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.

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

modern economy. Tim Harford is here to tell the story about three of them.

So air conditioning is a fascinating invention.

There's a wonderful writer Stephen Johnson who argued that air conditioning elected Ronald Reagan.

How does that work?

Well, air conditioning changed the demographics of the United States.

It enabled many more people to live comfortably in Texas, in Florida,

all those people retiring to Florida and then starting to vote Republican.

So it's changing the political landscape of the United States.

There is no way you can build a glass-walled skyscraper in

Singapore or Dubai without air conditioning. It's completely impossible. There's no way that

technology will work without air conditioning. So it makes possible skyscrapers in warm climates. It makes a lot of things possible

that we take for granted. Think about all those floors. These are roughly 80, 100 stories.

Now let's just chop them into single-story or two-story buildings and distribute those buildings

all over a big out-of-town office park.

And think of all the car parks you need to have around them.

Think of the enormous amount of space that that office park would take up.

Now, because they're all stacked on top of each other, you don't need the car parking.

You don't need people driving their

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