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The Science of Everything Podcast

Episode 104: The History of the World Economy and Growth

The Science of Everything Podcast

James Fodor

Natural Sciences, Science, Social Sciences

4.8750 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2020

⏱️ 73 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the second part of our series on economic growth and development, I provide a brief history of the world economy, beginning with the key features of premodern economies and the Malthusian trap. I then outline critical developments and points of debate in subsequent economic history, including the Great Divergence, the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the Great Depression and era of central planning, the Bretton Woods era and the gold standard, and the modern period of neoliberalism and globalisation. Recommended pre-listening is Episode 103: Economic Growth and Development Part I. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a paypal donation or becoming a patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:15.0

Oh, my.

0:16.0

And the world. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 104,

0:38.3

Economic Growth and Development Part 2, History of the World Economy.

0:43.3

So in this episode, we're continuing on from obviously the previous episode,

0:46.7

which was an introduction to poverty and growth,

0:49.1

and here I'm going to deliver a concise history of the world economy.

0:52.9

So this is a bit more of a history lesson than

0:54.8

I think we've ever had on the science of everything before, but it's necessary to really

0:58.9

understand a lot of the things that I'm going to subsequently talk about to have the kind of

1:03.4

background to what's happened. So this is kind of focusing on the when and the where aspect of

1:09.0

economic growth, looking at which places have

1:11.1

grown and which haven't. It's useful to bear in mind the categorization of high, middle,

1:16.8

and low-income countries that I mentioned in the previous episode when thinking about this,

1:19.9

because this is sort of an attempt to explain when this divergence happened and where it happened,

1:25.5

and not exactly why, but maybe hinting at some of the reasons

1:28.7

why, and then we'll talk about more of the why later. I do want to emphasize that in this

1:32.6

series of episodes, I'm primarily interested in explaining differences in contemporary growth

1:38.2

rates, particularly since the Second World War. I'm less interested in the historical

1:42.3

questions as to say why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain, for example.

1:46.0

I will talk about that a bit in this episode, but it's a little bit different from trying to address the questions to differences in

1:52.0

contemporary growth rates as opposed to growth rates 200 years ago, which you need to sort of think about some different questions in.

...

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