Month: April 2017

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Elevator

In 1853 Elisha Otis climbed onto a platform which was then hoisted high above a large crowd of onlookers, nervy with anticipation. A man with an axe cut the cable, the crowd gasped, and Otis’s platform shuddered – but it did not plunge. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe!” he boomed. The city landscape was about to be turned on its head by the man who had invented not the elevator, but the elevator brake. As Tim Harford explains, the safety elevator is an astonishingly successful mass transit system which has changed the very shape of our cities. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Modern Elevator, Credit: iurii/Shutterstock)
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Containers - Episode 7: The Lost Docks

It’s 1979 and containerization is sweeping through the San Francisco waterfront, leaving the old docks in ruins. As global trade explodes, a group of longshoremen band together to try to preserve the culture of work that they knew. They take pictures, create a slide show, and make sound recordings. Those recordings languished in a basement for 40 years. In this episode, we hear those archival tapes as a way of exploring the human effects of automation.

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Crimetown - S1 E15: Family Ties

Charles “the Ghost” Kennedy and his sister Gloria took very different paths in life. She became a state senator. He became a drug smuggler. And as his empire starts to crumble, the people close to him suffer the consequences.

For a full list of credits, and for more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Contraceptive Pill

The contraceptive pill had profound social consequences. Everyone agrees with that. But – as Tim Harford explains – the pill wasn’t just socially revolutionary. It also sparked an economic revolution, perhaps the most significant of the late twentieth century. A careful statistical study by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz strongly suggests that the pill played a major role in allowing women to delay marriage, delay motherhood and invest in their own careers. The consequences of that are profound. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Oral contraceptive pill, Credit: Areeya_ann/Shutterstock)
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Containers - Episode 6: And They Won, They Won Big

It started with a puzzle: why were people in West Oakland dying 12-15

years earlier than their counterparts in the wealthier hills? The

people in the flatlands were dying of the same things as the people in

the hills, just much younger. Meet the doctor who helped make the case

that air pollution from cargo handling was one big part of the answer,

and the smart-dressing, wise-cracking environmental activist who

helped to clean up the air. This is an inside look at the problems

that come with being a major node in the network of global trade—and

the solutions that people have devoted their lives to implementing.

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