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Planet Money had an episode where they used the metric "minutes of light per day's wages". Here's the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/503769949

But there are qualitative changes that aren't captured by this -- street lights are brighter and whiter now than they were in the 1990s for example, and those were brighter than oil lamps before them.



Note: that's a more accessible podcast/write-up of the paper I linked in my comment as [1]. If people want the denser in (in both good ways and bad) version, look up there.




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