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At any time earlier than about 1000 AD, the material standard of living of almost every person was close to the minimum needed to sustain life. Societies in which the majority of the people attained a significantly higher standard of living have emerged only within the last two or three hundred years…

Improved material well-being resulted in substantially longer lives. Infant mortality (defined as death within the first year of life) declined, and the life expectancy of those who survived infancy rose. Malnutrition and its associated diseases became less common, and the mass killers, famine and plague, receded…

How has per capita output changed around the world over the last five hundred years? Worldmapper has answered this question by creating maps in which each country’s size is proportional to its per capita output…

Economists distinguish between two kinds of growth, extensive and intensive. Extensive growth raises a nation’s total output, but doesn’t make the populace better off and can easily make it worse off. Intensive growth, on the other hand, raises the average person’s standard of living…

A continuously rising standard of living would have been an alien concept to anyone living in Europe (or anywhere else) before 1500. People lived and worked much as their parents and grandparents had, and most of them produced food…

Humans are an environmental niche, and organisms arise through mutation to populate it. The survival of a colonizing organism depends upon its ability to adapt to the human body, and upon the body’s ability to adapt to it…

North and Thomas argue that the establishment and enforcement of property rights has been a major cause of economic growth. A person who has property rights over a particular resource has the right to control it and use it as he pleases. Property rights are determined in part by law and in part by social conventions…

The classical economists strongly supported the idea of private property. The idea was less well received in the nineteenth century: John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall were skeptical of it, and Karl Marx rejected it entirely. The twentieth century saw another reversal of opinion…

Feudalism was the economic and political system of Europe during the Middle Ages. One might be tempted to dismiss it as a primitive system, discarded when something better came along, but to do so would be to misunderstand human institutions…

Custom played such a large role in governing feudal institutions that they were resistant to change. Feudalism could only be shaken by substantial changes to the external environment, and those changes finally came…