How Economics Explains the World Quotes

“Wine Spectator magazine provides higher ratings – relative to other publications – to wines that advertise in its pages.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“In 2020, global government debt jumped to a full year of worldwide income.3 Two”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“In 2019, global government debt was equivalent to ten months of worldwide income.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“And, like the debate over the Corn Laws and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the Trump tariffs and Brexit were a reminder that while openness may be good economics, isolationism often wins elections.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Corruption flourishes when economic power meets crooked politics outside the public eye.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Trade had the effect of ‘unbundling’ production and consumption.7 Trade means that things no longer need to be made and sold in the same country.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“American polymath Benjamin Franklin once wrote that ‘no nation was ever ruined by trade’.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Tariffs were easy to administer and good for the government budget, but bad for the economy as a whole. Tariffs have been likened to a country impeding shipping by putting rocks in its own harbours.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Smith didn’t think that markets were perfect. Unlike some of the economists who would follow him, he was worried about monopolies, the excessive influence of business on politics, and collusion between companies. ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together,’ he wrote ‘but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Institutions were vital to the industrial revolution. Capital markets allowed investors to raise funds. Insurance markets allowed them to hedge risk. In Britain, the currency was relatively stable and law courts were relatively independent.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Risk on the high seas called forth ingenious economic solutions. In Ancient Greece, those organising a shipping voyage sold ‘bottomry bonds’, which paid a high rate of interest if the ship reached port, but nothing if it sank. In 1293, Portugal’s King Denis established Europe’s first marine insurance fund, allowing merchants to organise voyages without bearing the entire risk of catastrophe.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Through force of arms and treaties with Indian provincial rulers, the British East India Company came to control two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent – the area that makes up modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Much the same was true of the British East India Company, whose monopoly allowed it to mint money, raise an army, collect taxes, run criminal trials and transport enslaved people from Asia and Africa. In the Indonesian Maluku Islands, then known as the Spice Islands, conflict between the company and its Dutch counterpart helped provoke four Anglo-Dutch wars.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Because investors could buy shares in the Dutch East India Company, it was the world’s first public company.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Colonialism was not always a government enterprise. The largest company in history may well have been the Dutch East India Company, a multinational formed in 1602 by the merger of several trading companies.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Among the most famous is Giovanni Boccaccio, who fled Florence – a city where up to three-quarters of the population died – to write his masterpiece The Decameron. From 1300 to 1400, the world population shrank from 430 million to 350 million.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“The Black Death also provides a dramatic illustration of economics in action.15 A scarcity of workers doubled European real wages (that is, wages after inflation). Suddenly land was relatively abundant, so rents declined. This helped shift the power balance in favour of peasants and against landowners. To a large extent, the plague killed feudalism.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“Originally from a village in northern Tuscany, members of the Medici family moved to Florence in the twelfth century, making their living in the textile trade. In 1397, the family formed the Medici Bank, which became the largest bank in Europe. They were among the first to use double-entry bookkeeping, and benefited from Florence’s strength in crafts, controlled by a series of powerful guilds.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“1500, Spain was one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Two centuries later, it was a backwater. An echo of Spain’s experience is the modern-day resource curse, in which valuable mineral assets can end up impoverishing a nation. Among low-income nations, those with significant resource deposits tend to grow more slowly.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity

“So what was life like for most people in this era? ‘Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state,’ wrote Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His English counterpart Thomas Hobbes took an utterly different view, declaring that early human life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.”
― Andrew Leigh, How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity