Hello and welcome to another episode of The Weeds. I'm your host Dylan Matthews and today

we're going to be taking a break from the normal Tuesday panel to bring you a conversation

about how the world became rich. That's a new book by economic historians Mark Coyama of

George Mason and Jared Rubin of Chapman and it seeks to answer or at least outline some

possible answers to one of the hardest questions in all of history which is why some 200,

250 years ago did parts of the world start experiencing sustained economic growth for the first time.

Why did that take so long and why did the process begin in England which as recently as a few

hundred years before that was not really a leading country in Europe. Before this process began,

human living standards improved slowly if at all for thousands of years. The vast majority of

humans lived in what today we might characterize as extreme poverty and then in a few hundred years

which is just a small blip in the course of human history that also started to change to where

the vast majority of humans have escaped extreme poverty and enjoy life spans, technologies,

and diets unlike anything their ancestors dreamed could be possible.

So I'm excited to have professors Coyama and Rubin on the weeds today to talk about that

transformation and about their book. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Welcome to the

good beer. So a central premise in the book and sort of a background premise for a lot of

economic history is that for most of human history living standards were improving quite slowly.

Explain what that looked like to us. So what did the economies of say the Roman Empire or

Han Dynasty China look like and why did that not translate to living standards steadily going up

for people who lived in places like that? Yeah, this is the big question we think in economic history

and economic growth. How do we become rich? And the starting point as you say is a pre-industrial

agrarian societies which are capable of relatively high levels of urbanization,

...