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SPEAKER_01: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford We've got four more of our 50 things that made the modern economy to come. But as you know, over the last few weeks on the podcast, we've been asking you for a 50 first thing, one extra idea, something you couldn't bear me not to discuss in a spectacular final episode. More than 500 suggestions have arrived in the 50 One Things inbox. Thank you to everybody who contributed. In this special episode of the podcast, I'll introduce a shortlist of six of my personal favourites that I've chosen from the suggestions. After you've listened to the shortlist, please do vote for the one you'd most like to hear explored in more depth. That will form a bonus extra episode of 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, which you'll be able to hear on the 28th of October 2017. Details about how to vote coming up at the end of the podcast. The first option of our six traces its history to 1960 in Minnesota in the United States. Dorothea Parry was ironing when her husband Forrest came home from work at the computer giant IBM. How was his day? Well, he had a problem. IBM had worked out how to encode information on magnetic strips. They wanted to fix the strips to plastic cards, but he couldn't figure out how. Dorothea could. She ironed them on. The addition of the magnetic strip was a huge boost for credit cards, which were just a few years old and struggling for acceptance. Merchants shown a Diners Club or American Express card had to phone the bank. IBM's magnetic strip paved the way for a far less cumbersome approach. The new credit cards were pushed aggressively, and people soon found that having a flexible friend can make us drop our financial guard. Behavioural economists tell us that spending on plastic is psychologically much easier than spending cash, but it's hard to imagine the modern economy without them. Our second suggestion also requires heat to manufacture, but a household iron won't do the job. You need temperatures of 1700 degrees Celsius to make glass. Who first did that is lost to history, but they probably lived in Egypt, Syria or Mesopotamia, about 5,500 years ago. Did they look at sand and have an unlikely brainwave? Hmm, I wonder what would happen if we melt it? Or did they discover glass by accident, perhaps while smelting bronze? Who knows? And if you choose glass as the 51st thing, my challenge would be choosing how to tell its story. Perhaps you're listening to this via the internet, piped through fibre optic cables to a touch screen device. Is that the story of glass? Or I could focus, so to speak, on the lens, how the telescope and microscope changed our knowledge of the world. Spectacles, windows or fibreglass could each fill an episode of their own. That was a challenge with choosing my list of 50. So many inventions overlap, one bright idea later enabling another. The episode on clocks, for example, concluded by observing that GPS wouldn't work without extremely accurate timekeeping. But many of you felt GPS deserves a story of its own. And that's our third possibility. GPS stands for Global Positioning System. There are 31 satellites flying around the Earth right now, constantly transmitting their position and the time. If your phone can pick up signals from at least four of them, it can do some clever maths to work out where it is and show you on a map. Like many of our 50 things, GPS has military origins. The US Department of Defence developed it to win the Cold War. Now, in turn, GPS is enabling new bright ideas that will make the economy of the future, new business models that connect buyers and sellers and new technologies such as self-driving vehicles, robots and drones. The fourth item on our shortlist begins with an old story about a flood. It's not the Judeo-Christian story of Noah's Ark. It's the story of Emperor Yu, the founder of China's first dynasty 4,000 years ago. Noah floated on the waters, but Emperor Yu tamed them, recruiting an army of labourers, along with a dragon and a giant turtle, to assist in setting up irrigation and drainage. Great Yu changed China. And irrigation continues to shape our economy, from California, where arguments rage over the most valuable use of scarce water, to Bali, where the intricacy of the water management system has astonished visiting experts. The only woman ever to receive a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, Lynn Ostrom, spent much of her life studying irrigation systems. Ostrom was fascinated by how humans cooperate to manage common resources. There are few more important questions than that, and few better case studies than how we decide who gets how much water. We'll soon be asking for you to vote on this shortlist, so you might want to reach for pencil and paper to jot down the details. We've had an episode on paper. Should the pencil join it? It does have a special place in the history of economic thought. In 1958, the libertarian economist Leonard Read published an essay, I, Pencil, in which an ordinary pencil explained the miracle of its existence. The pencil boasted cedar from Oregon, milled in California, graphite from Sri Lanka, a brass ferrule, an eraser made from Italian pumice and Indonesian rapeseed oil, and more besides. Leonard Read's point was that in a modern economy, behind even the humblest of objects was a tale of international supply chains, complex manufacturing, capital investment and science. The pencil is a small enough player on the global scale, but a perfect way to understand the sophistication of the modern economy. Time for one more idea, plucked from a list of hundreds. But where did I store that list? On a spreadsheet, of course. Or perhaps I should say on a digital spreadsheet, because pencil and paper spreadsheets used to be ubiquitous. The accountants of the 1970s would fill out row upon row of cost and revenue assumptions. A single change might require hours or even days with a calculator and an eraser. The first electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc, came in 1979. It was the brainchild of Dan Bricklin, a computer-savvy student at Harvard Business School. He fantasised about creating a spreadsheet that would recalculate itself. His software revolutionised finance. Wall Street and the City of London started trading financial products that could hardly be said to exist, let alone be comprehended, without a spreadsheet. It reshaped accountancy. We increasingly understand the world around us through numbers, and the digital spreadsheet deserves much of the credit. So that's our list of six. The credit card, glass, the global positioning system, irrigation, the pencil and the spreadsheet. Now I'd like you to tell us which one you think should make up our final podcast of the series, the 51st thing that made the modern economy. So as promised, here's how to vote. You can do so any time up to 12 noon GMT on Friday 6th October 2017 by going to bbcworldservice.com slash 51 things. That's numerals, 51. You'll find the full terms and conditions there too. And remember, the deadline is 12 noon GMT on Friday 6th October 2017.
