How the World Became Rich

Over the past two centuries humanity gained nearly all of its wealth, and Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin work through the many explanations offered for why modern growth took off at the times and in the places it did. They weigh recent theories based on politics, geography, demography, culture and colonialism, each explaining part of the story. They ask why the Industrial Revolution started in eighteenth-century Britain, why some European countries, the United States and Japan caught up in the nineteenth century, why others took far longer, and why some still lag. Their answer is that successful economies seem to share certain prerequisites, yet no single cure exists, and each society's past, institutions and culture help shape how it develops.

Tyler Cowen included it on his list of the best non-fiction books of 2022.