Riches and Power

Imagine living in a country without a written constitution. A country in which laws are subject to whimsy or a powerful person’s interpretation and there is no recourse for an individual who does not like or agree with the outcome of various legal decisions. In the United States, we live in a system subject to a written constitution. The document is—from a historical perspective—unique, and also o...

Imagine traveling across the world. But not on an airplane, not by car, but on your own two feet and on the backs of animals. Now, imagine doing that for two decades. Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant whose travels gained notoriety in his time and whose name survives across the millennia. There is far, far more to the man than just his name. He traveled across the known world and served the Great...

Imagine, or perhaps think back, to a Europe in which each country had a different currency. In Germany you bought things with the Deutschmark, but cross the border into France and you’d have to use the French franc, and further still in Spain you’d be buying things with Spanish peseta. Currencies are omnipresent in the modern day and permeate commerce, government, and psychology in equal measures....

Imagine a world in which there are no machines. If you need to move something heavy, get from place to place, or pump water, you have limited options including: human power, animal power, and (if you are close to a suitable river) river power. Thanks in large part to Scottish inventor James Watt, the Industrial Revolution was a time of unprecedented technological change in which his Watt steam eng...

Imagine a world in which your country is purchased by a foreigner. Not taken over by a foreign country, mind you, but rather bought and paid for via a purchase contract. While there are many instances of one country invading or occupying another throughout history, the late 1800s saw European powers come to own—at least in their eyes—nearly the entire of Africa. Europeans exploited a strictly lega...

A patent grants its owner “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” an invention for a specified period of time in return for disclosing the invention to the public. Patents are a foundational piece of intellectual property rights both in the United States and worldwide, and they are both celebrated and criticized for variously enabling or preventing innovatio...

Imagine living with the fear of catching a disease that could paralyze you for the rest of your life. Generations of people in the United States lived with the fear of polio, and worldwide people still contend with that fear today. The development of the polio vaccine is one of the most renowned achievements in modern medicine, and thanks to its development it is vanishingly rare to see someone in...

Imagine a world in which there were zero protections for you as a worker. If you got sick, you could be fired. If you grow too weak or old to work in the mines, you’re fired and there are other workers to take your place. While workers today frequently still find themselves in precarious positions, but many of the protections we can be thankful for today we can ascribe to unions.  What is the...

Imagine traveling before the wheel. Anywhere you wanted to go, you had to either walk, or be wealthy enough to afford an animal such as a horse that could take you there. Travel was slow, fraught with delay, and in the case of a horse, needed constant feeding. Living in a developed, wealthy country, it’s easy to forget that the car isn’t the only way to get around the world. The bicycle is a hidde...

While we have an abundance of choice as consumers in the United States, in many realms there are increasingly few options in terms of what, and from where, we can buy. Monopolies have existed in North America since the colonial era and, though fought aggressively in the mid-20th century, have reared their head once more in recent decades. In this episode we have a conversation with author and radi...

Part 2 of a conversation with Professor Louis Hyman of Cornell University. How did consumer debt in the United States move from general acceptance (covered in part 1), into something that is omnipresent? Beyond that, how did it go from something that was an enabler of success in the mid-20th century to something that eroded wealth over people's lifetime? Debt as we accept it today is a uniquely mo...

Consumer debt powers a huge swath of the US economy. The ease with which we are able to access and use debt today is a wholly modern invention. Even a couple hundred years ago, debt was something that could potentially land you in prison and was largely unavailable to the average consumer. Join us as we explore the evolution of debt from something that was abhorred to something that is a normal pa...

Imagine walking into an arena, sword in one hand and shield in the other. You are in a kill or be killed situation in which other people--and perhaps wild animals--attack you to the cheers of thousands of Romans. This our most common understanding of the Roman games, from both movies and other art, but is it a fiction? Kathleen Coleman is one of the world's foremost experts on the Roman games, why...

Imagine killing a whale. The American whaling industry was one of the largest industries in early America and supported thousands of jobs while also being guilty of killing thousands--if not millions--of whales. We interview author Eric Jay Dolin and learn about how American whaling built fortunes and irrevocably changed the landscape of America's oceans. Learn more about Eric's writing: https://w...