The road to riches
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=346598
Dec 23rd 1999
From The Economist print edition
Western man is incomparably
richer than his ancestors of
1,000 years ago. And he takes it
for granted that he will grow
richer still. Yet, seen in its long-
term context, the past 250 years’
rise in incomes and living
standards looks less like an
inevitable process and more like
a single, astonishing event
FOR nearly all of human history,
economic advance has been so slow
as to be imperceptible within the
span of a lifetime. For century after
century, the annual rate of economic
growth was, to one place of decimals, zero. When growth did happen, it was so slow as to be
invisible to contemporaries—and even in retrospect it appears not as rising living standards (which is
what growth means today), merely as a gentle rise in population. Down the millennia, progress, for
all but a tiny elite, amounted to this: it slowly became possible for more people to live, at the
meanest level of subsistence.
From about 1750, this iron law of history was broken. Growth began to be no longer invisibly slow
nor confined, as it largely had been before, to farming. The new increase in human productivity was
staggeringly large: it not only supported a hitherto unimaginable 7 1/2-fold rise in the world’s
population, but entirely transformed the lives of ordinary people throughout the West.
This surge of growth was due to industrialisation. Thanks to it, material prosperity has risen more in
the past 250 years than in the previous 10,000. And so conditioned to growth have people become
that most westerners now expect their standard of living to improve automatically year by year; if it
does not, something is wrong. This taking for granted what would once have seemed miraculous is
the measure of the change.
What, why, there, then?
What happened? And why at that particular time, in that particular place, Western Europe and its
American offshoot? The answer to the first question