So how do you get from a subsistence economy where the great mass lives on the edge of famine and disaster? Funny you should ask, because Adam Smith desperately wanted this improvement for his native Scotland. Getting it would be like a miracle. He knew the mechanisms that led to prosperity and the obstacles that got in the way. And one day, in France he started a book, An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
We get as far as the ideas of the Physiocrats, Smith’s core assumptions in the Wealth of Nations, and some of the objections people have to Smith’s assumptions.
There is also a long digression into the Mughal empire and its dissociation. India when from the greatest proto industrial power with industrial output higher than China or Europe, to….well, vulnerable.
With Camie we discuss the Matrix, and she chides me for leaving America out of the stage setting, so we get some American context.