As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. We take such things as being able to flick on a light at any time for granted. Until we get hit with a blackout lasting hours or days (an increasingly common occurrence, thanks to ‘net zero’). Heating and cooking, even more so.
Our ancestors of just a few generations ago would be astonished at the almost-magical abundance in which we live.
As a measure of that abundance, economist William Nordhaus conducted an extensive analysis on the “time price” of light over the span of human history. By “time price”, he meant the time an average worker would need to work to afford just one hour of the light required for comfortable reading (around 1000 lumens).
In 1830, an average worker would have to labour for three hours, to afford just one hour of comfortable reading light (about 83 candles’ worth).
Innovation replaced candles with kerosene lamps and then with incandescent lighting and then LED lighting. Today, for 75 cents, one can buy a Cree J Series 5050C E Class LED that generates 228 lumens per watt. By increasing the wattage to 4.4 watts one can, therefore, generate 1,000 lumens of light. Electricity prices are currently around 17 cents per 1,000 watt hours, commonly known as kilowatt hours or kWh. One watt hour costs 0.017 cents; thus, the 4.4 watts to power the Cree LED for one hour would cost a mere 0.0745 cents. The average worker earns $36.53 an hour, or slightly more than a penny per second. Working for around 0.0735 seconds, therefore, the average worker earns enough money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour.
The light that cost three hours of labour in 1830 costs just 0.0735 seconds today. For the cost of one hour of reading light 200 years ago, workers get 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 per cent increase.
Even more astonishing, that abundance has spread to most of the world’s population, even as that population has increased by 583 per cent.
To measure how humanity’s resource base has changed, we calculate the size of the global resource “pie” by multiplying personal resource abundance by population. That reveals how much “total abundance” exists across humanity at a given moment.
As we already saw, during the 195-year period, personal light abundance rose by a factor of 146,980. Assuming for argument’s sake that everyone in the world enjoys American prices of LEDs and energy, combined with the 6.83-fold increase in population, the global light abundance factor would amount to 1,004,360. In other words, the global light pie has grown by 100,435,912 per cent – from an index value of one in 1830 to 1,004,360 today […]
What was once scarce, flickering, and expensive has become nearly boundless – flowing at the speed of electrons and photons across the planet.
Not just boundless, but nearly thoughtlessly easy and safe. Candles were not just expensive, they were time-consuming to use (trimming wicks, striking matches and so on) and dangerous. Even today, there are about 8,000 candle-caused fires in the USA every year, but those are just one in 50 house fires. Infernos such as the Great Fire of London, or the Chicago Fire, are widely suspected to be caused by candles or lanterns.
Gas lighting was somewhat safer, but still dangerous. You’re talking about flames, after all, and high-pressure, highly-flammable, gas. Gasometer explosions were too-common, deadly occurrences.
For a long time, whale oil lit houses across the world. Harvesting the resource was not just an environmental catastrophe, it was incredibly deadly. It was said that every lamp that burned with whale oil contained a drop of human blood.
Even more importantly, though, the ability to cheaply and easily read well into the night has unquantifiable flow-on effects.
More people with light has meant more minds, more ideas, and more ventures into the unknown. When free to imagine and innovate, humans transform scarcity into abundance – and ignorance into insight. Over the past two centuries, we have converted the darkness of want into the radiance of wealth, beginning with light itself […]
Compared to the abundant light of today’s world, our ancestors really did live in the “dark ages.”
So the next time you flick on a light, think of the little miracle that’s at your fingertips.
