666. This Is How Progress Happens

I am sometimes surprised at how quickly we humans habituate to progress. We're given something wonderful and we immediately want more of it and complain that we don't get it quickly or cheaper. How do you think about it? Well, as an economic historian, I think it is my mission to tell people how good they have it.

The good old days may have been old, but they weren't good. They were terrible. Joel Mokier is a professor at Northwestern University who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Philippe Aguillon and Peter Howitt. Mokeir was awarded the prize for having, quote, identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. It is

quite clear that progress is driven by a very small proportion of the population. I would say something around maybe two, two and a half, maybe three percent of the labor force are driving all the progress. And what exactly do those two or three percent do? These people change culture quite drastically.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (53 minutes, 8,671 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.