In January 1914, Henry Ford announced the 'Five Dollar Day': $5 for an eight-hour day, roughly twice the usual pay in the car industry, subject to conditions on workers' personal conduct. The moving assembly line, introduced shortly before, made the work so monotonous that employees were leaving in droves: staff turnover reportedly reached 370% in 1913. After the announcement, quitting plummeted and productivity soared.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.