Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

simple question: Surrounded by the wreckage of modernity, without access to the lifeblood of modern technology

Four decades ago, the science historian James Burke posed that scenario in his TV series Connections.

The end of civilization

internal combustion engine

McKinsey’s breakthrough was a book published in 1922, with the not-entirely-thrilling title Budgetary Control

the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits.” If it’s legal, and it makes money, they should do it. And if people don’t like it, don’t blame the company—change the law.6

One study found it was eco-friendlier to grow tomatoes in Spain and transport them to Sweden than it was to grow them in Sweden.12 Another claimed that raising a lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to England emits less greenhouse gas than raising a lamb in England.13

According to Geoffrey Heal of Columbia University and Jisung Park of Harvard, a hotter-than-average year is bad for productivity in hot countries, but good in cold ones: crunching the numbers, they conclude that human productivity peaks when the temperature is between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller

Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays pioneered the fields of public relations and propaganda. Among his most famous stunts for corporate clients, Bernays helped the American Tobacco Company in 1929 persuade women that smoking in public was an act of female liberation. Cigarettes, he said, were “torches of freedom.”