-infant-formula-market.

20. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table.

21. http://www.businessinsider.com/nestles-infant-formula-scandal-2012-6?IR=T#the-baby-killer-blew-the-lid-off-the-formula-industry-in-1974-1.

22. “Timeline: China Milk Scandal,” BBC News, January 25, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7720404.stm.

23. http://www.sltrib.com/news/3340606-155/got-breast-milk-if-not-a.

10. TV Dinners

1. Alison Wolf, The XX Factor (London: Profile Books, 2013), 80–85.

2. Jim Gladstone, “Celebrating (?) 35 Years of TV Dinners,” Philly.com, November 2, 1989, http://articles.philly.com/1989-11-02/entertainment/26137683_1_tv-dinner-frozen-dinner-clarke-swanson

3. USDA, Economic Research Service, “Food-Away-from-Home,” http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-choices-health/food-consumption-demand/food-away-from-home.aspx, last updated December 30, 2016.

4. Matt Philips, “No One Cooks Any More,” Quartz, June 14, 2016, http://qz.com/706550/no-one-cooks-anymore/.

5. Wolf, The XX Factor, 83.

6. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 48–49 and especially 72–73. Professor Cowan also offers a touching postscript about her own experience with laundry.

7. Wolf, The XX Factor, 84; Valerie A. Ramey, “Time Spent in Home Production in the 20th Century: New Estimates from Old Data,” NBER Paper 13985 (2008), published in The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 1 (March 2009), 1–47, http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Home_Production_published.pdf; Valerie Ramey, “A Century of Work and Leisure,” NBER Paper 12264 (2006), published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1, no. 2 (July 2009), 189–224.

8. Wolf, The XX Factor, 85.

9. David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, and Jesse Shapiro, “Why Have Americans Become More Obese?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 3 (2003), 93-118, doi:10.1257/089533003769204371.

11. The Pill

1. Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill (London: Macmillan, 2014), 7.

2. James Trussell, “Contraceptive Failure in the United States,” Contraception. 83, no. 5 (May 2011), 397–404.

3. Unless otherwise stated, the argument and statistics here are from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 4 (2002), 730–770, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2624453.

4. A later study by economist Martha Bailey used a similar state-by-state analysis to examine the impact of oral contraceptives on women’s wages. She, too, found a major effect: women who had had access to them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one were making 8 percent more than women who had not.

5. Steven E. Landsburg, “How Much Does Motherhood Cost?” Slate, December 9, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2005/12/the_price_of_motherhood.html; Amalia R. Miller, “The Effects of Motherhood Timing on Career Path,” Journal of Population Economics 24, no. 3 (July 2011), 1071–1100, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41488341.

6. Carl Djerassi, one of the fathers of the Pill, has a chapter on the Japanese case in This Man’s Pill: Reflections on the 50th Birthday of the Pill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

7. See, e.g., the World Economic Forum Gender Gap report and ranking: https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2015/ and http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/29/national/japan-remains-near-bottom-of-gender-gap-ranking/#.V0cFlJErI2w.

12. Video Games

1. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010), 55. The name is actually rendered with an exclamation point—Spacewar!

2. J. M. Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” Creative Computing 7, no. 8 (August 1981).

3. In 1972, Stewart Brand wrote a prescient piece for Rolling Stone, “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” about how Spacewar would transform our relationship to computers. His brilliant opening lines: “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics” (Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html). More recently, Steven Johnson has argued that Brand’s article was almost as influential as Spacewar itself, helping people understand how computers had been unlocked and turned into compelling sources of entertainment and enrichment for everyone—not just gray corporate calculators; see Johnson, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016).

4. Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar.”

5. It’s often said that video games take in more revenue than films, but this claim stacks up only if we take a broad view of video games—including spending on game consoles—and a narrow view of movies, excluding rentals, streaming, and DVD sales. Nevertheless, video games earn a large and growing revenue. See http://www.gamesoundcon.com/single-post/2015/06/14/Video-Games-Bigger-than-the-Movies-Dont-be-so-certain for a useful discussion.

6. Edward Castronova, “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” CESifo Working Paper No. 618, December 2001.

7. Vili Lehdonvirta, “Geographies of Gold Farming,” blog post, Oxford Internet Institute, October 29, 2014, http://cii.oii.ox.ac.uk/2014/10/29/geographies-of-gold-farming-new-research-on-the-third-party-gaming-services-industry/, and Vili Lehdonvirta interview with the author, December 9, 2016.

8. “Virtual Gaming Worlds Overtake Namibia,” BBC News, August 19, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3570224.stm; “Virtual Kingdom Richer than Bulgaria,” BBC News, March 29, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1899420.stm.

9. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (London: Vintage, 2011), 3. McGonigal’s estimates included 183 million in the United States, 105 million in India, 200 million in China, and 100 million in Europe.

10. Ana Swanson, “Why Amazing Video Games Could Be Causing a Big Problem for America,” The Washington Post, September 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/23/why-amazing-video-games-could-be-causing-a-big-problem-for-america/.

13. Market Research

1. Charles Coolidge Parlin, “The Merchandising of Automobiles: An Address to Retailers” (Philadelphia: The Curtis Publishing Company, 1915), http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89097464051;view=1up;seq=1.

2. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/market-research-analysts.htm.

3. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23990211.

4. Douglas Ward, A New Brand of Business: Charles Coolidge Parlin, Curtis Publishing Company, and the Origins of Market Research (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

5. Parlin, “The Merchandising of Automobiles.”

6. Tom Collins, The Legendary Model T Ford: The Ultimate History of America’s First Great Automobile (Iola, WI: Krause, 2007), 78, 155.

7. Mansel G. Blackford and Austin K. Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

8. http://www.economist.com/node/1632004.

9. Ibid.

10. Blackford and Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History.

11. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html.

12. Geoffrey Miller, Must Have: The Hidden Instincts Behind Everything We Buy (New York: Vintage, 2010).

13. http://dwight-historical-society.org/Star_and_Herald_Images/1914_Star_and_Herald_images/019_0001.pdf.

14. Air-Conditioning

1. http://www.economist.com/node/17414216.

2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rain-how-to-try-to-make-it-rain/.

3. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2003081,00.html.

4. Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), 57.

5. http://www.williscarrier.com/1903-1914.php.

6. Bernard Nagengast, “The First Century of Air Conditioning,” ASHRAE Journal, February 1999, https://www.ashrae.org/File%20Library/docLib/Public/200362794446_326.pdf.

7. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/keepin-it-cool-how-the-air-conditioner-made-modern-america/241892/,

8. Johnson, How We Got to Now, 81–83.

9. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2003081,00.html.

10. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/10/climate-heat-world-air-conditioning.

11. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21569017-artificial-cooling-makes-hot-places-bearablebut-worryingly-high-cost-no-sweat.

12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/31/the-world-is-about-to-install-700-million-air-conditioners-heres-what-that-means-for-the-climate/.

13. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/business/for-biggest-cities-of-2030-look-toward-the-tropics.html.

14. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21569017-artificial-cooling-makes-hot-places-bearablebut-worryingly-high-cost-no-sweat.

15. http://journaltimes.com/news/local/violence-can-rise-with-the-heat-experts-say/article_d5f5f268-d911-556b-98b0-123bd9c6cc7c.html.

16. Geoffrey M. Heal and Jisung Park, “Feeling the Heat: Temperature, Physiology & the Wealth of Nations,” John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, January 2014, Discussion Paper 14-60, http://live.belfercenter.org/files/dp60_heal-park.pdf.

17. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2003081,00.html.

18. http://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3510.full.pdf.

19. Heal and Park, “Feeling the Heat.”

20. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/how-america-became-addicted-to-air-conditioning.

21. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21569017-artificial-cooling-makes-hot-places-bearablebut-worryingly-high-cost-no-sweat.

22. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/10/climate-heat-world-air-conditioning.

15. Department Stores

1. Lindy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge (London: Profile Books, 2007).

2. Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 192.

3. Steven Johnson, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016); Trentmann, Empire of Things, 192.

4. Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge.

5. Harry E. Resseguie, “Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823–1876,” The Business History Review 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1965), 301–322.

6. Trentmann, Empire of Things, 191–197.

7. Ibid., 194.

8. The American Time Use Survey for 2015, Table 1, shows that women spend an average of fifty-three minutes a day “purchasing goods and services”: men spend thirty-six minutes a day doing the same. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureaus of Labor Statistics, USDL-16-1250, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf.

9. “‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking down the Aisles,” Knowledge@Wharton (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), November 28, 2007, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/men-buy-women-shop-the-sexes-have-different-priorities-when-walking-down-the-aisles/.

10. Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge.

III. Inventing New Systems

1. Friendship Among Equals, an official history of the ISO published in 1997: http://www.iso.org/iso/2012_friendship_among_equals.pdf.

16. The Dynamo

1. Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.

2. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 546–547.

3. The key sources here are Paul David, “The Computer and the Dynamo: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” AEA Papers and Proceedings: Economic History of Technology 80, no. 2 (May 1990), 355–361, which popularized the parallel between computing in the late twentieth century and electricity in the late nineteenth; and Warren D. Devine, Jr., “From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification,” The Journal of Economic History 43, no. 2 (June 1983), 347–372, which gives much more detail both about how the steam-powered and electric powered factories worked, and the take-up of the new technology over time.

4. Paul A. David and Mark Thomas, The Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2006), 134–143.

5. Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt, “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (Fall 2000), 23–48.

17. The Shipping Container

1. “Merchandise Trade (% of GDP)” (World Trade Organization, and World Bank estimates), The World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TG.VAL.TOTL.GD.ZS.

2. “Intermodal Container,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container, accessed July 4, 2016.

3. Louis Allen and Maritime Cargo Transportation Conference (U.S.), The SS Warrior (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1954).

4. Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 2. See also Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think (London: The MIT Press, 2015).

5. Levinson, The Box, 129–130.

6. Ibid., 38.

7. Ibid., 45.

8. Levinson, The Box. See also G. Van Den Burg, Containerisation: A Modern Transport System (London: Hutchinson, 1969).

9. Nuno Limao and Anthony Venables, “Infrastructure, Geographical Disadvantage and Transport Costs,” World Bank Research Paper 2257 (1999), http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTEXPCOMNET/Resources/2463593-1213975515123/09_Limao.pdf.

10. At least, so says the “World Freight Rates Freight Calculator”: http://www.worldfreightrates.com/en/freight; $1,500 for a container, and a container can weigh more than thirty tons.

18. The Bar Code

1. Margalit Fox, “N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Barcode, Dies at 91,” The New York Times, December 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-the-bar-code-dies-at-91.html?hp&_r=0.

2. Charles Gerena, “Reading Between the Lines: How the Grocery Industry Coalesced Behind the UPC Bar Code,” Econ Focus, Second Quarter, 2014, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2014/q2/economic_history.

3. Guru Madhavan, Think Like an Engineer: Inside the Minds That Are Changing Our Lives (London: OneWorld, 2015).

4. Stephen A. Brown, Revolution at the Checkout Counter: The Explosion of the Bar Code (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

5. Alistair Milne, “The Rise and Success of the Barcode: Some Lessons for Financial Services,” Loughborough University Working Paper, February 2013.

6. Ibid.

7. Thomas J. Holmes, “Bar Codes Lead to Frequent Deliveries and Superstores,” The RAND Journal of Economics 32, no. 4 (Winter 2001).

8. National Retail Federation 2016. https://nrf.com/2016/global250-table. Walmart revenues in 2014 were $486 billion. Costco, Kroger, Lidl’s parent group Schwarz, Tesco, and Carrefour earned revenues of about $100 billion each.

9. Emek Basker, “The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart’s Growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 3 (Summer 2007).

10. David Warsh, “Big Box Ecology,” Economic Principals, February 19, 2006; Emek Basker and Van H. Pham, “Putting a Smiley Face on the Dragon: Wal-Mart as Catalyst to U.S.-China Trade,” University of Missouri–Columbia Working Paper, July 2005, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.765564.

19. The Cold Chain

1. Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2008).

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 62.

6. Ibid.

7. http://www.msthalloffame.org/frederick_mckinley_jones.htm.

8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37306334/this-invention-by-a-british-student-could-save-millions-of-lives-across-the-world.

9. Tom Jackson, Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

10. Ibid.

11. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30925252.

12. Annika Carlson, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Life Cycle of Carrots and Tomatoes,” IMES/EESS Report No. 24, 1997, http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/15000/15100/15145/DE97763079.pdf.

13. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1553456/Greener-by-miles.html.

14. http://www.trademap.org/Product_SelProductCountry.aspx?nvpm=1|320||||TOTAL|||2|1|1|2|1||1||.

15. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gt.html.

16. https://www.usaid.gov/guatemala/food-assistance.

17. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GCR2016-2017/05FullReport/TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2016-2017_FINAL.pdf.

20. Tradable Debt and the Tally Stick

1. Hilary Jenkinson, “Exchequer Tallies,” Archaeologia 62, no. 2 (January 1911), 367–380, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261340900008213; Goetzmann and Williams, “From Tallies and Chirographs to Franklin’s Printing Press at Passy,” in The Origins of Value, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Bodley Head, 2013), chap. 1.

2. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (London: Melville House, 2014), 47.

21. The Billy Bookcase

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2660005/What-great-IKEA-Handyman-makes-living-building-flatpack-furniture-30-hour-dont-know-nuts-bolts.html.

2. http://www.dezeen.com/2016/03/14/ikea-billy-bookcase-designer-gillis-lundgren-dies-aged-86/.

3. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/billy-bookcase-stands-everything-thats-great-and-frustrating-about-ikea-173642.

4. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-15/ikea-s-billy-bookcase-is-cheap-in-slovakia-while-the-u-s-price-is-surging.

5. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/the-making-of-an-ikea-billy-bookcase-factory-tour-205339.

6. http://www.nyteknik.se/automation/bokhyllan-billy-haller-liv-i-byn-6401585.

7. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/the-making-of-an-ikea-billy-bookcase-factory-tour-205339.

8. http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_JP/about_ikea/facts_and_figures/ikea_group_stores/index.html.

9. https://sweden.se/business/ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea/.

10. http://www.dezeen.com/2016/03/14/ikea-billy-bookcase-designer-gillis-lundgren-dies-aged-86/.

11. https://sweden.se/business/ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea/.

12. http://www.wsj.com/articles/ikea-cant-stop-obsessing-about-its-packaging-1434533401.

13. Rolf G. Larsson, “Ikea’s Almost Fabless Global Supply Chain—A Rightsourcing Strategy for Profit, Planet, and People,” in Lean Management of Global Supply Chain, ed. Yasuhiro Monden and Yoshiteru Minagawa (Singapore: World Scientific, 2015).

14. Ibid.

15. http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0070700893/student_view0/ebook2/chapter1/chbody1/how_ikea_designs_its_sexy_prices.html.

16. http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_CA/img/pdf/Billy_Anniv_en.pdf.

17. http://www.nyteknik.se/automation/bokhyllan-billy-haller-liv-i-byn-6401585.

18. Ibid.

19. Larsson, “Ikea’s Almost Fabless Global Supply Chain.”

20. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/ikea-billionaire-ingvar-kamprad-buys-his-clothes-at-second-hand-stalls.

21. https://sweden.se/business/ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea/.

22. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/11/02/how-ikea-billionaire-legally-avoided-taxes-from-1973-until-2015/#6b2b40d91bb4.

23. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/billy-bookcase-stands-everything-thats-great-and-frustrating-about-ikea-173642.

24. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8264572.stm.

25. http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/billy-bookcase-stands-everything-thats-great-and-frustrating-about-ikea-173642.

26. http://www.ikeahackers.net/category/billy/.

27. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2660005/What-great-IKEA-Handyman-makes-living-building-flatpack-furniture-30-hour-dont-know-nuts-bolts.html.

22. The Elevator

1. If I recall correctly, I first heard this puzzle on the wonderful Futility Closet podcast.

2. Precisely how many journeys are taken in elevators is unclear. According to the National Elevator Industry Inc. “Fun Facts” sheet, the number is 18 billion a year in the United States alone. Another credible-seeming source is more bullish. Glen Pederick, in “How Vertical Transportation Is Helping Transform the City” (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Working Paper, 2013), estimates 7 billion passenger journeys a day worldwide, although this produces the suspiciously convenient factoid that elevators move the equivalent of the entire world’s population every day. The fact that we don’t really know emphasizes how underrated the elevator is. The statistic about Chinese elevator installation comes from Andreas Schierenbeck, chairman of ThyssenKrupp Elevator, quoted in The Daily Telegraph, May 23, 2015.

3. The Skyscraper Center (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat), http://skyscrapercenter.com/building/burj-khalifa/3 and http://skyscrapercenter.com/building/willis-tower/169.

4. Eric A. Taub, “Elevator Technology: Inspiring Many Everyday Leaps of Faith,” The New York Times, December 3, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/03/technology/elevator-technology-inspiring-many-everyday-leaps-of-faith.html?_r=0.

5. “Six Stories,” 99% Invisible, episode 98, January 2, 2014, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/six-stories/.

6. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Macmillan: London, 2011), 138.

7. “Six Stories”; Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 138; Jason Goodwin, Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001).

8. David Owen, “Green Manhattan,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/18/green-manhattan; Richard Florida, “The World Is Spiky,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/images/issues/200510/world-is-spiky.pdf.

9. Nick Paumgarten, “Up and Then Down,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down. Paumgarten points out that there are no truly reliable statistics on elevator accidents, but they are clearly safe. About two people a month die in elevator accidents in the United States; almost invariably, those are people working on elevator maintenance rather than passengers. In any case, two people die on America’s roads every half-hour—which puts the elevator fatality rate into context.

10. Kheir Al-Kodmany, “Tall Buildings and Elevators: A Review of Recent Technological Advances,” Buildings 5 (2015), 1070–1104, doi:10.3390/buildings5031070.

11. Ibid.; Molly Miller, “RMI Retrofits America’s Favorite Skycraper,” Rocky Mountain Institute press release, April 2009, http://www.rmi.org/RMI+Retrofits+America’s+Favorite+Skyscraper.

12. Owen, “Green Manhattan.” In 2004, Owen made the point that RMI was split across two sites. More recently, RMI has opened a new headquarters.

13. Rocky Mountain Institute visitors guide, http://www.rmi.org/Content/Files/Locations_LovinsHome_Visitors_Guide_2007.pdf.

IV. Ideas About Ideas

1. George M. Shaw, “Sketch of Thomas Alva Edison,” Popular Science Monthly 13 (August 1878), 489, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_13/August_1878/Sketch_of_Thomas_Alva_Edison.

2. “The Invention Factory,” Edison and Innovation Series, Rutgers University, School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas A. Edison Papers, http://edison.rutgers.edu/inventionfactory.htm.

23. Cuneiform

1. Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Bodley Head, 2013), 39–42.

2. William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 19–30.

3. Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (London: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 11–12.

4. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything, 19–30.

24. Public-Key Cryptography

1. http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=74801.

2. http://www.eng.utah.edu/~nmcdonal/Tutorials/EncryptionResearchReview.pdf.

3. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/09/a-primer-on-public-key-encryption/302574/.

4. http://www.eng.utah.edu/~nmcdonal/Tutorials/EncryptionResearchReview.pdf.

5. http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=74801.

6. Ibid.

7. http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/quantum-computing-is-a-major-threat-to-crypto-says-the-nsa/.

25. Double-Entry Bookkeeping

1. Robert Krulwich, “Leonardo’s To-Do List,” Krulwich Wonders, NPR, November 18, 2011, http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/11/18/142467882/leonardos-to-do-list.

2. Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (London: Allen & Unwin, 2013), 49.

3. Raffaele Pisano, “Details on the Mathematical Interplay Between Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli,” BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 31, no. 2 (2016), 104–111, doi: 10.1080/17498430.2015.1091969.

4. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 10.

5. Omar Abdullah Zaid, “Accounting Systems and Recording Procedures in the Early Islamic State,” Accounting Historians Journal 31, no. 2 (December 2004), 149–170; Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 22.

6. Jolyon Jenkins, A Brief History of Double Entry Book-keeping, BBC Radio 4, episode 5, March 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r402b/episodes/guide.

7. William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 199–201.

8. Crosby, The Measure of Reality.

9. Ibid.; Origo, The Merchant of Prato.

10. Michael J. Fisher, “Luca Pacioli on Business Profits,” Journal of Business Ethics 25 (2000), 299–312.

11. Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 71–78.

12. Ibid., 115–120.

13. Anthony Hopwood, “The Archaeology of Accounting Systems,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 12, no. 3 (1987), 207–234; Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 136–138; Jenkins, A Brief History of Double Entry Book-keeping, episode 6, June 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r402b/episodes/guide.

14. Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 215.

15. Jenkins, A Brief History of Double Entry Book-keeping, episode 7, July 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r402b/episodes/guide.

16. Translation by Larry D. Benson, https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/shippar2.htm.

26. Limited Liability Companies

1. David A. Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

2. Ulrike Malmendier, “Law and Finance at the Origin,” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 4 (December 2009), 1076–1108.

3. “The Key to Industrial Capitalism: Limited Liability,” The Economist, December 23, 1999, http://www.economist.com/node/347323.

4. Randall Morck, “Corporations,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), vol, 2, 265–268.

5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

6. See, for instance, Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2004). An alternative view is that of the economist John Kay, who argues that Friedman’s basic analysis is wrong and there’s no legal or economic reason why a corporation shouldn’t pursue social goals. John Kay, “The Role of Business in Society,” February 1998, https://www.johnkay.com/1998/02/03/the-role-of-business-in-society/.

7. “The East India Company: The Company That Ruled the Waves,” The Economist, December 15, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21541753.

8. Kelly Edmiston, “The Role of Small and Large Businesses in Economic Development,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Review, Second Quarter, 2007, 77, https://www.kansascityfed.org/PUBLICAT/ECONREV/pdf/2q07edmi.pdf.

9. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/10/most-americans-say-u-s-economic-system-is-unfair-but-high-income-republicans-disagree/.

10. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are-too-high-america-needs-giant-dose-competition-too-much-good-thing.

27. Management Consulting

1. Slides accompanying Nicholas Bloom, Benn Eifert, David McKenzie, Aprajit Mahajan, and John Roberts, “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India,” research paper, downloadable at https://people.stanford.edu/nbloom/sites/default/files/dmm.pptx. See the next note for the published paper.

2. Nicholas Bloom, Benn Eifert, David McKenzie, Aprajit Mahajan, and John Roberts, “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 1 (February 2013, 1–51, doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs044.

3. http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html.

4. http://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/news/public-sector-spend-management-consultants-rises-second-year-row.

5. “10 Largest Management Consulting Firms of the Globe,” Consultancy.uk, News, June 15, 2015, http://www.consultancy.uk/news/2149/10-largest-management-consulting-firms-of-the-globe.

6. Duff McDonald, “The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America,” Longreads, October 23, 2013, https://blog.longreads.com/2013/10/23/the-making-of-mckinsey-a-brief-history-of-management/.

7. Ibid.

8. Hal Higdon, The Business Healers: A Documented Appraisal of the Management Consulting Profession . . . (New York: Random House, 1969), 136–137.

9. Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

10. Nicholas Lemann, “The Kids in the Conference Room,” The New Yorker, October 18, 1999, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/10/18/the-kids-in-the-conference-room.

11. Chris McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), e.g., 17, 21, 80.

12. Patricia Hurtado, “Ex–Goldman Director Rajat Gupta Back Home After Prison Stay,” Bloomberg, January 19, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-19/ex-goldman-director-rajat-gupta-back-home-after-prison-stay.

13. Jamie Doward, “The Firm That Built the House of Enron,” The Observer, March 24, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/mar/24/enron.theobserver.

14. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/17/management-consultants-cashing-in-austerity-public-sector-cuts.

15. Christopher Hope, “Whitehall Spending on Consultants Nearly Doubles to £1.3 Billion in Three Years . . . with 47 Paid over £1,000 a Day,” The Telegraph, January 13, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12095961/Whitehall-spending-on-consultants-nearly-doubles-to-1.3billion-in-three-years...-with-47-paid-over-1000-a-day.html.

16. Slides accompanying Bloom et al., “Does Management Matter?” downloadable at https://people.stanford.edu/nbloom/sites/default/files/dmm.pptx.

28. Intellectual Property

1. Charles Dickens to Henry Austin, May 1, 1842, quoted in “How the ‘Dickens Controversy’ Changed American Publishing,” Tavistock Books blog, http://blog.tavbooks.com/?p=714.

2. Zorina Khan, “History of Intellectual Property,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), vol. 4.

3. Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996), 13.

4. Christopher May, “The Venetian Moment: New Technologies, Legal Innovation and the Institutional Origins of Intellectual Property,” Prometheus 20, no. 2 (2002), 159–179.

5. Michele Boldrin and David Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 1, available at http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm.

6. William W. Fisher III, “The Growth of Intellectual Property: A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States,” 1999, https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/iphistory.pdf.

7. Ashlee Vance, “Why Elon Musk Just Opened Tesla’s Patents to His Biggest Rivals,” Bloomberg, June 12, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-12/why-elon-musk-just-opened-teslas-patents-to-his-biggest-rivals.

8. For instance, see Alex Tabarrok, “Patent Theory Versus Patent Law,” Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy 1, no. 1 (2002), article 9, https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PatentPublished.pdf.

9. Dickens made £38,000. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s more than £3 million in today’s money, and relative to the cost of labor it is nearly £25 million.

29. The Compiler

1. Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).

2. Lynn Gilbert with Gaylen Moore, Particular Passions: Grace Murray Hopper (Women of Wisdom series, Lynn Gilbert, 2012). Hopper earned her master’s and doctorate at Yale; the university recently renamed a residential college after her.

3. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.

4. Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions.

5. Ibid.

6. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age.

7. Ibid.

V. Where Do Inventions Come From?

30. The iPhone

1. Laura Gray and Tim Harford, “What’s the World’s Most Profitable Product?” BBC World Service, May 20, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03vqgwr.

2. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myth (London: Anthem, 2011), 95, and chap. 5 in general.

3. Ibid., 103–105; “The History of CERN,” http://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-history-of-CERN?page=1.

4. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (London: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

5. Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds (London: W. W. Norton, 2016).

6. Daniel N. Rockmore, “The FFT—An Algorithm the Whole Family Can Use,” Computing in Science & Engineering 2, no. 1 (2000), 60, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~rockmore/cse-fft.pdf.

7. Florence Ion, “From Touch Displays to the Surface: A Brief History of Touchscreen Technology,” Ars Technica, April 4, 2013, http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/from-touch-displays-to-the-surface-a-brief-history-of-touchscreen-technology/.

8. Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, 100–103.

9. Danielle Newnham, “The Story Behind Siri,” Medium, August 21, 2015, https://medium.com/swlh/the-story-behind-siri-fbeb109938b0#.c3eng12zr; Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, chap. 5.

10. Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, chap. 5.

11. William Lazonick, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute Press, 2009).

31. Diesel Engines

1. See, e.g., Morton Grosser, Diesel: The Man & the Engine (New York: Atheneum, 1978); http://www.newhistorian.com/the-mysterious-death-of-rudolf-diesel/4932/; and http://www.nndb.com/people/906/000082660/.

2. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 48.

3. Ibid., 51–52.

4. http://auto.howstuffworks.com/diesel.htm.

5. http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-20070000-jgh-2007.pdf.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/inventor-rudolf-diesel-vanishes.

10. http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-20070000-jgh-2007.pdf.

11. http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/bunker-fuels-account-for-70-of-a-vessels-voyage-operating-cost/.

12. http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-20070000-jgh-2007.pdf.

13. http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Pathdependency.htm.

14. Greg Pahl, Biodiesel: Growing a New Energy Economy (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008).

15. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/inventor-rudolf-diesel-vanishes.

32. Clocks

1. http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_churches/stjohns.php.

2. Ralph Harrington, “Trains, Technology and Time-Travellers: How the Victorians Re-invented Time,” http://www.artificialhorizon.org/essays/pdf/time.pdf.

3. Stuart Hylton, What the Railways Did for Us: The Making of Modern Britain (Stroud, England: Amberley, 2015).

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices.

5. http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3506.

6. For a discussion of innovation prizes in general, see Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (New York: Little, Brown, 2011); Robert Lee Hotz, “Need a Breakthrough? Offer Prize Money,” The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/need-a-breakthrough-offer-prize-money-1481043131.

7. http://www.timeanddate.com/time/how-do-atomic-clocks-work.html; Hattie Garlick, interview with Demetrios Matsakis, “I Keep the World Running on Time,” Financial Times, December 16, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/3eca8ec4-c186-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354.

8. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/375792.

9. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-high-frequency-trading/360411/.

10. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891892/why-computers-still-struggle-to-tell-the-time.html.

11. https://theconversation.com/sharper-gps-needs-even-more-accurate-atomic-clocks-38109.

12. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/most-accurate-atomic-clock-ever.

33. Chemical Fertilizer

1. Daniel Charles, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

2. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/immerwahr-clara.

3. Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).

4. http://www.wired.com/2008/05/nitrogen-it-doe.

5. http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/10/haber-bosch-ruthenium-catalyst-reduce-power.

6. http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-worldagriculture.pdf.

7. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n10/full/ngeo325.html.

8. Ibid.

9. Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Discovery That Changed the Course of History (New York: Broadway Books, 2009).

10. Ibid.

11. Charles, Master Mind.

34. Radar

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/kenya/7612869/Iceland-volcano-As-the-dust-settles-Kenyas-blooms-wilt.html.

2. http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/pages/2012-12-06-01.aspx.

3. http://www.oxfordeconomics.com/my-oxford/projects/129051.

4. Robert Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peace (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 54–56.

5. Ibid., 27–33.

6. Ibid., 41–46.

7. Ibid., 48.

8. Ibid., 246.

9. Ibid., 458.

10. Ibid., 459.

11. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1956-grand-canyon-airplane-crash-a-game-changer/.

12. http://lessonslearned.faa.gov/UAL718/CAB_accident_report.pdf.

13. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/faa-drone-approvals-bedeviled-by-warnings-conflict-internal-e-mails-show/2014/12/21/69d8a07a-86c2-11e4-a702-fa31ff4ae98e_story.html.

14. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1956-grand-canyon-airplane-crash-a-game-changer/.

15. https://www.faa.gov/about/history/brief_history/.

16. http://www.transtats.bts.gov/.

17. http://www.iata.org/publications/Documents/iata-safety-report-2014.pdf.

35. Batteries

1. The Newgate Calendar, http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng464.htm.

2. http://www.economist.com/node/10789409.

3. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2023689_2023708_2023656,00.html.

4. http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651928-lithium-ion-battery-steadily-improving-new-research-aims-turbocharge.

5. http://moneyweek.com/battery-technology-the-final-piece-of-the-puzzle/.

6. “Energy Storage: Charge of the Lithium Brigade,” The Economist, May 28, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651928-lithium-ion-battery-steadily-improving-new-research-aims-turbocharge; “Chemists Create Battery Technology with Off-the-Charts Charging Capacity,” Phys.org, April 20, 2016, http://m.phys.org/news/2016-04-chemists-battery-technology-off-the-charts-capacity.html?_utm_source=1-2-2.

7. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11415510/solar-power-costs-innovation.

8. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~gowrisan/pdf_papers/renewable_intermittency.pdf.

9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27071303.

10. http://www.rmi.org/Content/Files/RMI-TheEconomicsOfBatteryEnergyStorage-FullReport-FINAL.pdf.

11. http://www.fastcompany.com/3052889/elon-musk-powers-up-inside-teslas-5-billion-gigafactory.

36. Plastic

1. Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

2. Leo Baekeland, diary, vol. 1, 1907–1908, Smithsonian Institution Transcription Center, Archives Center—NMAH, amhistory.si.edu/media/NMAH-AC0005-D01.pdf.

3. Bill Laws, Nails, Noggins and Newels: An Alternative History of Every House (Stroud, England: The History Press, 2006).

4. Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

5. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/plastic-not-so-fantastic/.

6. Freinkel, Plastic.

7. Ibid.

8. Meikle, American Plastic.

9. “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics,” World Economic Forum, January 2016, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.pdf.

10. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/plastic-not-so-fantastic/.

11. “The New Plastics Economy.”

12. Leo Hornak, “Will There Be More Fish or Plastic in the Sea by 2050?” BBC News, February 15, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35562253.

13. Richard S. Stein, “Plastics Can Be Good for the Environment,” The NEACT Journal 21, no. 1 (Summer–Fall 2002), http://www.polymerambassadors.org/Steinplasticspaper.pdf.

14. “The New Plastics Economy.”

15. https://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics/content.cfm?ItemNumber=823.

16. http://resource-recycling.com/node/7093.

17. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Environment at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators 51, fig. 1.34, http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/environment/environment-at-a-glance-2015_9789264235199-en#page51.

18. http://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwan-the-worlds-geniuses-of-garbage-disposal-1463519134.

19. http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-device-recycles-plastic-bottles-into-3d-printing-material.

20. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/turning-trash-into-high-end-goods/.

VI. The Visible Hand

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 455–456.

2. Marc Blaug, “Invisible Hand,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), vol. 4.

37. The Bank

1. William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 11.

2. Ibid., 180.

3. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press 1992), 471. The story is also told in S. Herbert Frankel’s Money: Two Philosophies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) and in Felix Martin’s Money: The Unauthorised Biography (London: Bodley Head, 2013), chap. 6.

4. Martin, Money, 105–107; Marie-Thérèse Boyer-Xambeu, Ghislain Deleplace, and Lucien Gillard, Private Money & Public Currencies: The 16th Century Challenge, trans. Azizeh Azodi (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

38. Razors and Blades

1. King C[amp] Gillette, The Human Drift (Boston: New Era, 1894), accessed at https://archive.org/stream/TheHumanDrift/The_Human_Drift_djvu.txt.

2. Randal C. Picker, “The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s),” University of Chicago Law Review 78 (2011), 225–255.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. http://www.geek.com/games/sony-will-sell-every-ps4-at-a-loss-but-easily-recoup-it-in-games-ps-plus-sales-1571335/.

7. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/02756661311310431.

8. http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/single-serve-coffee-wars-heat-up/.

9. Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009).

10. https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/klemperer/competition.pdf.

11. http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/532-rcp-razors.pdf.

12. For a discussion of confusion pricing, see Tim Harford, “The Switch Doctor,” Financial Times, April 27, 2007, https://www.ft.com/content/921b0182-f14b-11db-838b-000b5df10621, and “Cheap Tricks,” Financial Times, February 16, 2007, https://www.ft.com/content/5c15b0f4-bbf5-11db-9cbc-0000779e2340.

39. Tax Havens

1. http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1026675.shtml.

2. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/21/multinational-firms-tax-ebay-ikea; http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/apple-google-taxes-eu/.

3. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings/sinister.html.

4. Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, Measuring Tax Gaps 2016 Edition: Tax Gap Estimates for 2014–15, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/561312/HMRC-measuring-tax-gaps-2016.pdf.

5. Miroslav N. Jovanović, The Economics of International Integration, 2nd ed. (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 2015), 480.

6. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

7. Daniel Davies, “Gaps and Holes: How the Swiss Cheese Was Made,” Crooked Timber blog, April 8, 2016, http://crookedtimber.org/2016/04/08/gaps-and-holes-how-the-swiss-cheese-was-made/.

8. Gabriel Zucman, “Taxing Across Borders: Tracking Personal Wealth and Corporate Profits,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 4 (Fall 2014), 121–148.

9. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Vintage, 2011).

10. Estimates from the Global Financial Integrity (GFI) at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., quoted in Shaxson, Treasure Islands.

11. Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations.

12. Ibid.

40. Leaded Gasoline

1. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

2. Deborah Blum, “Looney Gas and Lead Poisoning: A Short, Sad History,” Wired, January 5, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-a-short-sad-history/.

3. William J. (Bill) Kovarik, “The Ethyl Controversy: How the News Media Set the Agenda for a Public Health Controversy over Leaded Gasoline, 1924–1926,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993, DAI 1994 55(4): 781-782-A, DA9425070.

4. http://pittmed.health.pitt.edu/jan_2001/butterflies.pdf.

5. Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial.

6. Ibid.

7. Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (London: John Murray, 2016).

8. “Lead Poisoning and Rome,” Encyclopædia Romana, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html.

9. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, “Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime,” NBER Working Paper 13097, 2007, http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097.

10. On the environmental Kuznets curve in China, see Tim Harford, “Hidden Truths Behind China’s Smokescreen,” Financial Times, January 29, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/4814ae2c-c481-11e5-b3b1-7b2481276e45.

11. Jamie Lincoln Kitman, “The Secret History of Lead,” The Nation, March 2, 2000, http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/.

12. Ibid.

13. Wolpaw Reyes, “Environmental Policy as Social Policy?”

14. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lead: Preventing Lead Poisoning in Young Children,” http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/publications/books/plpyc/chapter2.htm.

15. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7326/full/468868a.html.

16. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/20071114_cardio-tobacco/.

17. Markowitz and Rosner, Deceit and Denial.

18. Bernard Lo and Marilyn J. Field, eds., Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2009); text available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22932/#_a2001902bddd00028_.

41. Antibiotics in Farming

1. Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 306–307.

2. James Gallagher, “Farmers Urged to Cut Antibiotic Use,” BBC News, December 8, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35030262.

3. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antibiotics-linked-weight-gain-mice/.

4. “Antimicrobials in Agriculture and the Environment: Reducing Unnecessary Use and Waste,” The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, chaired by Jim O’Neill, December 2015.

5. Ibid.

6. http://ideas.time.com/2012/04/16/why-doctors-uselessly-prescribe-antibiotics-for-a-common-cold/.

7. http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/10/1345.full.

8. “Antimicrobial Resistance: Tackling a Crisis for the Health and Wealth of Nations,” The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, chaired by Jim O’Neill, December 2014.

9. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bmflem.html.

10. http://time.com/4049403/alexander-fleming-history/.

11. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf.

12. http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/florey/story.htm.

13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8828000/8828836.stm; https://www.biochemistry.org/Portals/0/Education/Docs/Paul%20brack.pdf; http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/penicillin-oxford-story.

14. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/fleming-lecture.pdf.

15. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2013.pdf.

16. http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/07/antibiotic-resistance-teixobactin/.

17. “Antimicrobials in Agriculture and the Environment.”

42. M-Pesa

1. http://www.technologyreview.es/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=39828.

2. Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-Pesa: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’ Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya,” Innovations: Technology, Governance & Globalization 2, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2007), 63–81, http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/innovationsarticleonmpesa_0_d_14.pdf.

3. Isaac Mbiti and David N. Weil, “Mobile Banking: The Impact of M-Pesa in Kenya,” NBER Working Paper 17129, June 2011, http://www.nber.org/papers/w17129.

4. http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/globalfindex/overview.

5. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/02/27/m_pesa_ict4d_and_mobile_banking_for_the_poor_.html.

6. http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielrunde/2015/08/12/m-pesa-and-the-rise-of-the-global-mobile-money-market/#193f89d23f5d.

7. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-18.

8. http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielrunde/2015/08/12/m-pesa-and-the-rise-of-the-global-mobile-money-market/#193f89d23f5d.

9. http://www.cgap.org/sites/default/files/CGAP-Brief-Poor-People-Using-Mobile-Financial-Services-Observations-on-Customer-Usage-and-Impact-from-M-PESA-Aug-2009.pdf.

10. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-05/safaricoms-m-pesa-turns-kenya-into-a-mobile-payment-paradise.

11. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/corruption-in-afghanistan-un-report-claims-bribes-equal-to-quarter-of-gdp-a-672828.html.

12. http://www.coastweek.com/3745-Transport-reolution-Kenya-minibus-operators-launch-cashless-fares.htm.

13. http://www.financialtechnologyafrica.com/top-stories/1686/cashlessafrica-why-kenya%E2%80%99s-cashless-mutatu-failed/.

43. Property Registers

1. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 163.

2. “The Economist Versus the Terrorist,” The Economist, January 30, 2003, http://www.economist.com/node/1559905.

3. David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein, “The Secret Document That Transformed China,” Planet Money, NPR, January 20, 2012, http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china.

4. Christopher Woodruff, “Review of de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital,” Journal of Economic Literature 39 (December 2001), 1215–1223.

5. World Bank, Doing Business in 2005 (Washington, DC: The World Bank Group, 2004), 33.

6. Robert Home and Hilary Lim, Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Tenue (London: Glasshouse Press, 2004), 17.

7. Ibid., 12–13; de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, 105–152.

8. De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, 20–21; World Bank, Doing Business in 2005.

9. Tim Besley, “Property Rights and Investment Incentives: Theory and Evidence from Ghana,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 5 (October 1995), 903–937.

10. World Bank, Doing Business in 2005.

VII. Inventing the Wheel

44. Paper

1. Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 104–105.

2. Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

3. James Moseley, “The Technologies of Print,” in M. F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

4. Kurlansky, Paper, 82.

5. Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters (London: Penguin, 2014), chap. 2.

6. Kurlansky, Paper, 46.

7. Ibid., 78–82.

8. Miodownik, Stuff Matters.

9. Kurlansky, Paper, 204.

10. Ibid., 244.

11. Bloom, Paper, chap. 1.

12. Kurlansky, Paper, 295.

13. “Cardboard,” Surprisingly Awesome podcast, episode 19, August 24, 2016, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/19-cardboard/.

14. Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).

15. The estimate, from Hewlett-Packard in 1996, was that enough office paper emerged from printers and copiers that year to cover 18 percent of the surface area of the United States (Bloom, Paper Before Print, chap. 1). Office paper consumption continued to rise over the subsequent few years.

16. “World Wood Production Up for Fourth Year; Paper Stagnant as Electronic Publishing Grows,” United Nations press release, December 18, 2014, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=49643#.V-T2S_ArKUn.

17. David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2008).

45. Index Funds

1. “Brilliant vs. Boring,” Planet Money, NPR, May 4, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/04/469247400/episode-688-brilliant-vs-boring.

2. Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, “The Early History of Stock Market Indices, with Special Reference to the French Case,” Paris School of Economics Working Paper, http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.com/hautcoeur-pierre-cyrille/Indices_anciens.pdf.

3. Michael Weinstein, “Paul Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94,” The New York Times, December 13, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/economy/14samuelson.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

4. Paul Samuelson, “Challenge to Judgment,” The Journal of Portfolio Management 1, no. 1 (Fall 1974), 17–19, http://www.iijournals.com/doi/abs/10.3905/jpm.1974.408496.

5. John C. Bogle, “How the Index Fund Was Born,” The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904583204576544681577401622.

6. Robin Wigglesworth and Stephen Foley, “Active Asset Managers Knocked by Shift to Passive Strategies,” Financial Times, April 11, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/2e975946-fdbf-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0a0d.

7. Donald MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets,” http://www.lse.ac.uk/accounting/CARR/pdf/MacKenzie.pdf.

8. Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, “Why Mark-to-Market Accounting Rules Must Die,” Forbes, February 23, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/23/mark-to-market-opinions-columnists_recovery_stimulus.html.

9. Eric Balchunas, “How the Vanguard Effect Adds Up to $1 Trillion,” Bloomberg, August 30, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-30/how-much-has-vanguard-saved-investors-try-1-trillion.

10. Paul Samuelson speech to Boston Security Analysts Society, November 15, 2005, cited in John C. Bogle, “How the Index Fund Was Born,” The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904583204576544681577401622.

46. The S-Bend

1. Paul Simons, “The Big Stench That Saved London,” June 17, 2008, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/law/columnists/article2047259.ece.

2. G. C. Cook, “Construction of London’s Victorian Sewers: The Vital Role of Joseph Bazalgette,” Postgraduate Medical Journal, 2001.

3. Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Stroud, England: The History Press, 2013).

4. Laura Perdew, How the Toilet Changed History (Minneapolis: ABDO, 2015).

5. Johan Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (London: OneWorld, 2016), 33.

6. Rachel Baum, Jeanne Luh, and Jamie Bartram, “Sanitation: A Global Estimate of Sewerage Connections without Treatment and the Resulting Impact on MDG Progress,” Environmental Science Technology 47, no. 4 (2013), 1994–2000, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es304284f.

7. See the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program reports at http://www.wsp.org/sites/wsp.org/files/publications/WSP-ESI-Flier.pdf, http://www.wsp.org/content/africa-economic-impacts-sanitation, and http://www.wsp.org/content/south-asia-economic-impacts-sanitation.

8. “Tackling the Flying Toilets of Kibera,” Al Jazeera, January 22, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/201311810421796400.html; Cyrus Kinyungu, “Kibera’s Flying Toilets Flushed Out by PeePoo Bags,” http://bhekisisa.org/article/2016-05-03-kiberas-flying-toilets-flushed-out-by-peepoo-bags.

9. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44452#.VzCnKPmDFBc.

10. “World Toilet Day: Kibera Slum Hopes to Ground ‘Flying Toilets,’” http://www.dw.com/en/world-toilet-day-kibera-slum-seeks-to-ground-flying-toilets/a-18072068.

11. “Seven Man Made Wonders: London Sewers,” BBC, September 24, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/sevenwonders/london/sewers_mm/index.shtml.

12. G. R. K. Reddy, Smart and Human: Building Cities of Wisdom (Noida: HarperCollins India, 2015).

13. Halliday, The Great Stink of London.

47. Paper Money

1. William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 9.

2. Richard von Glahn, “The Origins of Paper Money in China,” in The Origins of Value, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 67.

3. Glyn Davies, A History of Money (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 181–184.

4. There’s a more detailed discussion of hyperinflation in Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run—or Ruin—an Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).

48. Concrete

1. M. D. Cattaneo, S. Galiani, P. J. Gertler, S. Martinez, and R. Titiunik, “Housing, Health, and Happiness,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2009), 75–105; Charles Kenny, “Paving Paradise,” Foreign Policy, January 3, 2012, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/03/paving-paradise/.

2. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 54–57.

3. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 10.

4. Nick Gromicko and Kenton Shepard, “The History of Concrete,” https://www.nachi.org/history-of-concrete.htm#ixzz31V47Zuuj; Adam Davidson and Adam McKay, “Concrete,” Surprisingly Awesome podcast, episode 3, November 17, 2015, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/3-concrete/; Amelia Sparavigna, “Ancient Concrete Works,” Working Paper, Department of Physics, Turin Polytechnic, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.5230.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_domes. Brunelleschi’s great dome in Florence is octagonal, so the distance across varies.

6. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994).

7. Forty, Concrete and Culture, 150–155.

8. Inventors and Inventions (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2008), vol. 4.

9. Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters (London: Penguin, 2014), chap. 3.

10. Ibid.; Smil, Making the Modern World, 54–57.

11. “Concrete Possibilities,” The Economist, September 21, 2006, http://www.economist.com/node/7904224; Miodownik, Stuff Matters, 83; Jon Cartwright, “The Concrete Answer to Pollution,” Horizon, December 18, 2014, http://horizon-magazine.eu/article/concrete-answer-pollution_en.html.

12. James Mitchell Crow, “The Concrete Conundrum,” Chemistry World, March 2008, 62, http://www.rsc.org/images/Construction_tcm18-114530.pdf; Smil, Making the Modern World, 98, reports that the energy used to make a ton of steel is typically about four times the energy used to make a ton of cement; a ton of cement itself can be used to make several tons of concrete. Cement production also emits carbon dioxide independently of the energy input.

13. Shahidur Khandker, Zaid Bakht, and Gayatri Koolwal, “The Poverty Impact of Rural Roads: Evidence from Bangladesh,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3875, April 2006, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2006/03/29/000012009_20060329093100/Rendered/PDF/wps38750rev0pdf.pdf.

49. Insurance

1. “Brahmajāla Sutta: The All-Embracing Net of Views,” trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi, section II, 2, 14, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html.

2. Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 92.

3. Swiss Re, A History of Insurance in China, 2014, http://media.150.swissre.com/documents/150Y_Markt_Broschuere_China_Inhalt.pdf.

4. Raymond Flower and Michael Wynn Jones, Lloyd’s of London (London: David & Charles, 1974); see also Bernstein, Against the Gods, 88–91.

5. Michel Albert, Capitalism Against Capitalism, trans. Paul Haviland (London: Whurr, 1993), chap. 5; see also John Kay, Other People’s Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? (London: Profile Books, 2015), 61–63.

6. James Poterba, “Annuities in Early Modern Europe,” in The Origins of Value, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

7. The study is nicely summarized by Robert Smith of NPR at http://www.npr.org/2016/09/09/493228710/what-keeps-poor-farmers-poor. The original paper is Dean Karlan, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, and Christopher Udry, “Agricultural Decisions After Relaxing Credit and Risk Constraints,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 2 (May 2014), 597–652, doi:10.1093/qje/qju002.

8. John Kay, Other People’s Money, 120.

Conclusion: Looking Forward

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-globally-since-1770.

2. http://charleskenny.blogs.com/weblog/2009/06/the-success-of-development.html.

3. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute?%2Flatest=undefined&stackMode=relative.

4. Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Douglas Martin, “Anthony J. Wiener, Forecaster of the Future, Is Dead at 81,” The New York Times, June 26, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/us/anthony-j-wiener-forecaster-of-the-future-is-dead-at-81.html.

5. See, e.g., http://news.mit.edu/2015/mit-report-benefits-investment-basic-research-0427, https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/randd-share-for-basic-research-in-china-dwindles/7726.article, and http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/european-scientists-ask-governments-boost-basic-research.

6. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/how-do-we-stop-tech-being-turned-into-weapons.

7. Olivia Solon, “Self-Driving Trucks: What’s the Future for America’s 3.5 Million Truckers?” The Guardian, June 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/17/self-driving-trucks-impact-on-drivers-jobs-us.

8. http://mashable.com/2006/07/11/myspace-americas-number-one/#nseApOVC85q9.

9. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com, accessed January 20, 2017.

10. For an argument that QWERTY is a good keyboard design and not an example of technological lock-in, see Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” The Journal of Law and Economics 33, no. 1 (April 1990), 1–25.

Epilogue: 50. The Lightbulb

1. William D. Nordhaus, “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not,” in The Economics of New Goods, ed. Timothy F. Bresnahan and Robert J. Gordon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27–70. For other accounts of Nordhaus’s calculations, see Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (London: Little, Brown, 2008); Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014); and David Kestenbaum, “The History of Light, in 6 Minutes and 47 Seconds,” All Things Considered, NPR, May 2, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-one-thing-hasnt-changed-it-takes-time-to-buy-light.

2. An excellent starting point for such calculations is the Measuring Worth website, www.measuringworth.com. For Timothy Taylor’s perspective, see Planet Money, NPR, October 12, 2010, http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/12/130512149/the-tuesday-podcast-would-you-rather-be-middle-class-now-or-rich-in-1900.

3. Marshall B. Davidson, “Early American Lighting,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 3, no. 1 (Summer 1944), 30–40.

4. Johnson, How We Got to Now, 165; Davidson, “Early American Lighting.”

5. Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (London: Souvenir Press, 2011).

6. Improvements in LEDs are said to be governed by Haitz’s law. See the Wikipedia discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law.

7. Brox, Brilliant, 117; see also Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 4.