Abstract My theme is of a Rise and a Fall of understanding, coming from a failure to measure ones understanding. Down to 1848 the new field of political economy was gradually coming to understand the system of market-tested betterment (lamentably called by its enemies “capitalism”). After...

Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad. Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half times more people. Starvation worldwide is at an all-time low, and falling. Literacy and life expectancy are at all-time highs, and rising. How did average...

Thrift has been viewed since the blessed Adam Smith as the foundation of economic growth. Economists, the theorists of prudence, wsh it so. But it was not, and is not true. Modern economic growth came from some other source---perhaps the stunning shift 1600-1776 in the rhetoric of economy-talk.

Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand---the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. The Bourgeois Revaluation...

What happened to make for the factor of 16 were new ideas, what Mokyr calls “industrial Enlightenment.” But the Scientific Revolution did not suffice. Non-Europeans like the Chinese outstripped the West in science until quite late. Britain did not lead in science---yet clearly did in...

North, with many other Samuelsonian economists, thinks of “institutions” as budget constraints in a maximization problem. But as Clifford Geertz put it, an institution such as a toll for safe passage is “rather more than a mere payment,” that is, a mere monetary constraint. “It was...

Transportation improvements cannot have caused anything close to the factor of 16 in British economic growth. By Harberger’s (and Fogel’s) Law, an industry that is 10% of national product, improving by 50 percent on the 50% of non-natural routes, results in a mere one-time increase of...