The Washington Post article mentions a 1994 research paper by William Nordhaus as the source, but their link doesn’t seem to work. Here’s a working link to the paper:
https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-08/d1078.pdf
The Washington Post article mentions a 1994 research paper by William Nordhaus as the source, but their link doesn’t seem to work. Here’s a working link to the paper:
https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-08/d1078.pdf
The research paper tries to adjust for light output. One oil lamp, or one campfire, makes less light than a modern incandescent bulb. It’s saying you need to spend 60 hours gathering and splitting wood with stone tools to make a campfire with the same light output that a modern bulb could produce in 1 hour.
And 60 hours’ worth of earnings in 1993 (when the paper was written) would buy you enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of hours of light with a modern bulb.
There are big assumptions necessary to come up with these numbers. The story is that the various technologies advanced by many orders of magnitude over time.