On explaining why the (human) world is rich

Abstract

The wealth of the modern world is a natural historical marvel. Explaining it has traditionally been the purview of economic historians, as exemplified by the recent book How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. Economic historians, though, tend to only ask process-oriented “how” and “by what means” questions of the Great Enrichment. The eight co-authors of Explaining Technology, who are not economic historians, engage the debate asking a different question. Their goal is to explain the exponential shape of our enrichment with a model of the combinatorial evolution of technology. With an eye toward how we ask questions of the Great Enrichment, I propose broadening our inquiries to include questions typically overlooked in modern economic science, namely, “What form does it take? and “For what purpose?”