Measuring Progress by the Cost of Light

Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light allows us to take back the night for reading, moving about, seeing people’s faces, and otherwise engaging with our surroundings. The economist William Nordhaus has cited the plunging price (and hence the soaring availability) of this universally treasured resource as an emblem of progress. Figure 17-4 shows that the inflation-adjusted price of a million lumen-hours of light (about what you would need to read for two and a half hours a day for a year) has fallen twelve thousandfold since the Middle Ages (once called the Dark Ages), from around £35,500 in 1300 to less than £3 today. These days (and nights), if you aren’t reading, conversing, getting out, or otherwise edifying yourself, it’s not because you can’t afford the light.

The plunging cash value of artificial light actually understates the progress, because, as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”17 Nordhaus estimated how many hours a person would have to work to earn an hour of light to read by at different times in history.18 A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesameoil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.

Notes:

Folksonomies: human progress quantification

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/business and industrial/energy/oil (0.377889)

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 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Pinker, Steven (2018227), Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Retrieved on 2018-07-27
Folksonomies: enlightenment humanism