2.
THEORIES THAT DON’T WORK
T HE L AY OF THE L AND
T HE FOCUS OF our book is on explaining world inequality
and also some of the easily visible broad patterns that nest
within it. The first country to experience sustained economic
growth was England—or Great Britain, usually just Britain,
as the union of England, Wales, and Scotland after 1707 is
known. Growth emerged slowly in the second half of the
eighteenth century as the Industrial Revolution, based on
major technological breakthroughs and their application in
industry, took root. Industrialization in England was soon
followed by industrialization in most of Western Europe and
the United States. English prosperity also spread rapidly to
Britain’s “settler colonies” of Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand. A list of the thirty richest countries today would
include them, plus Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.
The prosperity of these latter three is in turn part of a
broader pattern in which many East Asian nations,
including Taiwan and subsequently China, have
experienced recent rapid growth.
The bottom of the world income distribution paints as
sharp and as distinctive a picture as the top. If you instead
make a list of the poorest thirty countries in the world today,
you will find almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa. They
are joined by countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti, and
Nepal, which, though not in Africa, all share something
critical with African nations, as we’ll explain. If you went
back fifty years, the countries in the top and bottom thirty
wouldn’t be greatly different. Singapore and South Korea
would not be among the richest countries, and there would
be several different countries in the bottom thirty, but the
overall picture that emerged would be remarkably
consistent with what we see today. Go back one hundred
years, or a hundred and fifty, and you’d find nearly the same