How the West Grew Rich

Review of the classic economic history, How the West Grew Rich, by Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell:

"The central question that How the West Grew Rich addresses is precisely what its title implies. For thousands of years, human beings lived in unrelieved misery: hunger, famine, illiteracy, superstition, ignorance, pestilence and worse have been their lot. How did things change? How did a relatively few people--those in what we call "the West" -- escape from grinding poverty into sustained economic growth and material well-being when most other societies remained trapped in an endless cycle of birth, hardship, and death? This fascinating book tells that story.

Throughout almost the entire span of human history, material privation and chronic insecurity were the norm. Not even those at the peaks of social status and political power could enjoy the creature comforts and consumer delights that "poor" people take for granted in the West today. At times, certain populations fared somewhat better—in ancient Greece and Rome, perhaps, and in China during the Sung Dynasty (960–1279)—but those cases were exceptional.

As late as the fourteenth century, the Chinese probably enjoyed the highest level of living of any large population. Recall the amazement with which Europeans greeted Marco Polo’s account of China in the latter part of the thirteenth century, even though, as Polo declared on his deathbed, he had not described the half of what he had seen.

As the Middle Ages waned the Europeans began to make quicker economic progress, while the Chinese lapsed into economic stagnation. Even more remarkable, the economic energy of Europe began to shift away from the great commercial centers of northern Italy and toward the periphery of civilization in northwestern Europe. The barbarians, it seemed, had somehow stumbled onto the secret of economic progress. Henceforth, despite many setbacks, the western Europeans—and later their colonial cousins in North America as well—steadily pulled ahead of the human pack. By the eighteenth century they had far surpassed the Chinese, not to speak of the world’s more backward peoples, and until the late twentieth century the gap continued to widen...

full review: The Freeman