Markets Are Eating the World

This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month

October 2019: Markets Are Eating the World

In this article Taylor Pearson discusses the evolution of markets and how improvements in technology have had such a big impact on the changes in markets. One big technological change to markets was the invention of money which had a huge effect on markets because it allows a wider range of people to trade with each other. Another big change we are all familiar with is the internet which probably had the biggest effect on the markets that we interact with today.

The internet opened up a much wider range of sellers/buyers and a much wider range of goods to be traded. Before the internet there was no eBay which allows people to buy and sell rare collectibles such as baseball cards from people 1000’s of miles away.

EBay led to the invention of PayPal which allows buyers to get the items they buy a lot quicker because before PayPal the most common way of making payments to sellers was by personal check or certified check. It took days before the check arrived at the seller’s mailbox and if you sent a personal check it took even more days because the seller then would wait for the personal check to clear their bank.

PayPal’s great idea of creating a way to make payments online led others later on to follow suit and create others ways to pay online such as Zelle, Venmo (now owned by PayPal), and eventually Bitcoin and cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain to process payments.

Taylor also discusses in this article how blockchain can have a huge impact on corporations and markets in the future but one of my favorite parts was his discussion on the impact that the invention of the mechanical clock had on markets and people’s worklife.

Here is what I learned from this article and added to the “Did You Know” section of my website last month:

The first mechanical clock was invented in the 14th century in Europe. It is an invention that we all take for granted because it’s been around so much longer than we have. Before the clock was invented people relied on 2 bell-ringers to keep track of time mostly for workers to know when it was time to go to work and time to go home.

The bell-ringers’ wages were financed by local guilds so sometimes workers would be worried that the bell-ringers were bribed by the guilds to extend the workday. And before there were bell-ringers, most workers were essentially tied to their master’s land as slaves or serfs because of the difficulty to keep track of time. It wasn’t until the escapement was invented which allowed for the invention of the clock due to its ability to transfer energy to the clock’s pendulum at a steady rate that workers started to become more free and less worrisome that they had to work longer than they needed.