Tim Harford special - the things that created our economy
This is Money Podcast
This is Money
4.1 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2017
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever really thought about what it is that creates the modern economy?
These are the things that surround us and we interact with, or depend on, everyday but rarely think about.
From credit cards, to shipping containers, batteries and double-entry book-keeping, there are a lot of things that are more interesting than you may think.
And for this special Christmas edition of the This is Money podcast we have a treat for you. Tim Harford, author of Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, presenter of the podcast of the same name, and Undercover Economist makes a guest appearance.
He joins Simon Lambert, Rachel Rickard Straus and Georgie Frost in the studio to talk about what it is that shapes the world around us, why it matters, and how what are commonplace things now were dreamed up and then completely changed the way we live.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to This Is Money podcast in partnership with NS&I, your weekly roundup of the top personal finance, consumer and business stories that editor Simon Lamber and his team have been covering on their award-winning website. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm your host, Georgie Frost, and alongside Simon I today is personal finance editor Rachel Rickard Strauss. |
| 0:19.5 | And we have a special guest, because today we explore what barbed wire, disposable razors, |
| 0:25.5 | concrete and TV dinners all have in common. |
| 0:29.0 | Well, according to our undercover economist, they are some of the 50 things that made the modern economy. |
| 0:34.7 | We're talking to Tim Harford. |
| 0:37.7 | I want you to imagine catastrophe. I want you to imagine catastrophe. |
| 0:42.9 | The end of civilisation. |
| 0:45.5 | This complex, intricate, modern world of ours is finished. |
| 0:50.5 | Don't worry about why. |
| 0:52.0 | Maybe it was swine flu or nuclear war. |
| 0:55.0 | Killer robots or the zombie apocalypse. |
| 1:00.0 | And now imagine that you, lucky you, are one of the few survivors. |
| 1:06.0 | You have no phone, who would your phone anyway? |
| 1:09.0 | No internet. No electricity, no fuel. |
| 1:15.0 | Four decades ago, the science historian James Burke posed that scenario in his TV series, Connections. |
| 1:22.5 | And he asked a simple question, surrounded by the wreckage of modernity, |
| 1:29.2 | without access to the lifeblood of modern technology, where do you start again? What do you need to keep yourself and the embers of |
| 1:35.3 | civilisation alive? This is money, brought to you in partnership with NS&I premium bonds, making saving that little bit more exciting. |
| 1:47.5 | A good question, what do you need to keep the embers of civilisation alive? Also, are we on the verge |
| 1:54.2 | of the fourth industrial revolution? How does technology shape us? And why perhaps we should be |
| 2:00.4 | more afraid of Jennifer than Rachel, |
... |
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