How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong: A Review Essay

This essay reviews two recent books on economic growth: Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin’s How the World Became Rich and J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia. Both books offer rich and nuanced treatments of the long-run and proximate mechanisms underlying the global growth in the past centuries. I evaluate their arguments and conclude with some reflections on conceptual shortcomings in the growth literature and some suggestions for the future. (JEL F54, J11, N10, N30, N40, N60, O40)