Never lose sight of how a lot progress there was (as a result of the lights are on)

Flipping on a light switch is something almost everyone alive takes for granted and yet to our ancestors it was a magical, awe-inspiring event. So cheap is lighting now that people don’t bother to turn off the lights.

There’s a scene in Moby Dick where the whalers are sleeping in a room absolutely blazing with dozens of whale oil lamps. Herman Melville – writing in the 1850s – notes: until that very moment in history, only kings and religious figures had ever experienced that much artificial light shone upon them.

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

Men sailed to the Arctic to hunt whales and died along the way. We went to extremes to create light. Now we flip a switch. The cost of leaving every light in my house on for a year would be relatively less than a single candle cost a medieval farmer for one evening.

It’s the same with computing power, information access, communication.

Housing and healthcare are up but technology-driven goods and services have been in a relentless deflationary spiral for centuries and it will continue. The lighting chart is just the longest-running proof.

Next on the menu is software. We saw a brutal rise in pricing power of software in the past 20 years, even as it improved. Now AI is going to destroy it. Tax filing software, legal software, productivity software and much more is all on the menu. God willing, pharma will be too but GLPs alone may ultimately drive down the cost of all obesity-related healthcare costs.

The whaling industry was destroyed but now we have universal, virtually-costless light.

This is my favourite chart in the whole world and represents the ultimate lesson of history: The industrial revolution was the only thing in human history that ever mattered. James Watt patented the industrial steam engine in 1769.