Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

internal combustion engine

McKinsey’s breakthrough was a book published in 1922, with the not-entirely-thrilling title Budgetary Control

the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits.” If it’s legal, and it makes money, they should do it. And if people don’t like it, don’t blame the company—change the law.6

One study found it was eco-friendlier to grow tomatoes in Spain and transport them to Sweden than it was to grow them in Sweden.12 Another claimed that raising a lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to England emits less greenhouse gas than raising a lamb in England.13

According to Geoffrey Heal of Columbia University and Jisung Park of Harvard, a hotter-than-average year is bad for productivity in hot countries, but good in cold ones: crunching the numbers, they conclude that human productivity peaks when the temperature is between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller

Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays pioneered the fields of public relations and propaganda. Among his most famous stunts for corporate clients, Bernays helped the American Tobacco Company in 1929 persuade women that smoking in public was an act of female liberation. Cigarettes, he said, were “torches of freedom.”

The nature of advertising was changing: no longer just providing information, but trying to manufacture desire

But systematically investigating consumer preferences was only part of the story; marketers also realized it was possible systematically to change them

The invention of market research marks an early step in a broader shift from a “producer-led” to “consumer-led” approach to business—from making something, then trying to persuade people to buy it, to trying to find out what people might buy and then making it.