Tim Harford
Tim Harford’s long-running column in the Financial Times, “The Undercover Economist,” reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His first book, The Undercover Economist, was published in 30 languages and sold…
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For this special crossover episode, Tim is joined by the one and only Roman Mars to discuss his new series, A History Of The United States In 100 Objects. From a safe that stayed locked away for a century to a well-intentioned milk carton that terrified a nation, each item reveals a fascinating piece of American history – and comes with its very own cautionary tale.
Listen to A History Of The United States In 100 Objects on the 99% Invisible feed, or on BBC Sounds.
Pushkin.
00:12
Speaker 2
Wow.
00:12
Speaker 1
This is an exciting moment because I am joined by Roman Mars.
00:18
Speaker 3
Roman, exciting for me too.
00:20
Speaker 1
Roman, it's great to have you. We are going to talk about your series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects. But before we do, there's something I have to say, which is that if you're listening to this you're listening to cautionary tales you may well be listening to cautionary tales because of roman mars it's possible it is possible because roman is of course among other things the host of the wonderful podcast 99 invisible and one of the very first episodes of cautionary tales was released by roman by on the 99% Invisible feed. And that is, I think, the only reason why anybody has ever heard of Cautionary Tales. It's all thanks to you, Roman.
01:07
Speaker 3
It's very generous of you to say that. When I hear a new podcast that sort of speaks to my sensibilities and is made so well, I love just shouting it from the rooftop. So it was my pleasure to promote the show.
01:19
Speaker 1
We're going to sort of slightly, in a tiny way, try to repay the favor because we're going to talk about Roman's new podcast, which is a joint venture with the BBC and 99% Invisible, and it is called A History of the United States in 100 Objects. Roman, give me the elevator pitch. What's it all about?
01:40
Speaker 3
Well, I mean, it really started from an original BBC series called A History of the World in 100 Objects, which Neil MacGregor, the curator of the British Museum at the time, you know, walked around his museum, picked out 100 things with his curators, and decided to tell the history of the world through these objects in the British Museum. And they were looking to do an update of that for the semi-quincentennial of the United States, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And they came to me because to their great credit, the BBC was like, we don't know if we are the greatest authority on what makes the United States the United States. And so... We chatted a lot. We came up with a sort of approach and it was trying to use these objects to tell histories. But instead of things that maybe be put inside of museums, they're kind of the more forgotten and, you know, disregarded and overlooked and misunderstood objects.
02:32
Speaker 1
This is Cautionary Tales. So we're going for the Venn diagram between Cautionary Tales and History of the United States in 100 Objects. We've challenged you to pick out three objects that, one way or another... contain cautionary tales but before we hear about the first one we should play the cautionary tales music I'm joined by Roman Mars, radio and podcast legend and the host of a new BBC and 99% Invisible joint venture, A History of the United States in 100 Objects. So Roman, the very first object in the series is a kind of cautionary tale in its own right. So tell us about the Century Safe.
03:38
Speaker 3
The Century Safe was the brainchild of a magazine publisher named Anna Dean. She came up with this idea at the centennial celebration in the United States. So in 1876, she had this idea of presenting this gigantic safe at the centennial celebration, kind of a World's Fair celebration, and that people would put things in it that were important to them that would be opened in 100 years at the bicentennial by the President of the United States. So etched on the safe, this thing is going to sit for 100 years and then be opened by no less than the president of the United States 100 years from now.
04:13
Speaker 1
In 1976. In 1976. This is kind of like anniversary inception now because we're now celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the United States. That's right. Okay, great.
04:27
Speaker 4
Go on.
04:27
Speaker 1
That's right.
04:28
Speaker 3
And so she presented this safe. It traveled around. People put stuff in it. You could pay a little bit of money to sign your name and put it in it. And It was this idea of creating a time capsule to speak to the future.
04:41
Speaker 1
I guess the thing is, you can say the president is going to open this in 1976. It doesn't mean that the president is going to open this in 1976.
04:49
Speaker 3
Very true.
04:50
Speaker 1
So as the clock is ticking down to 1976, there wasn't much going on in the US in the mid-70s, was there? Nothing to distract us from the important business of the century safe. Yeah.
05:03
Speaker 3
You know, Watergate had happened. We'd just gotten out of Vietnam. There was a real malaise. And the bicentennial was this, people were really trying to create a rallying point to sort of get excited about the idea of America again. And in the process of figuring out what to do and how to celebrate, you know, somebody went back and looked at the centennial celebration, the 1876 celebration, and what did they do? And they sort of rediscovered the idea of the safe. They got sort of some energy around it. And at some point they realized that they did not have the key to the safe. No one knew where the key to the safe was.
05:39
Speaker 1
At least they knew where the safe was. That's something.
05:41
Speaker 3
I mean, the safe was big enough. It's like if you've seen a movie in which robbers have stopped a train.
05:46
Speaker 1
I'm imagining this is the kind of safe that falls onto Wile E. Coyote.
05:51
Speaker 3
Exactly. That's exactly right. It is a safe that would flatten Wile E. Coyote. And they didn't have the key to it. There was a newspaper article. Some descendant of Anadim realized that he had the key.
06:02
Speaker 1
It's sort of.
06:03
Speaker 3
gathered some interest and some presidential aide decided that President Ford should take some time out of his schedule to do this kind of silly thing. But I think they did it because it was silly, because it was fun, because it was a nice celebratory, non-controversial thing to do. And we have, because it's a presidential speech, we actually have the audio. You found the audio of President Ford giving, I think, quite a nice little speech before they opened the safe.
06:31
Speaker 1
Let's listen.
06:33
Speaker 4
Our real national treasure does not have to be kept under lock and key in a safe or in a vault. America's wealth is not in material objects, but in our great heritage, our freedoms, and our belief in ourselves. As we look inside this safe, let us look inside ourselves. Let us look into our hearts and into our hopes. to unleash the God-given treasures stored within. Thank you very much.
07:16
Speaker 3
I think it's a beautiful sentiment. It's such a cogent, thoughtful, empathic sentiment. It's stuff that you don't really hear from politicians as much. And Ford was not the most notable of presidents in our history, but to hear someone just speak so just Lovely and eloquently. It's just nice to hear.
07:32
Speaker 1
Also sensible because he's not leaving too many hostages to fortune. He's saying, look, what's really in the safe is our hopes and dreams. That's right. Whatever's actually in the safe. That's what's really there, which may be wise because we should play the moment of the big reveal.
07:48
Speaker 3
We should.
07:49
Speaker 4
Here is a... That's a Tiffany inkstand, I understand. It looks a little different than the ones we have, Kyle. This is a photograph of an early statesman. I don't see his name. Lindy, I have a picture of a chairperson. I don't have any indication of her name, but she looks mighty pretty.
08:23
Speaker 3
The contents are so boring, so lackluster. that he really can't come up with very much. It's a lot of photographs, photographs of the Congress that was seated at the time. There's a temperance pamphlet in there. There's an inkwell by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And then there's a bunch of these signatures that don't have a lot of meaning to people because they paid a little bit of money to put their signature in. We interviewed Jill Lepore for this piece, who's one of my favorite historians. And she's just a delight, you know. And she's very critical. She's like, there's nothing of use in this thing. And, you know, she notices when things are useful inside of archives. That's what her job is.
09:06
Speaker 1
She speaks her mind as well. I mean, did Jill have any opinion about what this tells us about what was valued?
09:15
Speaker 3
What she points to is this idea that was new and novel at the time. was the idea of preservation at all. Like the idea that you could have a photograph of someone was just in and of itself was just sort of delightful. And the fact that this whole exercise of taking a bunch of stuff and sealing it into a vault that would keep for a hundred years was not, you know, like kind of inside the metabolism of people at the time. Life was fleeting, things rotted and went away. They just were so amazed that a photograph could exist at all. Like you could, you know, at this point, you know, bodies were, you know, barely able to be preserved. It was brand new that you could get a body preserved, you know, that that, that died in the war and then was, that could be buried back home. All these things were brand new. And so the idea of, of just extending time forward and like, and sort of putting that in your brain that you could extend time forward and think about a hundred years in the future was itself kind of a new concept. And so in and of itself, that's what's sort of, sort of rousing about the, the project. But they didn't have like a secondary thought of what would truly be interesting and unique for the future.
10:19
Speaker 1
People weren't really used to thinking about the future. That's right. Which is weird because we are endlessly thinking about the future, forecasting scenarios, P-Doom these days, whatever. We're always thinking about the future. Does that suggest we would do a much better job of filling a time capsule than they did back then?
10:38
Speaker 3
I am not sure. Hmm. people conflate this idea of what is important and what is interesting a lot. And so the idea of important things means that it means a lot to a lot of us. Therefore, there's a lot of examples of this sort of item or object or thought that's already there, and therefore it should be put in. Whereas what is probably more interesting and more interesting to future historians is something that is just a personal writing of a thing that happened to you once. And that is not a type of thing that makes it into books. So I don't think we'd necessarily be better. I think we'd be somewhat more equipped. But I think we'd fall for the same problem, which is we'd probably discount our personal ideas and personal lives in favor of big history.
11:20
Speaker 1
Like a bunch of email archives might be incredibly useful, even though it's all trivia. Actually, future historians being able to go through a really big email archive might be absolutely fascinating, even though for us, they're totally disposable.
11:36
Speaker 3
Exactly. I think that's exactly the point. I think a corpus of email would be way more than most of the published books in a thousand years' time. Way more important.
11:46
Speaker 1
So we're all about lessons here on Cautionary Tales. You chose The Century Safe. This is the thing. You decided you were going to kick off your entire History of the United States in 100 Objects series with The Century Safe. What lesson should we draw? What were you trying to say?
12:02
Speaker 3
We're going to do a story that would just explain what the series was about and then have it not be one of the objects? Or could we find an object that represented what we were trying to do? And the Sentry Safe just revealed itself as this thing, which is, it both is an object that tells us about what we were thinking about at a certain time in our history as a country. We were really thinking about the future for the first time and realizing that this thing might stick. I mean, you have to realize that when the Sentry Safe was built and put away, it was only less than a dozen years away from the Civil War, which was the first gigantic test of of the United States, there were probably a fair amount of people that just thought, maybe there isn't a president of the United States to open this thing in 1976. But they were feeling somewhat optimistic that it could. And so in and of itself as an object, it has a fun story to it and makes you think about the idea of preservation and telling the history of a country through objects. The other thing is the cautionary tale of what you put inside of it and realize that this is sort of a kind of foolhardy, thing to do is to sort of pick things, a hundred things to represent an entire country. And that if we fall on our face as we do it, give us some grace because we're not the first ones to do this.
13:16
Speaker 1
Well, let's move on to another object and another cautionary tale. This one combines national hysteria, good intentions, and breakfast. And we're going to hear it after the break. We're back. I'm Tim Harford, and I'm talking to Roman Mars about his new series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects. So Roman, what is the next item you'd like to share with Caution Tales listeners?
13:55
Speaker 3
We're going to learn about the missing children milk cartons.
13:58
Speaker 1
Okay, that sounds considerably more serious than the century safe.
14:03
Speaker 3
It is, yeah. So there was this campaign in the 1980s. There was.
14:09
Speaker 3
Two just horrific kidnappings of young boys, one named Johnny Gosch and one named Eugene Martin. And it prompted a local dairy to put the picture of the boys on a milk carton. And it started this campaign of putting missing children's faces on milk cartons because people see it. It sits on the breakfast table. photographs can be cycled out because people go through a thing of milk in a couple of days and you can put new ones on. And it was this whole campaign to sort of help find children who were missing. That was the idea of it.
14:48
Speaker 4
Yeah.
14:49
Speaker 1
The parents of Johnny, who went missing, he was on his paper round. I mean, my son does a paper round. It's just horrendous. The neighbors call and their paper hasn't been delivered and his father goes out and his little kind of red cart's there with the newspapers and he's just gone.
15:06
Speaker 4
Yeah.
15:07
Speaker 1
So his parents are trying to change the law.
15:10
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's right. So Johnny Gosch's parents, they realized that the laws for missing children were not designed for children. So you couldn't report it until three days missing was what was required. And there were different things that were all built around missing adults and not missing children. And so they did a lot of good work to change those laws so that missing children be treated differently with certain urgency so that these things could potentially be stopped if something horrible were to happen and somebody could be caught or some children could be found. In addition, there was this local dairy just was in the community of Eugene Martin, offered it as a solution. It was a pretty genius solution to an idea of just like, have you seen this boy? And then To get people like both be thinking about the specific children, but also be thinking about the idea of your children being safe. You know, the world was really changing and people could feel it and they wanted to build awareness of missing children.
16:11
Speaker 1
Yeah. Let's hear from Barbara Huggett, one of the artists who worked on the campaign.
16:17
Speaker 2
Our founder, apparently he'd seen Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin on the Anderson Erickson dairy milk cartons. but he felt that the program should be nationwide. Boy, I wish I knew how many cartons had circulated. I imagine it's way into the billions. When you have 700, 750 dairies printing day in and day out for years, we used cases that were believed to be what they termed in those days dangerous stranger abductions.
16:49
Speaker 1
Dangerous stranger abductions. Is there a a risk in that phrase, Roman?
16:55
Speaker 3
There is, because if you put a lot of weight on the idea of a stranger objection, what you're missing out is the 10, 20, maybe hundredfold real danger to children, which is usually harmed due to people that they know and people that are related to them. And I am very willing to go overboard when it comes to taking care of kids in whatever's like small, rare situations that they might be in to cause them harm. You know, I would move the earth if something happened to one of my children. But the danger of that or the cautionary tale of that is, do you then not take care of systemic things that relate to poverty and health and the safety of children inside of their domestic environment?
17:48
Speaker 1
Yeah.
17:48
Speaker 3
Because you are so afraid of this thing that it's a very, very rare chance of actually happening to a child.
17:54
Speaker 1
There's a cautionary tale we told a couple of years ago at Halloween. All of the concern about poisoned candy. First of all, it's not a thing. It seems to have never happened that a child has been poisoned by a stranger putting cyanide in their candy or whatever. And in fact, children are at much more risk on Halloween of just being run over by a car because it's dark and they're out on the streets. You know, that's the thing you need to be careful of and maybe make sure that the Halloween costume has some flashing lights on it. But then, I mean, the really horrendous irony was there was a boy who was murdered by poison candy and he was killed by his own father for the life insurance money, which is completely incomprehensible to me. But his father thought... he'd get away with it because, you know, kids are being poisoned by strangers all the time at Halloween. So no one's going to, no one's going to trace it back to me. I mean, it's just, we can envisage certain threats that maybe are not the real threats that we should be worried about.
18:57
Speaker 3
That's right. And so when you tell this story and it's a very effective story, it's a very like painful story, you know, it should move people to act and maybe overreact. I think that is okay. But when it ends up that you ignore, um, bigger things or when we have the power to really make children's life better in general, then it can be a problem.
19:19
Speaker 1
Was there pushback at the time? Were people at the time saying, look, you shouldn't be doing this? This is not helpful.
19:25
Speaker 3
I mean, at the time, I don't know if there was a ton of pushback. I think when you get into the health and welfare of children, it really changes the way that people discuss things and argue. And you'll notice that in today's politics, too, like very quickly. If somebody gets into the, like, children are in danger becomes, like, the baseline of which every argument gets reduced down to this idea. Yeah. It is super effective.
19:49
Speaker 2
Yeah.
19:50
Speaker 3
Does short circuit other logical pathways of your brain. Again, for reasons like it's. But I think that people went through with it because it just made sense in a lot of ways. But then, you know, after a while when it the efficacy is is is sort of not very clear. People don't want to be scared all the time. And they'll begin to like not see that carton of milk and then they'll just want it to go away. And I think that's what happened here. Yeah.
20:17
Speaker 1
I mean, did the milk carton campaign ever contribute to anybody being found?
20:23
Speaker 3
One of the kids was found, but it wasn't related. There was a random traffic stop and it ended up resulting in the kid being found. There was another famous case that became like a TV movie called The Kid on the Side of the Milk Carton. In which a young girl who was abducted by her mother and stepfather saw herself on a regional milk carton. And she cut out the milk carton. She kept it. And a friend of hers, parents of a friend of hers, found it, realized who she was. And it all resulted in her being returned to her father.
20:54
Speaker 1
It's an incredible story. Yeah. This neighborhood mom going, do you mind if I just keep this milk carton?
21:00
Speaker 3
Yeah.
21:00
Speaker 4
Yeah.
21:01
Speaker 3
Because it was in her own scrapbook, like the girl's scrapbook, the kidnapped child scrapbook.
21:06
Speaker 1
Yeah, I'm famous. My name's on a milk carton. But she couldn't read, right? So she had no idea really what this meant. But yeah, this other mum in the neighborhood did know.
21:15
Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, that was one of them. But again, it never really worked in the way that it was intended.
21:20
Speaker 1
So, Roman, viewing the milk carton as a cautionary tale, what lesson should we draw?
21:30
Speaker 3
This is a campaign that ran for a very short amount of time and scared the bejesus out of a generation of people around my age. And it did not result in any kids being found. And it probably rewired our brains to actually not be scared of the thing that probably we should be scared of. Again, in rare instances, it does happen, but mostly you should be thinking about child poverty. You should be thinking about alcoholism in a home. You should be thinking about all these other things and abuse when it comes to the safety of children and not men driving around in vans.
22:08
Speaker 1
You're listening to Cautionary Tales. I'm Tim Harford. I am talking to Roman Mars about his series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects. And after the break, we will be back with one final cautionary object. and it is something to which we are all beholden. We're back. I'm talking to Roman Mars. And Roman, we are running through your pick of a history of the United States in 100 Objects, looking for the three items with the most cautionary overtones or undertones. I don't want to imply that the other 97 are all just happy stories that have no consequence whatsoever. No depth, nothing. I know there were a few really amazing stories that we could have picked, but I really love this one. And before we get to the object, we should talk about time. Why was time so problematic in the late 90s? 19th century united states.
23:23
Speaker 3
Well because no one had any idea if they were on the same time or not that's basically the problem okay there's no way to check it and so people could use it in different ways to exploit people so like you know if you were uh ran a factory um you would say that people the workers are stealing time for you and if you were a worker in a factory you'd say well like you know like my labor is being stolen.
23:45
Speaker 1
Yeah you're supposed to be working I don't know, nine till six and have half an hour for lunch. And, you know, when is nine? When is six? Did you take half an hour or did you take 45 minutes? Or maybe he only gave you 20 minutes. That's right. That's right.
23:59
Speaker 3
Nobody really knew.
24:00
Speaker 1
Okay. But people had clocks, right?
24:02
Speaker 3
I mean, the problem is, is like you have to trust the clocks. And then when you build in sort of the somewhat adversarial relationship of people asking for your time and exchanging it for money, you don't trust that those minutes are their minutes or your minutes. It's just the way it is.
24:17
Speaker 1
I now realize I have the perfect example of what you're talking about because I have an alarm clock by my bed. It's kind of old school and the alarm goes off at 6.30 in the morning because, you know, got to get my son up for his paper round. And of course it goes off at 6.30, by which I mean, obviously 6.25. Of course, because I have the clock running five minutes fast. Whereas my wife is like, what kind of monster are you that you're saying it's 630, but it's actually 625. So that's right. You know, this only there's money at stake.
24:52
Speaker 4
Okay.
24:52
Speaker 1
I get it. I get it. Cause the clocks can be changed. They can be wound forward. They can be, they can easily be interfered with.
24:58
Speaker 3
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.
24:59
Speaker 1
Okay. So there is a solution and it is invented by Willard Bundy. Tell us more.
25:06
Speaker 3
I mean, Willard Bundy was, was a clock and engineering fanatic. Like he just loved clocks. He loved, fixing clocks and making clocks. And he heard of this problem of people in factories, as more factory work is happening, not knowing what time it was and when they started. And so he invented what was called the Bundy clock, which is the first, what we call a time clock, a thing that you were given a key, you kind of punched in, you knew when you were starting work, you could clock out, you knew when you ended work, and then you could be paid accordingly.
25:41
Speaker 1
It makes Willard sound like this is a guy with a really sharp eye for a market opportunity, but actually he was basically, he's basically just a guy who loved clocks. I mean, he also made, tell us about the wonderful clock.
25:51
Speaker 3
No, the wonderful clock was this clock where he was so entranced with the mechanisms of clock. He invented a clock that could run a thousand years long.
25:58
Speaker 1
Yeah. It's got a mechanical diorama and there's logs and there's frogs and there's waterfalls and it's, it's.
26:05
Speaker 3
Like a thing of beauty. Like he, he, you know, he really, like he really saw the beauty in engineering and solving problems and marking time. And loved the mechanism of a clock. He invented the Bundy clock as this idea to solve this problem, but he really didn't know how to sell it. He had this younger brother named Harlow who was a very different character from him and really saw the business application to the Bundy clock.
26:31
Speaker 1
Tom Bezek of the Bundy Museum tells us that Harlow was an absolute jerk. But Willard has created this amazing clock, so what does Harlow do with it?
26:42
Speaker 3
Arlo decides to sell it to factories, and they really are thinking of this problem from the worker point of view of like, you're going to want your employer to have this clock because it's the way that you can be paid properly for your work. So you should convince, you as a factory worker should convince your factory to buy a Bundy clock so that you will not have your time stolen from you. It did not sell this way. It did not move the needle at all. And they totally flipped the script. They decided instead to go like to go to factories and factory owners and managers. And they said, you know what? These workers are stealing from you because they're slacking off and they're showing up late and they're leaving early. You should get this clock so that you can keep them in control and you can pay them for only what they do. And that was that's the key, because that is what made the bunny clock be adopted everywhere. But, you know, the Bundy clock, as ingenious as it was and as great as Willard was at building things, it still becomes like this bottleneck in starting your day. So all these people have to now line up. They have to punch in somehow, whether it's with a key or with eventually it's with pieces of paper, pieces of tape. And so now it's not a matter of getting to work on time or starting work on time. You have to get to work early so that you can then punch in. And still, the veracity of what the clock says, it's still a little bit in question, and you're more ruled by it. And you can no longer negotiate with a foreman about where you were and what you were doing and stuff. The clock becomes this oppressive, kind of heavy thing on the back of the worker.
28:22
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, the advertisements that you describe. So one of them is, there's a bulldog biting through a timesheet and saying... put a watchdog on your payroll, which I thought, oh, that's kind of obnoxious. And then I saw the next advert. There are arrows coming out of the clock pointing at, you've got silhouettes representing all the workers and the clock is identifying the slackers. And the ad says the Bundy clock points out your unprofitable employees. Now you can sit down to the efficient employees from the inefficient. And that's so much worse than the bulldog. That's horrendous.
29:01
Speaker 3
That's right. That's right. It was just, yeah, it's very clear what it's trying to do. It is very clear that as soon as you put time on these things, like it becomes like the single data point in which you judge all things. And like, we love this. When we can reduce things down to one number, like people just get so excited about that idea. Like they just love it. And this is what they did there. And it becomes like, All of a sudden, the value of a person and a worker is whether or not they show up one or two minutes late versus what they actually contribute inside of the workday.
29:32
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, it becomes hugely distortionary of what the real judgment should be of these workers and their worth. And at which point we should probably introduce our next character, who is Frederick Winslow Taylor, the ultimate standing over you with a stopwatch guy.
29:50
Speaker 3
You know, Taylor introduced this idea of Taylorism, which is named after him, timing everything to figure out the most efficient way to work. He's upper-class Philadelphian. And he just had this concept of working efficiency and that he would time all tasks inside of a factory. And if you, I don't know, you worked at a drill press or something like that, he would start the stopwatch when you were doing your drill pressing. But if you went and grabbed a tool, he'd stop it and make that as sort of a timeout. And then he would start it again when you start working again. Or if you talk to someone or you did a thing or you adjusted yourself or whatever it was, and he would start to figure out the shortest time to do a task and then began to report that to factory owners and say, this is how efficient someone should be working if they're truly an efficient worker in your factory. I mean, it really reduced humans to just being machines in this horrible way that was very seductive to factory owners, but was very demoralizing and dispiriting to workers.
30:49
Speaker 1
Yeah, you don't get a break, but also you're not being treated as a human being.
30:53
Speaker 4
No.
30:53
Speaker 1
There's this amazing description by one boss. Do you want to read it to us?
30:57
Speaker 3
Yes, I do.
30:58
Speaker 1
He says.
30:59
Speaker 3
A man is a portable power plant. He has a boiler down here, the stomach, which consumes food. The processes are not similar to burning coal in the grate. He has an engine in here, which is his heart, which is a pump. And so he's just describing humans as a machine.
31:16
Speaker 1
There's truth in there, right? That's all true. And yet it's missing something so important.
31:21
Speaker 4
Yeah.
31:21
Speaker 3
It's so reductive as to sort of be absurd. You really can't make people work like a machine. It's not good for their soul. It's not good for making things. And it's really not good for a business, ultimately. I think we kind of learned that over time. Again, this idea of getting things down to data points and efficiencies and wringing out the inefficiencies of a system is a very seductive process. And the whole world was entranced by Taylorism.
31:47
Speaker 4
Yeah.
31:48
Speaker 1
Lenin had opinions about Taylor. Lenin looked at Taylor and Taylorism and said, this is just a terrible, oppressive, capitalist class struggle. Look over at America, these appalling things that they're doing. And then after the revolution, Lenin's like, we need to get ourselves some of these modern management methods. And they immediately imported Taylorism. Because actually this language about the worker as a kind of machine, I mean, yes, it's very oppressive and capitalist, but actually it's also very 1920s Soviet Union as well. You can see why that echoed there.
32:22
Speaker 3
Oh, totally.
32:23
Speaker 4
Totally.
32:24
Speaker 3
It's a very seductive idea of just like, how do you make this thing work better? But in the end, it's just hard to measure people's happiness and willingness and community and being a part of thing. It's just hard to measure those things, but they're super valuable. And I think people maybe realize it a little bit more today. I don't know.
32:42
Speaker 1
Well, maybe, but there is an alternative viewpoint, which is that, oh, The problem with Taylorism was he didn't have enough data. He just had a stopwatch. Now we have.
32:52
Speaker 3
That's right.
32:53
Speaker 1
You know, we can, people are working remotely. We can stick a camera on their computer. We can put tracking software. We had a cautionary tale where we described a woman who was, she had a fairly senior managerial role and she hadn't quite realized what she was signing up for. That a computer was basically taking a photograph every five minutes or so. And you're not at your desk. You go to the bathroom. Well, you know, we're not going to pay you for that five minutes. And, oh, you walked away to go for a walk to think about a business problem, or you picked up a notebook and you wrote with a pencil, or you're on the phone mentoring a junior employee. None of this stuff counts because it's not being measured by our system, but people continue to have this illusion that they can measure what really matters.
33:37
Speaker 3
Yeah, it's so depressing. But it's depressing, like it's so terrible for workers. But I mean, holding that mindset as a person who like runs things, is also miserable. That's what I don't get. That's not a headspace I want to occupy. And I can't believe people willingly put themselves into that, where they're checking and don't trust anyone who works for them. That's a miserable way to live in and of itself. It's a miserable way to run a business. It just seems like we should just dispense with all of it.
34:09
Speaker 1
But the workers fought back, right? The workers, they pushed back hard.
34:12
Speaker 3
Yeah, they did. I mean, like they use the clocks against them. They would do their own measurements and try to argue a different point, which, again, like sublimates and sort of like includes like the language of the oppressor in your argument back to them, which has its own problems. But they did. And and sort of like the sort of ultra orthodox Taylorism did sort of begin to die out at a certain point, except for now, I guess, apparently, because now you can be monitored by a computer every second of your existence.
34:39
Speaker 1
So often it's, you know, it's about power. Who's holding the stopwatch and who is not holding the stopwatch. We should get back to the Bundy brothers. What happened to them?
34:48
Speaker 3
The Bundy brothers did not see eye to eye in terms of what was important about what their work was.
34:54
Speaker 1
Willard wanted to pour the profits into more beautiful clocks.
34:58
Speaker 4
Yeah.
34:58
Speaker 3
I mean, he really was not made for this type of cutthroat business and really wanted to make clocks and really butted heads with Harlow, who at that point didn't really need Willard anymore. He had a development process that didn't involve him. Paid him very, very little. He and his son argued for more pay. Harlow was unwilling to pay. They did finally break apart. But it was a tragic story for Willard. Like, he never really recovered financially.
35:25
Speaker 1
He tried to set up his own company, and his brother sued him.
35:28
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's right. He did sue him repeatedly. Yeah, I forgot about that.
35:31
Speaker 1
Oh, yeah.
35:34
Speaker 3
Yeah, it was bad. It's bad. But it's a symptom of the whole problem.
35:38
Speaker 1
So, I mean, do I even need to ask what the cautionary tale is with the Bundy clock?
35:42
Speaker 3
Yeah, well, I think the cautionary tale there is like when you try to reduce a complex interaction to a simple set of numbers, humanity is lost.
35:52
Speaker 1
So there are 100 objects in your series. So you've given us three. And you're also encouraging your listeners to get involved. So if people have an idea for an object, what should they do?
36:04
Speaker 3
They should write us at 100objects at 99pi.
36:05
Speaker 4
Org.
36:08
Speaker 3
And let us know. And we are looking for things that are personal, that are small. They don't have to be something that is mass produced necessarily. So yeah, write us, let us know how this little piece of history that you have, that you're thinking of, tells the story of America in some broader way.
36:25
Speaker 1
Roman Mars, thank you very much.
36:27
Speaker 3
Oh, it was a delight to be here. Thank you so much.
36:29
Speaker 1
Of course, you can hear a history of the United States in 100 Objects, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also hear it on the 99% Invisible podcast feed, which, of course, you are subscribed to already. But just in case some algorithm has unsubscribed you, resubscribe. And along with the regular 99PI episodes, which are wonderful, you will hear... All 100 objects, is that right?
36:57
Speaker 3
You will eventually hear all 100 objects. We put a new one out every Friday, so you'll eventually hear them. And we only have about maybe 50 to 60 decided, so people really can contribute and add more to it.
37:10
Speaker 1
Thank you so much. Check it out. Everyone subscribe immediately.
37:15
Speaker 3
Yes.
37:15
Speaker 1
Meanwhile, I will be back next week with another cautionary tale. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. really does make a difference to us and if you want to hear it ad free and receive a bonus audio episode video episode and members only newsletter every month why not join the cautionary club to sign up head to patreon.com slash cautionary club that's patreon p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash cautionary club
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