We are trying to explain how this came about in the first place. There is real hope to believe this will continue into South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa in our lifetime. It has since raised living standards in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and parts of Latin America. The world we know today is a direct result of the economic growth that began in Britain in the 19th century, quickly spread to parts of Europe and North America, and has continued unabated since. What is economic growth? What is this phenomenon you’re trying to explain? Jared RubinĮconomic growth occurs when there is a sustained increase in economic prosperity, which we can measure by the total number of goods and services produced in the economy. I interviewed Rubin and Koyama via email a transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. That’s changed: How the World Became Rich, by Chapman University’s Jared Rubin and George Mason University’s Mark Koyama, provides a comprehensive look at what, exactly, changed when sustained economic growth began, what factors help explain its beginning, and which theories do the best job of making sense of the new stage of life that humans have been experiencing for a couple brief centuries. Historians, economists, and anthropologists have proposed a long list of explanations for why human life suddenly changed starting in 18th-century England, from geographic effects to forms of government to intellectual property rules to fluctuations in average wages.įor a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. The big question is what drove this transformation. Deaths in childhood have plunged, and adult heights have surged as malnutrition decreased. Today, the average human life expectancy is more like 73. Before 1800, average lifespans didn’t exceed 40 years anywhere in the world. Over the next two centuries, extreme poverty fell dramatically in 2018, the World Bank estimated that 8.6 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day. In 1820, some 94 percent of humans lived on less than $2 a day. What today we’d characterize as extreme poverty was until a few centuries ago the condition of almost every human on Earth.
And between 19, it grew more than fourfold. In the United Kingdom, whose Industrial Revolution kicked off this transformation, GDP per capita grew about 40 percent between 17. Quality of life went from improving very gradually if at all for the vast majority of human history to improving very, very quickly. The third period, in which we all live, is characterized by an unprecedented phenomenon: sustained economic growth.
In the second, lasting from about 10,000 BC to around 1750 AD, humans adopted agriculture, allowing for a more secure supply of food and leading to the establishment of towns, cities, even empires. In the first, which lasted for the vast majority of our time on Earth, from the emergence of Homo sapiens over 300,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago, humans lived largely nomadic lifestyles, subsisting through hunting and foraging for food. You can crudely tell the story of our species in three stages.
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