About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a s...
Those controlling political power will eventually find it more beneficial to use their power to limit competition, to increase their share of the pie, or even to steal and loot from others rather than...
Slavery and the slave trade in Africa further disrupted family and marriage structures and may also have reduced fertility.
No two societies create the same institutions; they will have distinct customs, different systems of property rights, and different ways of dividing a killed animal or loot stolen from another group....
Just as African societies took aggressive advantage of the economic opportunities presented by the slave trade, they did the same with legitimate commerce. But they did so in a peculiar context, one i...
Inclusive economic institutions, such as those in South Korea or in the United States, are those that allow and encourage participation by the great mass of people in economic activities that make bes...
Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions, that is, those that distribute political power widely in a pluralistic manner and are able to a...
In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented b...
Ignorance can explain at best a small part of world inequality.
If these rulers would only get the right advice from the right advisers, the thinking goes, prosperity would follow.
Hua could not repudiate the Cultural Revolution, and this weakened him. He was also a comparative newcomer to the centers of power, and he lacked the web of connections and informal relations that Den...
Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leader...
Fruits of unsustainable extractive growth: Zheng He’s ship alongside Columbus’s Santa Maria Gregory A. Harlin/National Geographic Stock
First perfected by Cortés in Mexico, it was based on the observation that the best way for the Spanish to subdue opposition was to capture the indigenous leader. This strategy enabled the Spanish to c...
Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Ada...
Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people.
But in many other cases, just the opposite takes place, and the process of political centralization also ushers in an era of greater absolutism.
Allowing people to make their own decisions via markets is the best way for a society to efficiently use its resources. When the state or a narrow elite controls all these resources instead, neither t...
Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties...
A broad coalition meant that there would be greater demands for the creation of pluralist political institutions. Without some sort of pluralism, there would be a danger that one of the diverse intere...