How did a business fiasco lead to a golden age of financial access and convenience? In this episode of Johan Norberg’s New and Improved, Norberg details how a little piece of plastic on the verge of being outlawed went on to open massive global markets for people all over the world.

Today credit cards give you the comfort of knowing that ready access to money is within reach regardless of your circumstances. But in their early years, they drew the ire of lawmakers and businessmen as they unleashed a new class of criminal and drove banks into the red.

Banks would eventually master the problems with their new offering through trial and error, thus transforming an embarrassing blunder into a cornerstone of modern society and improving quality of life for millions. Progress isn’t always smooth, straightforward, or predictable.