The vast majority of people reading this book have probably seen graphs depicting the human population explosion, looking pretty much like this:
The world's long-term population growth
As we can see, the trend broke in an upward direction around 1500. The reason was that, at this point, Western civilisation had started to get hugely creative, consequently experiencing an explosion of prosperity, which reduced child mortality and made it easier to survive. According to estimates from the prominent economist Angus Maddison, a mere 500 years earlier Western Europeans had had the same standard of living as Native Americans, and actually lower than that of Africans and Asians.
The huge innovation explosion in the West gradually impacted other civilisations and, as a result, total global income rose about 320 times between 1000 and 2000. That is quite a development, especially vis-à-vis the previous millennium, when the world's average per capita income actually remained unchanged. Yes, you heard right: 1000 years of nothing, and then everything suddenly took off.
Why did the West suddenly leave the others behind? Before answering, I should just point out that ‘the West’ was originally Western Europe, but later came to include areas that Western Europeans gradually populated and dominated: principally North America, most of Latin America, and Australia and ...
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