How Economies Grow from the History of Light : Planet Money : NPR

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Take the Summer School Final Exam Here

Our final episode is also the biggest yet for the 2022 Planet Money Summer School. We’re celebrating graduation! (If you made it through the exams). So put aside your graduation ennui, open your mind, and ponder the biggest questions: What drives human progress?

The short answer is: what economists call productivity.

Productivity is an economic measure of our ability to produce in a given period of time. It is one of the core ideas in economics because it has a huge impact on our quality of life.

Higher productivity first means we get the same or even better goods and services without having to work as hard. This has all sorts of positive effects. Lower prices, higher total output, and (at least in theory) more free time! But it doesn’t mean the gains are shared equally, which we’ll discuss as well.

So how can we, as a society, become richer and more affluent? The dominant driver of economic productivity is technology. It is technology that allows us to do more in less time, to create new things or experiences, to spend less time in labor and more time in leisure.

This is our final class for this summer, Light: A Productivity Case Study. Thousands of years ago, people lived in terrible darkness after sunset. Artificial light was so difficult to produce that cities around the world considered it a luxury, and few people could initially use it indoors for long periods of time. But now, you see, we have plenty of light at all times. We’ll look at how productivity has made light a fixture of our daily lives (no pun intended), and see what lessons we can learn from it to advance human progress.

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