The story inside
Part 1Schools of Thought
In the early 1870s three men who had never met, in England, in Austria and in Lausanne, solved the same century-old riddle about water and diamonds. A hundred years later a Kodak engineer built the first digital camera, an eight-pound box that took twenty-three seconds per black-and-white photo and saved it to a cassette tape. And in 1969 Fernando Henrique Cardoso helped found dependency theory; twenty-six years later he was president of Brazil. What did he do once he was in charge?
Part 2Economic Systems and the -isms
Then the ideas become systems. Charles Fourier designed communities of exactly 1,620 people, and his followers founded about twenty-five of them in 1840s America. Otto von Bismarck, who had tried to outlaw the socialists, gave workers compulsory health insurance in 1883. Park Chung-hee built a steel mill in a fishing village against a report that called it not viable. And in 1947 Friedrich Hayek gathered thirty-nine intellectuals in a hotel above Lake Geneva, and hardly anyone paid attention. Until the 1970s.