About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why?

Dylan Matthews of Vox.com interviewed Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama over the big question: Why the world started getting rich about 200 years ago:

The big question is what drove this transformation. 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.

For a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. 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.

I interviewed Rubin and Koyama via email; a transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

 

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