This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

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Our next storyteller is an economist and bestselling author of 50 things that shaped the modern

economy. Here is Tim Harford to tell the

story about three of those, starting with the Plough. It's a wonderful example of how technology

has profound effects on society. We think about technologies as solving problems.

So with the plow, what's the problem?

I want to grow crops.

The soil's not very fertile.

I need to break up the surface of the soil.

So I invent the plow.

But of course, that's just the beginning.

Then all the social changes begin. So with the case of the plow, it created a surplus. It created a harvest that you could store somewhere at the end of the year, which meant you had an incentive to form up in big gangs. These days, we call them armies and we go and take the grain in someone

else's barn. It meant that you could support an elite, people who thought, who planned, bureaucrats,

accountants, priests. It meant you could support cities. And with cities, of course, comes the whole

of civilization. So you could really

say this is where the whole thing started, whether you like it or not, with the plow.

You say this. There was a reason that American farmers were so hungry for barbed wire.

A few years earlier in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act.

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