Transcript - Izzit.org

MAN: And for all but a few thousand of his one or two million years on this planet, this is how man
really lived –hand-to-mouth, day-to-day and place-to-place. He followed the herds, eating any wild
animals he could kill, and gathering whatever wild fruits and vegetables he could manage to find.
WOMAN: But for most people… life began to change dramatically about ten thousand years ago, when
human beings found the secret of staying in one place.
MAN: The secret was farming, domesticating animals – pigs and cattle, sheep and goats – and
cultivating crops. By finding that secret- man had stumbled on the path to prosperity.
WOMAN: The first prosperous civilizations grew up in four great river valleys – the Yellow River in
Northeastern China, the Indus in Pakistan, Tigris and Euphrates in modern Iraq and ancient Babylon and
the Nile in Egypt.
MAN: And yet, if you look at those great fertile valleys today you’ll find a strange thing. They are now
among the poorest of the world’s nations, often unable to provide even enough food for their inhabitants.
WOMAN: Until two or three hundred years ago, the richest countries were often the ones with the best
land. But today, great industrial communities have been built up in the world using resources imported
from other places. In other words, some of their wealth comes from foreign trade.
MAN: There will always be strong disagreement about why some countries have followed the path to
prosperity, and others haven’t.
WOMAN: But of one thing there is little doubt. Those who have achieved it, have done so by creating a
surplus…a big surplus, using exactly the same method as we did in our community. This factory, like all
factories, is the result of division of labor by product…and the product is television sets.
MAN: It produces them in a whole lot of different stages: Division of labor by process.
WOMAN: It’s mechanized, and the production is achieved through devices like wheels, levers, gears,
hinges and pulleys. Most of the energy comes from electricity supplied by harnessing the resources of
nature: like water, coal, oil and uranium.
MAN: As a result, a thousand people working in a factory like this turn out half a million sets a year –
five hundred a year each. Since they don’t need them all for themselves- they’ve created a massive
surplus of television sets to exchange.
WOMAN: So in effect, they’ll be swapped for other people’s surpluses. For his share of the exchange a
worker in a factory gets: food, clothing, heating, a house and a car- from other workers who produced
more of those things than they needed.
MAN: He also gets roads, street lighting, a teacher for his children, a doctor and a policeman as well.
WOMAN: And after all that, he still has his evenings free to watch a television.
MAN: Of course, he still has his problems and frustrations.
WOMAN: But when you consider the subsistence level where it all started long ago, is there any doubt
about which sort of life you would prefer
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