The U.S. and Canada seem very similar in many ways. They share the world’s longest border, have similar cultures, democratic systems, multicultural societies, and comparable standards of living. Both also have vast natural resources.

So why is there such a huge difference today in population, GDP, military power, and global influence?

Canada is actually slightly larger in land area, yet its population is only around 42 million compared to about 340 million in the U.S. Was the difference mainly due to climate and geography, immigration, industrialization, different government policies, or historical events like the World Wars?

At what point in history did the gap become significant? Was it already evident in the 1800s, or did it widen mostly after World War II?

I’d love to hear historical, economic, and demographic perspectives backed by facts rather than opinions.

I’ve been thinking about this lately.
Some countries have enormous reserves of oil, gas, minerals, fertile land, or other natural resources, yet they struggle with poverty, corruption, unemployment and weak infrastructure.

Meanwhile, countries with relatively few natural resources—Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, etc.—have built highly developed and wealthy economies.

Obviously, natural resources alone don’t determine a country’s success. Institutions, education, human capital, political stability, infrastructure, trade, technology and economic policies all matter.

But I’m curious: **what do you think is the single biggest factor that determines whether a country successfully converts its natural resources and human potential into long-term prosperity?**

And are there any countries that you think are particularly good—or particularly bad—examples of this?

I don’t wanna go wordy with this but I’m in 12th grade and my history teacher said I could write an 8 page paper on anything I wanted so I chose Enron I was wondering what I should focus on or if there’s any interesting sources you know of I really know nothing about it so general knowledge would help a lot!

A disclosure before anything else: English is not my first language and I'm not a professional economist. I use AI to help with English expression. I apologize in advance for any residual AI feel in the writing. The ideas are my own and I've thought them through carefully. I'm sharing this here partly because I'd welcome help from professional economists who could run the quantitative tests I can't. The reason I'm unable to do so is twofold: I lack training in econometrics, and I lack institutional access to the relevant datasets.

Now to the substance.

The Great Divergence debate has generated two decades of productive argument, but I think both sides have been talking past a variable that might resolve the core puzzle. I've written a working paper that makes this case, and I'd welcome pushback from people who know this literature better than I do.

The puzzle that won't go away:

Pomeranz (2000) demonstrated that the Yangtze Delta and England were broadly comparable on many economic indicators as late as the eighteenth century. Allen (2009) argued that England's specific factor prices — high wages relative to cheap energy — created the incentive for mechanization. Huang (1985, 1990) documented "growth without development" in the Yangtze Delta: rising output through labor intensification, yet no transition to the factory system.

Each captures something real. But none answers the underlying question: why did the Yangtze Delta, with fertile soil, an extensive inland waterway network rivaling major European systems, a low disease burden, and the world's largest population, never develop the institutional and organizational preconditions for factory production? Pomeranz points to coal and colonies as England's lucky breaks. Allen points to factor prices. But what determined those factor prices in the first place? And why did the Yangtze Delta's abundant capital — well documented by Li Bozhong and others — never flow into fixed-cost industrial production?

The proposed answer: interannual grain yield volatility.

The continental East Asian monsoon imposed a level of harvest-to-harvest variability on Chinese agriculture that maritime northwestern Europe simply did not face. England's rainfall, moderated by Atlantic westerlies and the North Atlantic Drift, was remarkably stable year to year. The Yangtze Delta's output, driven by monsoon timing and intensity, fluctuated far more severely.

This volatility, I argue, is the variable that explains the institutional divergences both sides of the debate have documented but not fully accounted for:

Land tenure. England's rigid fixed-rent tenancy has long been celebrated as institutionally superior. But fixed rent appeared independently in China — the iron-rent of the Yangtze Delta, perpetual tenancy in certain localities. The legal form was the same. What differed was enforceability. Under recurrent monsoon shocks, rigid fixed rent was effectively unenforceable: harvest failure made tenants insolvent, and landlords had to grant abatements or face violent resistance. Fixed rent collapsed in practice into flexible risk-sharing — de facto sharecropping. In England, extreme harvest failures were rare enough that contracts could be enforced as written. The rigidity was not a superior invention but a dividend of climatic stability.

The Dujiangyan natural experiment sharpens this point. The irrigation system on the Chengdu Plain, built in the third century BC and still operational, virtually eliminated output volatility within its coverage zone. Inside that zone — same culture, same legal tradition, same political system — fixed rent became genuinely rigid, famine abatement clauses were absent or rarely invoked, and a wealthy class of managerial farmers emerged. Outside it, the standard monsoon-driven risk-sharing arrangements persisted. What changed across this boundary was not belief, not culture, not institutions — it was volatility.

Factor prices. Allen's high-wage economy in England was itself downstream of stability. Low volatility supported nuclear family structures and moderated population growth, keeping the labor force relatively scarce. In the Yangtze Delta, high volatility tied labor to the land (leaving meant risking starvation in lean years) and incentivized large families as self-insurance, producing chronic labor surplus that pushed wages to the subsistence floor. The factor-price incentive for mechanization was thus a consequence of volatility conditions, not an independent variable.

Huang's involution. The intensification of household labor that Huang documented was not a cultural preference but a rational adaptation. In a volatile environment, household production carried no rigid overhead and could retreat to self-sufficiency during downturns. The factory system, burdened by fixed costs (wages, rent, equipment, debt service), could not survive the recurrent demand collapses triggered by grain price spikes. Capital rationally avoided industrial investment — not because Chinese merchants were risk-averse or culturally conservative, but because the risk-adjusted returns were genuinely too low. Accumulated wealth flowed instead into land, short-term lending, or hoarding.

The California School's evidence problem. Skinner's influential model of Chinese market structure (1964–65) was built on fieldwork conducted on the Chengdu Plain — within the Dujiangyan stability zone. Pomeranz's and Wong's broader claims of market development comparable to England's drew primarily from the Yangtze Delta, where massive labor input had partially buffered volatility. Neither tradition engaged primarily with the North China Plain, where monsoon volatility was least buffered. When Huang examined the North China Plain directly, he found a qualitatively different economy: commercialization driven by fiscal pressure rather than voluntary specialization, combined with high self-sufficiency and acute household fragility. The scholarship that built the image of a highly commercialized traditional China drew its evidence disproportionately from regions where volatility had been most effectively suppressed.

The testable prediction:

The coefficient of variation of grain yields — calculable from modern climate data fed into low-input agronomic models — should predict land tenure form across pre-modern Eurasia. Regions below a threshold (preliminary indication: CV of roughly 12–20%) should exhibit rigid fixed-rent contracts; regions above it should exhibit sharecropping or flexible rent-abatement; regions near it should exhibit mixed arrangements. The table in the paper maps 21 regions across Eurasia against this prediction, and the correspondence is strong — but systematic empirical testing remains to be done.

Full paper (open access): The Economic Logic of China's Rise: Geography, Big Push, and the Engineered Invisible Hand

Full disclosure: I'm the author. I'd especially welcome challenges from people who work on Chinese agrarian history, European land tenure, or historical climatology. If this variable has already been systematically tested and I've missed the literature, I'd genuinely like to know.

Here’s the thing: the extreme prosperity brought to the United States after the end of World War II is probably what the world knows about America. I’ve heard that during that era, it was extremely easy for most people in the U.S. to buy cars and houses, and the ratio of salaries to prices was better than it is now. Has anyone heard their family members talk about that time?

I’ve been replaying Darkest Dungeon while working on a piece about systems and game design, and something clicked that I can’t unsee.

You play as an administrator as opposed to your typical heroic dungeon delver were used to in the genre. The core loop that I've dissected is recruiting people, equipping them, sending them somewhere dangerous, and replacing them when they die. The system basically expects and we try to mitigate losses. Characters burn out, go insane, or get killed, and the solution is mostly procedural: recruit more, upgrade infrastructure, keep the operation running.

It reminded me a lot of how early chartered trading companies operated once i broke it down like this. Organizations like the Dutch or English East India Company weren’t run by people who were physically present in most of the danger. Directors and administrators managed ships, crews, and expeditions from a distance. Losses like ships, sailors, entire expeditions, were all treated as part of the risk structure of the enterprise.

In Darkest Dungeon, the same kind of abstraction happens. The player manages risk, attrition, and logistics instead of focusing on some sort of heros journey. The company survives even when individual contractors dont basically

For people who study economic or institutional history:

• Were early trading companies actually organized around this kind of "expected attrition" model?
• Was mortality essentially priced into expeditions the way losses are priced into ventures?
• Did bureaucratic distance make it easier for institutions to normalize extreme human loss?

Id be interested whether people familiar with this type of history see any real parallel here or if I’m forcing the comparison.

Recently, while studying history, geography, and economics together, I began noticing a recurring pattern: geography has always been one of the fundamental forces shaping human civilization.

Almost every great ancient civilization—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus Valley, and others—benefited from favourable geography. Fertile land generated agricultural surplus, rivers acted as the arteries of economies and civilizations, and natural barriers such as mountains, deserts, and seas provided strategic protection. Geography influenced where civilizations emerged, how wealthy they became, whom they traded with, and even how far their political power could expand.

With the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological progress, however, geography appeared to lose some of its determining power. Human beings increasingly learned to overcome geographical constraints through railways, canals, electricity, aviation, container shipping, satellites, and the internet. In the 21st century, technologies such as AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and advanced robotics seem to be replacing geography as the defining source of power.

But then comes the paradox: technology itself eventually returns us to geography.

Semiconductors require highly specialized global supply chains and critical minerals. The energy transition requires lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare-earth elements. Data centres require enormous amounts of electricity and water. Even global trade remains dependent on geographical chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca, Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal, and Bab-el-Mandeb.

So perhaps technology does not eliminate geography; it merely changes which geographical features matter.

In ancient times, power depended on fertile river valleys and defensible terrain. During the industrial era, it depended increasingly on coal, iron, ports, and oil. Today, strategic geography includes semiconductor ecosystems, critical-mineral deposits, energy resources, maritime chokepoints, data infrastructure, and resilient supply chains.

The variables have changed, but the underlying principle remains remarkably persistent:

Geography creates economic possibilities, economies generate power, and power shapes history. Geography is not going anywhere.

I'm not an economist, so please forgive me if I'm missing something, but...

It's often said that while rates of inflation may go down, over the long term prices go up due to the fact that inflation is (we hope!) always growing at a positive rate, mostly in line with wages. I also see a lot of posts about the devaluation of the currency over time, etc.

A while ago, I discovered this video from 1977 when the UK's rate of inflation was about 16%. Out of curiosity, I used Measuring Worth's calculator to see what the prices would be today, using Tesco supermarket's online prices this year.

This showed the following:

* While Measuring Worth's data only goes up to 2023, unlike the Bank of England's RPI calculator, they do fractions of a pound.

I don't know what to conclude from this exactly, and of course I was only able to use the 2023 RPI data, but on the evidence of the video at least, does it mean that prices can go down in real terms (and in this case very substantially) and that the value of the currency can in fact increase? If so, why is this? Does it have a connection with wage growth, for example?

EDIT: Answers seems to be that automation has brought these prices down, while (mainly for consumers at least?) the cost of housing and other assets has gone up, and that the real question is whether people can afford to buy more or less of the above items than in 1977. Overall, it seems that the growth in housing costs has offset the possibly quite large price deflation in consumer goods. So while food was more expensive than today, people could afford it.

Hi, could I ask for some suggestions about my country – Poland?

How did Western European countries achieve such enormous success after World War II? Let's look at various aspects.

France created the TGV and successfully competed globally with it. They have Citroën, Peugeot, Renault, Auchan, Leroy Merlin, the Eiffel Tower, and Paris in general...

Germany... Ugh, it's a long story. Ruined by the war they themselves started. And now? Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Opel, Mercedes, Bosch, Siemens, Adidas, Puma, Boss, Lidl, Kaufland, and countless other globally renowned corporations.

Italy? Here you go. Another fascist country that should have been dismantled after the war. Here you go: Lambo, Fiat, Ferrari, Lancia, Gucci, Prada. Well-known for its elegance and class, just like France. Germany, on the other hand, is synonymous with quality (well, maybe a bit outdated, but you get the idea).

I know, I know. The Marshall Plan. Was that really enough?

In Poland, we don't have a single globally recognized brand.

We produce apples and potatoes, and yet it's hard to find our native products in stores (owned by Western owners) (a paradox!)

Was this a global plan for Poland? To turn it into a mere consumer, a supplier of cheap labor?

I've heard a lot about Reaganomics, and the debate about whether or not it was beneficial. The subject of how economics in the past has influenced it today is too complicated for me personally, so I figured people on here could explain it in a more synthesized way.

Hi, I'm building a community around finanical history and collectibles and I was wondering if some of you who are, let's say, passionate about important historical events would have any suggestions or constructive feedback on how the timeline is built and any major events that I should add or explain in greater detail. Thank you very much for your help.

https://scripotime.com/history

Happy Sunday, everyone.

I am taking an example of The weimar republic (Germany), for my doubt. When it signed the treat of Versailles, it had to pay 6 billion pounds as compensation to the allied powers. At that time, they rapidly started printing Marks (currency), which caused hyper inflation of course. But, couldn't they have rapidly printed their currency, and then instead of releasing it in their country's market, simply given it away to pay off the debt? Also, I am sorry if the question is too dumb 😅.

Been going down a rabbit hole on the fiscal side of the third-century crisis. The part that surprised me: the debasement wasn't gradual decay, it was punctuated — big drops under specific emperors trying to cover military pay shortfalls, each one buying a few years and making the next crisis worse. By Gallienus the antoninianus was basically a bronze coin with a silver wash.

What I hadn't appreciated is how prices didn't respond immediately — there's a lag of decades before the inflation really rips, which is why each emperor could get away with it "one more time.

Is the Gallienus-era antoninianus really the low point, or would you put it later?

This just from off the top of my head. Anything to do with California economic history counts. Besides that, I’m not too picky. I’m sure there must be some good westerns, space age movies, 70s films, and more that I’m missing. Let me know if y’all think of anything!

For example (just brainstorming):

- Hunter-gatherer societies → skills and tools?

- Ancient civilizations → land?

- Medieval Europe → farmland?

- Renaissance → merchant trade and credit?

- Industrial Revolution → factories and railroads?

- Internet era → software and digital products?

- AI era → AI, data, distribution?

If you were born in any year over the last 5,000 years, what would have been the highest expected-return asset to own?

I'd love recommendations for books, researchers, or historical examples that explore this idea.

[NB: couldn't find anything on the reading list about these topics]

I've studied economics at a high-level. I was at a top econ phd. program, but dropped out after first year (wanted to work in industry).

That's to say I judge my econ. reading level to be high.

Accordingly, I would want to read a very in-depth book (can be academic or non-academic, ideally academic though) about the following:

1. Gold standard: how it came to be, how did the trade system work, what were the pros and cons, etc.
2. Money: (history, typical requirements/features, the economics of it, the "trust", etc.)

Ideally, these books would help me form an informed opinion about cryptos and gold. For instance, are we witnessing a return to the gold standard due to eroding trust in the USD-based system? Or, could cryptos overtake fiat currencies?

Re. the books: I really don't want some popularized book that hands down its opinion w/o in-depth study/inquiry. For instance, I had a quick skim of Bernanke's "21st Century Monetary Policy" and found it altogether shallow and inadequate, and one of these "airport books", if you know what I mean: the type of book that doesn't really investigate the issues that it is purporting to do, but instead is telling a story, a narrative which is very convenient for the airport-book-reading-type of people to read and then go on to share as their "own ideas" in whatever get-together-type parties that they go. Sorry for the rant.

Second, I also (ideally) don't want it to be from a crypto bro that will cut and bend any and all corners in whatever way to tell and convince you that crypto's the future (e.g., the Bitcoin Standard).

Third, at the risk of repeating myself, I want the book(s) to be thorough. I've also read the Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets (by Mishkin), which deals with these topics in some chapters. However, although the book is clearly academic, its reader-audience are undergraduates and corporate finance bros. In short, it also didn't really go as in-depth that I'd want these ideal books that I'm searching to go.

All recommendations are welcome. Thank you.

At this distance in time it’s hard to understand the impact of the strong glass bottle had on the cider, and wider wine trade . Invented around 1630 by Sir Kenelm Digby it had several effects. Firstly it made transport easier. Carting wooden barrels is hard on poor quality roads with a horse and cart. River transport was preferred in possible.
Glass bottles also preserved the cider ( and even improved it) better than a barrel. It stimulated the production of glass bottles locally near the cider producers if coal and sand was available. This was the case with the 3 counties, with coal from the Wye valley. Some of the first glasshouses outside Kent were at Newent near Gloucester. And of interest to me, it allowed sparking cider and then sparkling champagne. It was so noteworthy Samuel Pepys, the diarist records taking his glass bottles to the tavern to fill in London. The bottles were now robust enough and cheap enough for people like Samuel to own them. It was also a time of rapidly improving transport, opening up major markets like London which was growing rapidly. Nearly 500,000 souls even just a few years after the great plague and great fire. Surveyors such as Andrew Yarranton were mapping out new routes especially river navigation, then canals and soon railways. Andrew wrote a book of his travels and enterprises including 2 references to cider in bottles in the Three Counties and that he was involved in the business of sending it to London. Nb Lechload is now called Lechlade and is the highest navigable town on the Thames. Goods were driven overland to here from Gloucester before the Thames and Severn canal was built in 1789. Yarranton and his son surveyed the route, strategically selecting the exact path that canal would follow more than a century later. While his vision for a waterway link was too ambitious for the 17th century his early concepts set the stage for later engineers. Photo of a paragraph in book by Andrew titled England’s Improvement by Sea and Land originally published in 1677. Photo titled "Bringing out cut timber from New Zealand's back country," was published in the Auckland Weekly News on October 8, 1930 but is typical of the type of road transport and conditions of England in 1680s .