Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 103,

Economic Growth and Development, Part 1, Introduction to Poverty and Growth.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So, at long last, after many promises, I'm finally able to begin my series of economic growth

podcast episodes. As I said, this is going to be,

if all goes to plan, an eight-part series where I'm going to try to endeavor to explain what is

known about basically the reasons why some countries are rich and some countries are poor,

with a focus on trying to explain the divergent growth outcomes

in different countries over the past couple of centuries. So some countries have performed

very well, some countries have performed moderately well, some countries have performed very poorly.

The purpose of this series is to investigate the reasons and the research that have been

conducted into why

this is the case. So, I've done a lot of research preparatory for this podcast episode,

including consulting literally hundreds of papers and doing some of my own sort of statistical

analysis and looking at data and reading a number of books. And this is something that I've

been working on, kind of on and off, obviously, for about two years now. So I hope that you

enjoy it and find it interesting. This is obviously a very important topic in terms of understanding

many aspects of the current kind of geopolitically economic state of the

world. And in the course of this series, we'll talk about a whole range of issues relevant to that

in terms of politics and economics and other issues. So in the first episode, I'm going to focus on

...