The long-run record, which constrains most theories.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Transition: The First Ten Years — Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union
World Bank · 2002
Reviews a decade of post-socialist transition and finds that early, comprehensive liberalisation correlated with faster recovery, while countries…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century
Paul Mantoux · 1928
Argues the English industrial revolution was a coherent economic transformation of the whole productive system, not a string of isolated inventions,…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Six Centuries of Work and Wages
James E. Thorold Rogers · 1884
Reconstructs English prices and wages from manorial and college accounts across six centuries, arguing from the record that the fifteenth-century…
+6 more at this level
11 works
World Bank
Reviews a decade of post-socialist transition and finds that early, comprehensive liberalisation correlated with faster recovery, while countries that reformed haltingly saw output collapse for longer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Mantoux
Argues the English industrial revolution was a coherent economic transformation of the whole productive system, not a string of isolated inventions, tracing how mechanised cotton and iron production remade the organisation of labour itself.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Michael D. Bordo
Traces Bretton Woods from its design as a compromise between fixed rates and domestic policy autonomy through to its collapse, arguing the system worked only as long as the United States could credibly anchor it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. Bradford DeLong
Argues the 1970s inflation was driven less by oil shocks than by policymakers who misjudged how much slack the economy had and who lacked the will to disinflate until Volcker did.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James E. Thorold Rogers
Reconstructs English prices and wages from manorial and college accounts across six centuries, arguing from the record that the fifteenth-century labourer was better fed than the nineteenth-century one.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Christina D. Romer
Attributes recovery from the Great Depression mostly to expansionary monetary policy after 1933 — driven by gold inflows rather than deliberate fiscal stimulus — and finds fiscal policy played only a small direct role.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Douglass C. North
Argues that institutions, not just resources or technology, are the primary determinant of long-run economic performance, and that inefficient institutions can persist for centuries because those with the power to change the rules often benefit from the existing ones.
Nobel Prize lecturelink checked 17 Sept 2026Barry Eichengreen & Pablo Vazquez
Argues the exceptional growth of Western Europe's postwar 'Golden Age' rested on institutions -- coordinated wage bargaining, bank-based finance, and supranational arrangements like the European Payments Union -- suited to catch-up growth through imitation, and that growth slowed once economies neared the technological frontier those institutions could no longer help them close.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert C. Allen
Reconstructs three centuries of wages and prices across European cities to show the income gap between Europe's rich and poor regions was not ancient -- it opened specifically between 1500 and 1750, well before industrialisation, giving the Great Divergence debate a date rather than only a cause.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez
Reconstructs top income shares from tax records across the twentieth century and shows inequality fell sharply after 1940 and then returned to early-century levels by the 1990s, driven mostly by wage income rather than capital.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff
Compiles crisis data across sixty-six countries and eight centuries to argue that every crisis is preceded by officials and investors insisting this time really is different, right before it isn't.
link checked 17 Sept 2026