Fewer, Richer, Greener

6Before the Great Enrichment: The Year 1 to 1750

In the beginning was the year 1, and the Scottish economic historian Angus Maddison was already collecting data. According to Maddison, the average annual income in the world was $467.¹

Okay, I’m kidding. Jesus of Nazareth had just been born, the dollar would not exist for another 1700 years, and Angus Maddison would not exist for another 1900 and then some. But, in the year 1 AD, the world had an economy (and the years before that did too). People worked and consumed, bartered, bought, and sold. Sometimes they bought and sold each other. They grew enough food that they could survive—our existence today is testament to that. They reproduced, fought wars, built cities, made art. An income of $467 a year is not much, but it’s an average that includes many who were richer—Rome was at its zenith, Greece past its peak, China and Egypt flourishing—and many who were dirt-poor in ways that we can scarcely imagine.

And, two millennia later, Maddison, according to Deirdre McCloskey “a bear of a man fluent in seven languages . . . a Scot living in France and working in Holland . . . was the leading authority on the history of world trade and income.”² He was able to go back and reconstruct enough economic history, in many countries around the world, that he could come up with a defensible estimate of the productivity of the world economy in the year 1. He did the same thing, with increasing 
accuracy, for the years 1000, 1500, 1600, and ...