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These fertile but geographically limited river valleys changed the way people got enough to eat: it was less rewarding to roam around foraging for food, but more rewarding to give the local plants some encouragement.
But there’s a paradox: More abundance can lead to more competition.
the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate.
Agricultural abundance creates rulers and ruled, masters and servants, and inequality of wealth unheard of in hunter-gatherer societies.
But the plow did more than create the underpinning of civilization, with all its benefits and inequities. Different types of plows led to different types of civilization.
How can different type of plows solely be used to create different type of civilization ?!
In dry ground, that’s a counterproductive exercise, squandering precious moisture. But in the fertile wet clays of Northern Europe, the moldboard plow was vastly superior, improving drainage and killing deep-rooted weeds, turning them from competition into compost.
It' a counterproductive exercise , you should give it up as soon as possible.
The development of the moldboard plow turned Europe’s natural endowment of fertile land on its head.
The mass production of electricity car will turn China on the head of vehicle production industry.
but modern civilization still offers them some other potentially lucrative opportunities:
as one of the approximately 10 billion distinct products and services currently offered in the world’s major economic centers.
It links almost every one of the planet’s 7.5 billion people. It delivers astonishing luxury to hundreds of millions. It also leaves hundreds of millions behind, puts tremendous strains on the planet’s ecosystem,
How can we get our heads around this bewildering system on which our lives depend?
But there’s more to a physical copy of this book than paper.
Yet the bar code itself is often overlooked.
What does that even mean? It’s the result of a meta-invention, an invention about inventions—a concept called “intellectual property.” Intellectual property has profoundly shaped who makes money in the modern world.
But we’re now coming to realize that writing itself was invented for an economic purpose, to help coordinate and plan the comings and goings of an increasingly sophisticated economy.
Each of these inventions tells us a story, not just about human ingenuity, but about the invisible systems that surround us: of global supply chains, of ubiquitous information, of money and ideas and,
In each case, we’ll find out what happens when we zoom in closely to examine an invention intently or pull back to notice the unexpected connections.
Some of these fifty inventions, such as the plow, are absurdly simple. Others, such as the clock, have become astonishingly sophisticated. Some of them are stodgily solid, like concrete. Others, such as the limited liability company, are abstract inventions that you cannot touch at all. Some, like the iPhone, have been insanely profitable. Others, like the diesel engine, were initially commercial disasters.
Some of those stories are of vast and impersonal economic forces; others are tales of human brilliance or human tragedy.
and without which printing would be technically feasible but economic suicide.
And I don’t want to throw shade at the computer, I want to shed light.
And by the end of the book, we’ll be able to draw these lessons together and ask how we should think about innovation today. What are the best ways to encourage new ideas? And how can we think clearly about what the effects of those ideas might be, and act with foresight to maximize the good effects and mitigate the bad ones?
And of course it is true that inventions catch on because they do solve a problem that somebody, somewhere, wants to be solved.
But we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming that inventions are nothing but solutions. They’re much more than that. Inventions shape our lives in unpredictable ways—and while they’re solving a problem for someone, they’re often creating a problem for someone else.
Indeed it did. But to dismiss the Luddites as backward fools would be unfair. The Luddites didn’t smash machine looms because they wrongly feared that machines would make England poorer. They smashed the looms because they rightly feared that machines would make them poorer.
Such was Elizabeth Billington’s fame—some would say notoriety—that she was the subject of a bidding war for her performances.
But when you can listen at home to the best performers in the world, why pay to hear a merely competent tribute act in person?
The very best performers went from earning like Mrs. Billington to earning like Elton John. Meanwhile, the only-slightly-less-good went from making a comfortable living to struggling to pay their bills.
Imagine, he said, the fortune that Mrs. Billington might have made if there’d been phonographs in 1801.8 Even Elton John might be envious.
Once there were more TV channels than there were sports teams, the bidding war for the rights to broadcast games became frenetic.
Bowie seems to have been right. Artists have stopped using concert tickets as a way to sell albums and started using albums as a way to sell concert tickets.
“Lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.”
Lighter than air , stronger than whiskery, cheaper than dust
To call barbed wire the greatest discovery of the age might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that the advertisers didn’t know that Alexander Graham Bell was just about to be awarded a patent for the telephone.
in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act. It specified that any honest citizen—including women and freed slaves—could lay claim to up to 160 acres of land in America’s western territories. All
The American West, in turn, seethed with potential solutions: at the time, it was the source of more proposals for new fencing technologies than the rest of the world put together.7 And the idea that emerged in triumph from this intellectual ferment? Barbed wire.
Until barbed wire was developed, the prairie was an unbounded space, more like an ocean than a stretch of arable land. Private ownership of land wasn’t common because it wasn’t feasible.
Locke argued that we all own our own labor. And if you mix your labor with the land that nature provides—for instance, by plowing the soil—then you’ve blended something you definitely own with something that nobody owns. By working the land, he said, you’ve come to own it.
And to make his argument, Locke also had to make the claim that the land was abundant and unclaimed—that is, that because the indigenous tribes hadn’t “improved” the land, they had no right to it.
It’s a powerful argument—and it was ruthlessly deployed by those who wanted to argue that Native Americans didn’t really have a right to their own territory, because they weren’t actively developing it.
The first, and most obvious, is if neither of us knows the other exists.
Trust is an essential component of markets—it’s so essential that we often don’t even notice it, as a fish doesn’t notice water. In developed economies, enablers of trust are everywhere: brands, money-back guarantees, and of course repeat transactions with a seller who can be easily located.
Analysts such as Rachel Botsman reckon the “reputation capital” we build on such websites will eventually become more important than credit scores. Possibly; these systems aren’t bulletproof. But they achieve a crucial basic job: they help people overcome natural caution.
How online matching platforms should be regulated is a dilemma causing lawmakers around the world to scratch their heads.
even if its readership matches your target demographic, inevitably most people who see your advertisement won’t be interested in what you’re selling. No wonder newspaper advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff.
Google gives general advice about how to do well, but it isn’t transparent about how it ranks results. Indeed, it can’t be: the more Google reveals, the easier it is for scammers to fool its algorithms.
Trying to figure out how to please Google’s algorithm is like trying to appease an omnipotent, capricious, and ultimately unknowable deity.
You may say this isn’t a problem. As long as Google’s top results are useful to searchers, it’s tough luck on those who rank lower.
The concept of passport as protection goes back to biblical times.2 And protection was a privilege, not a right:
the more zealously bureaucratic of Continental nations had realized the passport’s potential as a tool of social and economic control.
While wealthy countries today secure their borders to keep unskilled workers out, municipal authorities in the eighteenth century had used them to stop their skilled workers from leaving.
