Winter is coming, but fear not, we’ve conquered the darkness before. Our early ancestors learned how to control fire to tame the night. And today, we have even more efficient lighting technology than our candles, lanterns, and gas lamps. The libertarian Cato Institute’s HumanProgress project highlights that a person would need to gather, chop and burn wood for about 60 hours just to get an hour’s worth of light from a modern bulb in prehistoric times. In contrast, today, the same amount of labor can light a room for more than 50 years. A fascinating 1994 paper by Yale economist William Nordhaus compared standards of living across radically different time periods using the measure of lighting output to create a comparable quality of life.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/the-amount-of-work-that-once-bought-an-hour-of-light-now-buys-51-years-of-it/