ABSTRACT

A growing economy Economic growth from the historical perspective is surprisingly controversial. There is, for example, much dispute over the forces that got the industrial revolution going in Britain around 1770 and why an industrial revolution did not get started earlier in, say, China in the Yangtze River valley or in north-central Italy or in France. Some economists emphasize that growth was essentially a capital accumulation process, one of more machines per worker; others emphasize the technical progress dimension of an economic take-off-better ways to produce cotton thread, more efficient ways to garner energy from a steam engine and so on. Then others emphasize the accumulation of new skills in workers, a process that seemed to be coincident with families ending up with fewer children. de Long and Schleifer (1993) emphasize the importance of the entrenchment of some variant of “the rule of law” as a precursor to economic take-off. Urbanization and reductions in family size are usually part of the growth process. In the United States, “total population grew twelvefold between 1800 and 1890 while those living in cities increased an astonishing eighty-seven times” (Appleby 2010; p. 197).