Something You Should Know - How to Be Beautiful and Why it Matters & Small Inventions that Rocked Your World

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

When you search for something in Google does it matter what order you put the words in? What about punctuation – does that matter? We start this episode with the best ways to optimize Google searches to get the best results. (https://edu.google.com/coursebuilder/courses/pswg/1.2/assets/notes/Lesson1.5/Lesson1.5Wordordermatters_Text_.html) What makes someone beautiful? Can you really become more beautiful? These are important questions because beauty and attractiveness have some clear benefits for everyone. Rachelle Smith, associate professor of psychology at Husson University, is author of the book The Biology of Beauty (https://amzn.to/2JOKMtn). Rachelle joins me to explain the importance of your own beauty and how to maximize what you have.  If you are going on a job interview it matters whether you are the first person interviewed or the last person or better yet, the fourth person. I’ll explain why. (http://www.businessinsider.com/always-go-fourth-during-interviews-2015-5) Seemingly small inventions like the razor blade, the TV dinner and paper money have had profound impacts on our lives and the economy in ways you never knew. Tim Harford, author of the book Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy (https://amzn.to/2JV5zM9) joins me for a fascinating explanation of how these innovations have transformed our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, it's not just what you search in Google that gets you the right results, it's how you search it. Plus, the biology of what makes people beautiful and attractive. Men are attracted to skin, so the more skin a woman shows, the more attention she might get. Women might not even be doing it on purpose. Just when they wear the little shorter skirt, get more attention and that's reinforcing even outside of their conscious awareness. Also how employers choose which candidate gets the job is different than you think and small inventions that change the world in big ways like frozen TV dinners. They saved an enormous amount of time. Really

educated women in the 60s were spending literally hours a day putting food on the table for their families. Once that process was sped up, then they could go out and they could earn a living. And of course, that gave them economic independence. All this today on Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks.

Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit,

the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Here's something I bet you've wondered about. When you type in a search query into Google, you've probably wondered, well, does the order of the words matter? Do all the words matter? Can I leave some words out? Does spelling matter? Well, it turns out that some things matter and some things don't matter. For example, every word does matter. You might think that if you leave out a or the in your search that that has no impact, but it does. And here's the perfect example.

If you search for who, you get the World Health Organization as the first result in your search query. If you search a who, you get Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss as your first result, and if you search the-hoo, you get the rock band. So those little words do matter. Word order also matters. If you search blue sky, you get very different results than if you search sky blue. In general, if you use what you would consider the natural sequence of words for your search you'll get better results. Capitalization and punctuation typically does not matter

and Google ignores special characters. They have no impact on your search. And spelling does matter, but typically Google will help correct if you misspell. And that is something you should know. What makes a person beautiful? You know a beautiful person when you see one, but what is it that makes them so? And is a beautiful person here perceived as a beautiful person in other cultures? Can you deliberately and intentionally make yourself

more beautiful? And perhaps more importantly, why is this important in the first place? Well, you're about to find out. I am joined by Rochelle Smith. Rochelle is an associate professor of psychology at Husson University in Maine and author of the book, The Biology of Beauty. Hey, Rochelle, so start by giving me an understanding of what, as a researcher, what is beauty to you? Beauty, it was fascinating to look at it more closely because what makes someone beautiful is this unique combination of these objective qualities that you can objectively look at a person, take measurements, kind of define objective beauty through symmetry or body proportions

or facial features. But then there's the subjective piece where personality plays a role, common experiences, similarities, familiarity. So we all have that individual that maybe we didn't even find that attractive when we first met. But then after you share some experiences, you get to know them, and they become more and more attractive in your eyes, even though their physical features didn't change. So let's talk about the physical features. And you talked about, you know, you can measure objective beauty. But is it really objective? In other words, if I have a picture of a beautiful woman, and I take it to the far reaches of a mountain range in Asia and show that picture to them, would they say the same thing? They would. There's been cross-cultural research.

Dr. David Buss from the University of Boston, I believe, he looked at 37 different cultures all over the world, different mating styles, different political systems, different... And there's a lot of similarities. There are consistent features that are found to be more attractive. And those features tend to correlate with health. Things that make you healthier tend to also make you more attractive. Things like? Things like for women, waist to hip ratio. So having a narrow waist and wider hips,

that's correlated with decreased chances of cancer and diabetes and heart disease. Like that feature, not only does it make you more reproductively successful, but it also correlates with all these other health aspects. So no matter where you are in the world, that kind of hourglass feminine shape is considered attractive. And wasn't there some something where somebody researched all the centerfolds in Playboy and they all had that ratio? That's right. And so even looking cross-culturally and across time, even though what's considered the most attractive might change from generation to generation, that waist-hip ratio tends to remain pretty consistent. And I've also heard that symmetry is important, that in essence that a fairly plain symmetry, like not a lot of irregularities,

is actually more attractive than somebody who doesn't have that. That's right. So in the research, the most attractive individuals are those who are the most average. And that sounds kind of counterintuitive, but if you take a bunch of different faces and kind of merge them into one, the face becomes more and more attractive than any of the contributing parts. And part of that is because it becomes more and more average, more and more symmetrical. Kind of any deformities or discolorations get kind of washed out.

And symmetry essentially gives you external evidence of underlying hormone functioning and developmental stability. So again, that symmetry is indicative of good health, strong genes, and a good developmental environment. Within all that objectivity of beauty, though, there is a lot of subjectivity, because some people find taller people attractive, some people may find shorter people attractive, some people like mates who are heavier, some people are attracted to people who are thinner. So there is preference mixed in with that objective definition of beauty. That's an excellent observation.

And all of this research looks at kind of averages, like on average, taller men are considered to be more attractive. But depending on how tall the viewer is might determine how tall is the most attractive. I found in the research is that overall body size doesn't contribute that much to attractiveness. So particularly in westernized societies or in industrialized societies, like women are always seeking to be thinner and skinnier and more slender. And the body size itself doesn't matter as much. It's the proportions. It's the waist to hip ratio, the body shape. So even men who prefer larger women or cultures where they prefer larger women on average, the same waist-to-hip ratio remains the same. Really? That's really interesting. So it's not the size. It's not size that matters as long as the ratio is right. And men don't get off the hook. For men, it's shoulder-to to hip ratio that we tend to look at.

So the wide shoulders to a narrow waist tends to be that inverted triangular shape is what we find attractive cross-culturally on men. And this isn't because you look at a guy and say, well, I really like that shoulder to hip ratio. That's just spectacular. It's just you look at it and you see beauty there, even though you don't know why you see beauty there. That's exactly right.

And even if you, they've shown that if you have, like, the back profile of men, the ones with the higher shoulder-to-hip ratio, it just catches your attention more. You look longer, your eyes go from the shoulder to the waist, and you spend more time looking at it. So it just innately captures your attention, not even at a conscious level, that it just captures your attention, you're drawn to it, you're likely to look longer, you're likely to engage. And none of this really gives an indication of relationship satisfaction or relationship health. It's just that initial attraction, that initial seeing something that you like. Is it true, because I've always sensed this, I have no research to back it up,

but is it true that physical attraction, the way the person looks, just looks, is more important to men when looking at women than it is for women when looking at men. That's exactly right. There's a lot of qualities in a relationship that far outweigh physical qualities, particularly for women. Women are much more interested in personality, in supportiveness, in connection and intimacy than in physical traits. And when women are asked to rate men for these different qualities, the pictures of the men, depending on whether the man's by himself, interacting with a child, interacting with a puppy,

like those other cues lead women to rate the men to be more attractive than any of the actual physical features. Yeah, I remember hearing some research where they showed women pictures of men, and then they showed pictures of the same men in, like, I don't know, it was Burger King uniforms or something, and they rated them much less attractive when they were not wearing their suit and instead were wearing their fast food uniform. That's right.

Women do tend to be attractive for signs of success, for signs of wealth, for signs of commitment, like someone who's going to be a good, solid partner, which sounds stereotypical and it sounds a little shallow, but it's based on reality that these are qualities that lead to a more successful relationship down the line. Clearly, in our culture and in many cultures, I assume, there is a lot of time, money, and effort put into being more beautiful, appearing more beautiful, optimizing the beautiful physical features that you have and downplaying the ones that aren't so beautiful.

And so my question is, is it worth it? I mean, if, as you're talking about, it all boils down to ratios, is all this other stuff worth it? On average, people who are more attractive do reap benefits from being attractive. So those people who put the effort into presenting themselves in a more attractive fashion tend to benefit from a phenomenon known as the halo effect. And the halo effect is this idea that if you're attractive

and you have this quality that we consider good, that you must have other good qualities as well. So if people are rating photographs of an attractive person, they tend to rate them as more fun, more intelligent, more dependable, more capable, even though they don't have any information beyond their appearance. So in like elementary school, starting in kindergarten, more attractive children tend to be rated as more hardworking, more intelligent. Teachers call on them more often. And they're not doing this on purpose.

It's just their attention gets engaged. They give them more time to answer questions. They give them more opportunities. And by the time those kids get to college, they're more likely to be accepted into college simply based on their appearance, despite scores on SATs or GPA. So there's a lot of these benefits starting really early in our lives simply based on their appearance despite scores on SATs or GPA. So there's a lot of these benefits starting really early in our lives that just being naturally attractive gives you.

And this extends into the workforce. In job interviews, more attractive applicants are more likely to be rated as competent and qualified regardless of their actual skills. And then once they have the job, they're more likely to be given opportunities, rated as more effective, given higher salaries, given more raises. So there's a lot of benefits that can radiate just from your physical appearance. I'm speaking with Rochelle Smith. She is an associate professor of psychology at Husson University in Maine, and she's author of the book, The Biology of Beauty. You know, we've talked a lot on this podcast about the importance of sleep, and nothing

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So, Rochelle, in addition to the ratios that you talked about, if you wanted to improve your objective beauty, I mean, are there certain parts of the body that you should perhaps focus on more than others? Are there certain things that have more, you know, bang for the buck? Oh, absolutely. Typically, attractiveness correlates with good health. So if you are

attempting to be more attractive or you'd like to present yourself in your best light, you should really focus on your health even more than losing weight, which I think is where a lot of people go to or building muscle. Healthy features tend to be rated and correlated with attractiveness. So this means getting adequate amounts of sleep to let your body restore itself, engaging in exercise to increase cardiac function to kind of give your skin that healthy glow, to eat a balanced diet full of vitamins and nutrients

that can give you healthy skin, healthy eyes, muscles, hair, drink plenty of water to get your energy levels up. There's all these natural methods that a lot of us overlook that can make us naturally more attractive. But if, for example, you're a guy and you want to improve that or get closer to that ideal shoulder-to-waist ratio, that might mean working out and building up those shoulders and cutting down on that waist? It definitely does. And I think a lot of men do this naturally without even realizing why they're doing it. But a lot of men do focus on their upper body. And you always see on online jokes, it's like, don't let your friend forget leg day, because men do tend to focus on

the upper body more than their lower body, Because they're just naturally trying to accentuate that feature that women are interested in. And the same for women. Women tend to do exercises that accentuate their waist and their hips, and those are the features that men are drawn to more. In our culture, in Western cultures, there seems, to me anyway, that attractiveness and sexiness are intertwined, that particularly for women to be more attractive, to make yourself more attractive, is to make yourself more sexy, to show more skin. True? I think it might depend on the woman. Men are attracted to skin, So the more skin a woman shows, the more attention she might get.

So it's interesting because women might not even be doing it on purpose, that just when they wear the little shorter skirt, they get more attention, and that's reinforcing. So it might kind of drive their behavior, even outside of their conscious awareness, that this behavior draws attention, it kind of gets them what they want, and thus it reinforces that they do it more. But doesn't time also enter into this? I mean, an attractive woman, you could take an attractive woman from today and compare her to an attractive woman from 1920, and the looks are different, you know, what seems to be accentuated is different. It's a very different look, but maybe what you're saying is, but underneath it all, it remains the same.

Right. It tends to cycle throughout generations. So in the 1920s, maybe the stick-thin, flapper kind of ideal was the trend, and then as you moved into the fifties, it became more the voluptuous, like hippie, larger breath. Like there's definitely the ideal changes with generations, but the waist to hip ratio doesn't. So if you look at Twiggy, who is a popular model known for her kind of androgynous figure, her waist to hip ratio was still lower than the average woman. So she still had that hip to ratio within that hyper ideal. So, but there has been many features, the ideal changes. So for example, like the ideal eyebrow, the ideal eyebrow for women used to be plucked, high arched, and you can kind of think back to movie stars with their high-arched eyebrows. This accentuated their femininity because it separated them from men

who tend to have bushier brows. It made them look more innocent, more open-eyed, where today a thicker brow is in fashion. So it's like the fashion of the eyebrow has changed kind of throughout generations. I don't know if this is something you looked at or if this just throws a monkey wrench into the whole conversation, but are gay couples, are gay people attracted to the same, in other words, is a gay woman looking for the same things in a woman that a heterosexual man is looking for, or is that a whole different discussion?

It's a whole different discussion. However, women tend to look for the same attributes, whether they're looking at a man or looking at a woman. And men tend to look for those same attributes, whether they're looking at a man or looking at a woman. So men do tend to initially be a little preoccupied with physical features. So if they're looking at a woman, they're looking for hyper-feminized traits. If they're interested in men, they're going to look for those hyper-masculinized traits in general. And same for women. Women are more interested in personality. They're interested in intimacy. Do we have a connection? Do we have similarities? So regardless of the sex of their partner, they're still going to look for those same traits. And lastly, in the discussion of truly just physical attractiveness and physical beauty,

is there a sense of when a woman typically looks at a man or a man at a woman, what are the first few things they notice? Is it the hair, the lips, the shoes? What is it that quickly grabs attention? I think it varies from individual to individual. Most men tend to notice body proportions, body shape. Women tend to look at the eyes. And it's interesting that something that I found surprising is bald men are actually rated as more intelligent, more dominant, more masculine, and more attractive. And they think part of that might be because when you

look at a man without the hair to distract, the attention goes right to the eyes, and there's that kind of sense of instant chemistry and instant connection. So it's kind of good news if men are concerned about balding. If you just shave it all off, you're rated consistently more attractive. Yeah, because there's a difference between being bald and balding. Correct. Yeah, if you have the comb over that's not helping you out, take that off. So they manipulated it on computer pictures where they took the same man and either gave him balding, full head of hair, or totally bald. And the totally bald man was always rated

as more intelligent and more attractive overall. But that's a good example of a feature that is a deal-breaker for some women who would never go out, at least when they're younger, would never go out with a bald guy, and some women are very attracted to bald guys. So that's a subjective difference that is, I guess, is just up to the individual. Right. And a lot of this is subjective. A lot of it's based on your personal experience. So people you've had relationships with in the past, if you liked them, then if future people have similar characteristics, you're going to feel naturally drawn to them. If you didn't like them, you're going to feel repulsed. So we bring with us all

of this baggage when we encounter new people and it definitely colors our view of how attractive somebody is. Anything else that surprised you that we haven't talked about besides the baldness thing? Not so much surprising, but I don't want this to come across as though I'm telling people that you need to make yourself more attractive. I think that you can use it strategically, and you can know kind of your best features, so you can know how to work that job interview or how you can get people to cooperate with you when you need it. But people who are hyper, kind of aware of their own appearance,

tend to struggle more. They tend to have poor psychological health. They tend to self-objectify. They tend to struggle more with depression and anxiety and self-esteem. So there's something to be said for being too aware. It's better to focus on being healthy and kind of let the rest take care of itself. That's probably some really good advice. Thanks, Rochelle. Rochelle Smith has been my guest. She is an associate professor of psychology at Husson University in Maine and author of the book, The Biology of Beauty.

There's a link to the book in the show notes for this episode. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from

But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You don't think about it much, but there are things that you use every day or that you see every day that have had a profound impact on our culture and economy and our lives

in ways you probably never knew. Tim Harford has uncovered a bunch of them and has fascinating stories to tell about them. He wrote a book called 50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. There's also an accompanying podcast series Tim did with the BBC called 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. Hey, Tim, welcome. It's great to be back. So of all the things that you looked at that have the modern economy. Hey, Tim, welcome. It's great to be back. So of all the

things that you looked at that have shaped our economy and in many ways shaped our culture, is there a favorite? Is there one that really stands out? Oh, well, it was fun to discover all of these different ideas. But the one that really fascinated me, I think, was paper. And the reason that I found paper so fascinating is because it's this bit part player in a story that people tell a lot, which is the story of the Gutenberg Press. When I was working on the book and on the radio series, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, people were saying, oh, you must write about the Gutenberg press. It revolutionized literacy in Europe, gave us the textbook and the newspaper and all sorts of ferocious wars. And it really changed the world. But the Gutenberg press wouldn't have worked at all without an inexpensive writing surface. And we had

things that we could write on, animal skin parchments, but they simply weren't economically viable without paper. So paper is this very simple, cheap material that changes the world. And it's often the simple, cheap stuff that gets very little attention, but actually is what really has a profound effect. There's a more modern one on your list that everybody uses somehow every day. And I can remember a time when there weren't any, and that's barcodes. And, you know, before barcodes, there were products just had little stickers with numbers on them, and you had to ring them up at the register. And really, the barcode changed everything. Yeah, I mean, it is a fascinating story. I should say that the idea has been developed independently several times. But the most famous example, and I think the precurs task of trying to speed up retail. And he went to hang out at his grandparents' house by the beach. I think it was down in Florida.

He was sitting on the beach, and he was thinking of his time in the Boy Scouts, and he dragged his fingers in this big, lazy through the sand and he was thinking the boy scouts morse code and he looked down and he created a sort of bullseye of grooves and ridges and he realized that you could create that sort of shape and the grooves and the ridges could stand for dots and dashes you could convey a kind of code and in fact the original barcodes that he designed were a bullseye, because the idea of the bullseye is where you can scan it from any angle and it looks the same. And that was a brilliant solution, but it really needed much cheaper lasers and much cheaper

computers to make it a reality. And that really happened in the 60s and 70s. But the interesting thing, though, is that even after the technology itself had been perfected, the next stage in the 60s and 70s. But the interesting thing, though, is that even after the technology itself had been perfected, the next stage in the story is a whole bunch of lawyers arguing in meeting rooms for months and months and months. The reason for that is that the big food manufacturers and the big retailers, they all understood that this was a technology that was going to change the game and it would create new winners and losers. Many of the technologies in the book and the podcast series do create new winners and losers. And so they were arguing over the details because different rules would advantage different people.

Well, and also there had to be massive buy-in on this. Yeah, it's a huge deal because there was one brewer, for example, that had been printing labels for the beer. I think it may have been Miller. They were printing labels for their beer and they'd been using the same machine to print the label since 1912. And these beautiful classic labels and there's no way to print a barcode. You need to throw the old machine out. And of course, all the print a barcode. You need to throw the old machine out. And of course, all the food manufacturers were saying, well, we'll print the barcodes when you retailers install the machines.

And all the retailers were saying, well, we'll install the machines when you guys print the barcodes. So it is a chicken and egg thing. But in the end, the lawyers were replaced by the chief executives of all these big companies and they got the deal done. So let's go down the list here and talk about as many as we can in the time we have to talk and discuss them, starting with the razor blade.

Because I would think, really? Razor blade? Yeah. Well, it's really what the razor blade, the disposable razor blade, symbolized. It was invented by an absolutely amazing guy called King Camp Gillette. You can guess which company Gillette founded. And he had all these weird utopian dreams. He was going to set up this enormous city on the border of the US and Canada called Metropolis. And the whole population of North America was going to live there in peace and harmony. And then when that didn't work out, he developed the disposable razor blade. But in particular, he developed the pricing model, where the original kit is cheap, and then the replacement blades are expensive. And you see

the same thing with, say, an Xbox or a PlayStation. It's the games that are really expensive. The kit itself is almost subsidized. It's priced very competitively. You see it with printers, very expensive printer ink. You see it with hotels where the minibars are expensive. So he developed this pricing model that is now completely ubiquitous. TV dinners. I mean, TV dinners are huge because without TV dinners,

there wouldn't be frozen food or there wouldn't be the frozen meal. And so where did that come from? Big time savers. So lots of people pointed to the washing machine and said, you should cover the washing machine because that saved time that was being spent on housework, mostly, of course, by women. And it freed women up to go out and do paid work instead of all this unpaid work in the home. When I looked at the data, that story is true. But washing machines don't deserve the credit. Because basically what happened is women or whoever was doing the housework started just doing a lot more laundry. So we got cleaner, but it didn't

save time. On the other hand, TV dinners and the whole kind of processing, food processing complex, takeaway pizzas, microwavable meals, pre-chopped salad, cheap fast food, you can go out, all of these things put together, they saved an enormous amount of time in food preparation. Really educated women in the 60s were spending literally hours a day just literally putting food on the table for their families. Once that process was sped up, saved them time, then they could go out and they could earn a living. And of course, that gave them economic independence. It's a big, big difference, a social and economic change caused by this change in the food system.

And where did that start? Well, you could track it all the way back to the 19th century in some cases. But there was one of the main innovations was a company that had been making ready meals for the army during the Second World War and then the Korean War. And then they started to realize, hmm, maybe there aren't going to be that many more wars and we need to find a different outlet. And so they started perfecting the Betty Crocker food company, if I remember rightly. But they perfected the frozen TV dinner in its sort of space age aluminium tray. The particular food scientist who developed it, whose name escapes me, she said that she would never allow a TV dinner in her own house. She said she spent all day working on these things at the office,

and there was no way she was going to have one in her own home. She saw them enough. So you pick one that you think is particularly interesting that maybe people wouldn't know, that would think, eh, not so much. Well, you know, one of my favorite ones is concrete because no one gives concrete the time of day. But this is an invention. It's probably 12,000 years old. There were early settlements using concrete in Turkey. The Romans perfected it, but it really took off when a French gardener called Joseph Meunier realized that you could put steel inside concrete.

He was originally trying to make flower pots out of concrete, and that was reinforced concrete. And by a cosmic coincidence, the thermal expansion of steel and the thermal expansion of concrete, the coefficient of thermal expansion is almost exactly the same. So that when the pair of them heat up, they expand in almost perfect unison. And so it doesn't crack when a building cools down and heats up. So this is, I mean, it's absolutely revolutionary as a material and it's easily the most used material in the world economy after water. You say that paper money is a big deal, that that really was a game changer. So how so? So paper money is an incredible invention. It was originally developed by accident. The Chinese province of

Sichuan, which is now famous for its food, was a border province. This is about a thousand years ago, and a little more than a thousand years ago. And the Chinese emperor said, we don't want you using gold or silver coins in Sichuan, because the gold and silver coins, they might kind of be spent and leak across the border. And then the barbarians, the tribes that we're afraid of, they would have the gold and silver. So by order of the emperor, you are only allowed to use iron coins. Well, now, when you think about it, iron coins, they're not very valuable. They're incredibly heavy. You might go to market to buy 100 pounds worth of rice, and you might need to take more than 100 pounds weight worth of coins just to buy the rice.

It's incredibly bulky. So people started writing each other notes. And I might say, well, Michael, rather than give you all these coins, which you don't really want, I'll just write you an IOU. And then when you go to the market, you've got Tim Harford's IOU. So then you might go to a merchant and say, well, look, I could write you an IOU for me. But instead of writing you an IOU for me, why don't I just give you Tim Harford's IOU? Because we both know Tim Harford, he's good for the money. And now my IOU starts passing around from merchant to merchant to merchant without ever having to be repaid. Everyone accepts that this is good. And if anybody ever took it back to me, I'd give them their iron coins.

And so it's a remarkably practical system. Of course, the great thing is because I don't ever actually have to repay the money, for me it's free money. And this is a concept that we call seniorage. thing is, because I don't ever actually have to repay the money, for me, it's free money. And this is a concept that we call seniorage. And governments pretty quickly, the Chinese government realized, hang on a minute, we should have a piece of that. In fact, we want the monopoly on that. So they banned private merchants from issuing paper money, and they took it over themselves. But that's where it all came from. Certainly, you would expect to see on your list the clock, because that certainly has shaped the economy. But what's the story there?

It's this story of increasing attempts to standardize. The faster the speed that we travel, the more we for example, in Exeter, which is in the west of England, was running six minutes behind the clock in London, the clocks in London. And they said, well, this is the correct time. It may even be more than six minutes, if I remember rightly. It was quite a bit later. ways started saying, well, we need to get you from London across to Reading, across to Bristol, and then across to Exeter, by which time the entire, the local time has changed by several minutes. We need to synchronize all of these clocks. So then you have the invention of railway time and clocks that are set to a constant time across the country. Similar development, of course, in the United States. And these days,

we're trying to synchronize time to the nanosecond with atomic clocks. And it's because our GPS system, the global positioning satellites, that's dependent on the highly accurate measurement of time. If your measurement of time is wrong, your GPS system is also going to be wrong. Well, and what you said about the railroads, when you think about it, I mean we've got to have a standard because if two trains are on the same track because we don't have the same time standard and they're headed toward each other, that's a problem. Absolutely, absolutely. But I mean you and I, we're I think eight hours time difference away. Wouldn't it be that much more inconvenient if it was eight hours and 11 minutes?

I mean, just that it's hard enough to adjust for the difference in the hours. But the idea that you might also have to adjust for the minutes as well, it's just too confusing. So in a global world with light speed communications and rapid transport, you need a consistent system. The gramophone is on your list, which is the early record player. But why? Why is that so important? The gramophone was introduced and then replaced by the CD and then later replaced by downloads. Each time, those technological changes have changed who gets paid to make music. So from a situation where the highest paid singers in the world were people who could fill an opera hall, to the highest paid singers in the world being the people who could

shift albums, and now the highest paid singers in the world are the ones who can fill stadiums. The change in the recording technology changes how much you can make as the best paid musician in the world, the hundredth best paid musician in the world, the hundred thousandth best paid musician in the world. And that's true of many, many other industries. Change the technology. And even if people's skills and abilities and popularity hasn't changed, their ability to turn that into income will change. Lastly, the elevator. The elevator is amazing. Elevators don't get enough love. I think it's because it's almost like being teleported when you get in, into and out of an elevator. We just take it for granted. But when you think about any dense city at all, but Manhattan is the classic one, it would be completely inconceivable without the elevator.

In fact, there was an elevator operator strike in the 1940s that paralyzed Manhattan for a while. And you can imagine how that would work. But it's a kind of mass transit system, shifts an enormous number of people. It's incredibly safe, but it's also incredibly environmentally efficient because it operates with a counterweight. So you're shifting people from the top to the bottom of something like the Empire State Building. Can you imagine chopping the Empire State Building up into one or two-story sections, and then setting those sections down in some big suburban office park with lots of parking all around them, imagine the sprawl of that. You realize the elevator is an incredibly efficient

mass transit device that's changed the shape of our cities, and that we basically completely take for granted. But what was the big moment? What was it that changed everything? Well, the elevator has existed for thousands of years, but the big invention was Otis. Otis invented not the elevator, but the elevator brake. And he showed this invention off in a display, a demonstration at one of the world's fairs in the mid-19th century. And he was hoisted on a platform high above the crowd. And then he had, just to add to the sense of doom, he had this guy with an executioner's axe standing behind him as though he was going to chop his head off. And the axeman swung the ax down and severed the rope that was supporting the elevator. And everyone in the crowd screamed and the

elevator just juddered a half an inch and then stopped. And Otis yelled out to everybody, all safe, gentlemen, all safe. So he had demonstrated the safety of his device. And that's what you needed. Nobody is going to get into an elevator unless it's safe. Great. Well, there are plenty other inventions and plenty other stories. If you want to hear them, you can hear them on the podcast series Tim did with the BBC called 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. And you can find that on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, I suspect. And the book is called 50 Inventions That Shape the Modern Economy. And I've got a link to the book in the show notes for this episode.

Hey, thanks for being here, Tim. Brilliant. Great to talk to you. When you're looking for a new job, any little bit of information that will give you an edge is worth knowing. And this is worth knowing. When a company is interviewing people on any given day, the fourth person interviewed is more likely to get the job. Researchers from Old Dominion University analyzed more than 600 30-minute job interviews at a university career center, and they found that the fourth person being interviewed

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