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Wealth & Business

882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 15.

721. Window shopping only became possible once shops put in glassMedieval shops were dim rooms with no glazed windows and little on display. Merchants kept stock at the back and fetched items only when asked, often serving through an opening on…
722. The enclosed mall arrived in 1956, but Chester's covered Rows beat it by centuriesVictor Gruen's Southdale Center near Minneapolis opened in 1956 as the first enclosed American mall. Yet the English city of Chester has run covered, multi-level shopping gallerie…
723. Trade barriers come in far more disguises than a simple tariffA tariff is the obvious way to shut out foreign goods, but governments have many quieter tools. Fussy safety rules, certification hoops, buy-local purchasing laws, cheap loans to …
724. The Louisiana Purchase worked out to about 4 cents an acreIn 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France for fifteen million dollars, roughly 4 cents for each acre. It ranks among the largest early property deals ev…
725. China's yuan descends from Spanish silver dollars shipped across the PacificFrom the 16th century into the 20th, China absorbed huge quantities of Spanish silver dollars minted in the Americas. Those coins became the model for every currency called yuan o…
726. Retail comes from an old French word for cutting off a pieceThe word retail grew from Old French retaillier, to shape by cutting, and by 1433 English used it for selling in small amounts. That captures the trade neatly. A retailer buys in …
727. Retirement as a normal stage of life is barely over a century oldFor most of history people simply worked until they died. Short lives, no social security and no pensions left little choice. Germany changed that in 1889 under Otto von Bismarck,…
728. Dining out in Chicago stacks five separate sales taxes on the billA restaurant meal in Chicago carries 11.25 percent tax. That figure is a stack: 6.25 percent for Illinois, 1.25 for the city, 1.75 for Cook County, 1 for the regional transit auth…
729. Before chips and phones, Samsung sold dried fish and noodlesSamsung began in 1938 as a forty-person trading shop in Taegu run by Lee Byung-chul, dealing in dried fish, local groceries and noodles. The name means three stars: three for some…
730. Lockstep or eat what you kill: how law partners split profitsAt many British law firms, partners climb a fixed ladder of points with every year of service, whoever brought in the clients. Many American firms instead reward each partner for …
731. Every pension quietly decides who carries the risk of a long lifeA pension looks like a simple promise of money in old age, but its design settles a harder question: if investments sour or a retiree lives far longer than expected, who pays? In …
732. The British pound began as an actual pound of silverKing Offa of Mercia, who reigned in the eighth century, took a Tower pound of silver, about 350 grams, and divided it into 240 coins called sterlings. Two hundred and forty of the…
733. In April 2020 sellers paid buyers to take oil awayFor the first time ever, in April 2020, contracts for West Texas Intermediate crude due for May delivery fell below zero, to minus 37.63 dollars a barrel. Holders feared being for…
734. Economists call a key part of growth a measure of ignoranceWhen economists subtract the growth explained by extra workers and extra machines, a stubborn remainder is left over, called total factor productivity. It is supposed to capture i…
735. Why economists expect profits in a truly competitive market to vanishA company can post healthy earnings on its accounts and still, to an economist, make no profit at all. Accountants subtract only the bills a firm actually pays. Economists also su…
736. Adam Smith praised private property and also warned about itAdam Smith argued that the hope of profit from improving your capital rests on secure private property, an idea central to capitalism. Yet the same thinker observed that great pro…
737. Why pricey Vancouver has Canada's lowest property tax rateVancouver homes are famously expensive, yet the city charges the lowest property tax in Canada as a share of assessed value. The explanation is simple arithmetic. Its budget has s…
738. Wall Street priced shares in Spanish pieces of eight until 2000For over two centuries, a share on the New York Stock Exchange never cost a tidy decimal. Prices moved in eighths of a dollar, a habit inherited from the seventeenth-century Spani…
739. Before Mario, Nintendo spent decades selling flower-patterned playing cardsNintendo opened in Kyoto on 23 September 1889 as a small workshop making hanafuda, handmade Japanese flower cards. Its best customers were gambling parlours run by the yakuza, whi…
740. Paper money began because Chinese coin strings were too heavyTang dynasty merchants in China paid with round copper coins, each with a square hole so they could be threaded onto rope. Big deals meant hauling heavy strings of them around. So…
741. The real price of waffles is the chocolate you turned downOffered only waffles, you would happily eat them. Offered waffles or chocolate, and you prefer chocolate, picking waffles means giving up something you value more. Economists call…
742. The oldest known mine was dug for red paint over 40,000 years agoIn the hills of Eswatini, Paleolithic people dug into the Ngwenya Mine to extract hematite, which they turned into the red pigment ochre. Radiocarbon dating puts the workings at r…
743. No society ever ran on barter, and money is named after a goddessThe textbook tale says people swapped goats for grain until coins came along. Yet no society has been found that relied mainly on barter. Communities without money ran on gifts an…
744. A monopoly does not have to be big, only alonePicture a monopoly and you probably imagine a giant corporation. Size has nothing to do with it. The word joins Greek roots for alone and to sell, and a tiny firm can hold one if …
745. Mortgage literally means death pledge, and the name makes grim senseThe word mortgage comes from Law French used in medieval Britain and means death pledge. The name is less sinister than it sounds. The pledge dies in one of two ways: either the b…
746. One song, three owners: who really owns My WayThe song My Way belongs to its composers, Paul Anka and Claude Francois. Frank Sinatra's famous recording of it belongs to Capitol Records, while Sid Vicious's snarling punk versi…
747. Milk chocolate needed a baby food maker's trick to stop going mouldyIn the late 1860s the chocolatier Daniel Peter had a problem. Milk added to chocolate left water behind, and the bars grew mildew. Henri Nestle, busy selling milk-based baby food …
748. A noisy pestle, an annoyed doctor and a lesson about when markets breakA confectioner had pounded sugar with a pestle and mortar for years when a doctor built a consulting room against his kitchen wall and sued over the vibrations. The doctor won. Ec…
749. Selling to a company works almost nothing like selling to youBuy a sofa and you likely pay the sticker price, decide alone and take it home. A business buying office chairs haggles, runs the order past accounting, quality control and logist…
750. Pompeii shoppers followed a weekly market timetable scratched on a wallOutside a large shop in Pompeii, someone scrawled the local market calendar. On Saturn's day, traders set up in Pompeii and Nuceria; on the Sun's day they moved to Nola and Atella…
751. McDonald's got fast by firing its carhops and throwing out the platesIn 1948 Richard and Maurice McDonald gutted their San Bernardino drive-in. They let all 20 carhops go, swapped dishes and cutlery for paper wrappers and cups so no dishwasher was …
752. Paying by card makes spending hurt less, and debt grows easierHand over banknotes and you feel the loss; tap a credit card and you barely notice. Economists call this the pain of paying, and the further a payment gets from cash, the weaker t…
753. Falling prices can be bad news for an economyCheaper goods sound like a gift, but economists worry when prices across a whole economy fall. If you expect things to cost less next month, you wait to buy. Sales drop, factories…
754. Thales of Miletus may have struck history's first derivative deal, on olivesAristotle tells how the philosopher Thales profited from a contract on olives, an arrangement some now see as the earliest known derivative, although Aristotle himself called it a…
755. Tens of millions of people work in other people's homes, often uncountedIn 2015 the International Labour Organization counted about 67.1 million domestic workers worldwide, cooking, cleaning and caring for children and elderly relatives in private hom…
756. Econometrics borrowed a tool astronomers built to track the heavensThe least squares method was devised in the early nineteenth century to pin down the motions of planets and the shape of the Earth. Economists later adopted it to measure things l…
757. For most of history, economic gains were swallowed by population growthBefore industrialisation, every advance in farming or technology mostly produced more people, not richer ones, as food supplies capped living standards. Economists call it the Mal…
758. Thomas Carlyle mocked economics as the dismal science in 1849Economists have argued for centuries over what their own subject actually is. Adam Smith called it an inquiry into the wealth of nations, Alfred Marshall a study of ordinary life,…
759. The idea of the economy as one thing is surprisingly recentPeople have made, swapped and shared goods for as long as there have been societies, but the word economy meaning a country's whole system of production only emerged around the 16…
760. In 1820 China's economy was six times the size of Britain'sAs Britain's Industrial Revolution was getting under way in 1820, China produced about a third of the world's output, six times Britain's and nearly twenty times that of the young…
761. A debit card spends your own money, not the bank'sUnlike a credit card, a debit card usually just sends a message to your bank to take money straight from your account. In many countries these cards have overtaken cheques entirel…
762. A Swedish copper mine may be the oldest commercial corporation on EarthIn 1347 King Magnus Eriksson chartered the Stora Kopparberg mining community at Falun, often called the world's oldest commercial corporation. The idea behind it is older still: R…
763. Bank of America launched the modern credit card by mailing a whole cityNobody wants a card few shops accept, and shops will not bother with a card few people carry. In 1958 Bank of America broke that stalemate in Fresno, California, where 45 percent …
764. Sweden adopted paper money because its copper coins weighed kilogramsMoney began as receipts for grain stored in Sumerian and Egyptian temples. Paper notes emerged in China between the Tang and Song dynasties, but Europe's first regular paper curre…
765. Garment work has leaned on women's low-paid labour for over six centuriesHistorian Judith Bennett found that in both 1381 and 1700, about a third of English working women made textiles or clothes. Six centuries later, most garment workers are still wom…
766. The first coins were too valuable to buy a loaf of breadSome of the earliest coins, struck in western Anatolia in the late 600s BC, were made of electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver. Even the smallest might have equalled a day'…
767. Ancient Egypt traded little because the Nile Valley was too uniformLong-distance exchange of goods may reach back about 150,000 years, judging by ornaments and weapons found far from home. Yet one of the first literate civilisations did surprisin…
768. A company was once someone you shared bread withThe word company traces back to a Late Latin term for the person who eats bread beside you. Centuries later, English judges declared the corporation an invisible, soulless and imm…
769. Perfect competition means every firm ends up earning zero economic profitEconomists' ideal market has countless tiny sellers offering identical goods to perfectly informed buyers. It is almost never seen in reality, and its logical endpoint is striking…
770. Building things now absorbs about 13 percent of the world economyGlobal spending on construction nearly tripled in a decade, from about 4 trillion dollars in 2012 to more than 11 trillion in 2022, and forecasts point toward 14.8 trillion by 203…
771. The word cheque may trace back through chess to the Persian word for kingDictionaries link the banking sense of check to guarding against forgery, a use of check meaning control. That meaning comes from chess, where check reached English through French…
772. When a bank grants a loan, it creates brand-new moneyA bank does not simply pass along savers' cash to borrowers. When it makes a loan, it credits the borrower with a fresh deposit, and new money comes into existence. Regulators req…
773. Philip II of Spain declared bankruptcy four times in forty yearsThe king who ruled much of the sixteenth-century world could not keep up with his bills. Philip II of Spain declared state bankruptcies in 1557, 1560, 1575 and 1596. He had plenty…
774. In parts of the United States, raw milk trades on the black marketBlack markets are not only about drugs and smuggled weapons. Several US states require milk to be pasteurised, and the ban has spawned underground trade in raw milk and young raw-…
775. To an economist, capital means machines and buildings, not moneyAsk an economist about capital and you may hear about lathes, oil rigs and data centres rather than bank balances. In economics, capital goods are durable things people have made …
776. The French Revolution cost Nicolas Leblanc his prize for making sodaDeforestation was making wood ash too expensive to supply the alkali needed for glass, soap and textiles, so the French Academy of Sciences offered 2,400 livres for a way to make …
777. Tiny farms grow a third of the world's food on a sliver of landFive of every six farms on Earth cover less than two hectares, yet together they occupy only about 12 percent of farmland. Meanwhile the biggest one percent of farms control more …
778. Alibaba began in a Hangzhou apartment and became history's biggest stock debutIn June 1999 Jack Ma and 17 friends and students launched a business-to-business trading website from his apartment in Hangzhou. Fifteen years later its New York share sale raised…
779. Today's AT&T is really a Baby Bell that bought its old parentFor most of the 20th century one company, nicknamed Ma Bell, ran nearly all American telephones. Regulators split it into seven regional firms in 1984. The smallest of those offsp…
780. Why so much of the economy happens inside firms, not marketsWe picture the economy as one giant marketplace, prices shuffling goods from seller to buyer. Yet in the United States, the value added by transactions inside companies roughly eq…

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