Some thoughts on the course: The Rise of the Global Economy taken in the first term as part of the International Trade, Finance and Development (ITFD) program.
How much of economic history stretching from hunter gather to modern day financial crisis can one really learn in five weeks? As it turns out, one can learn rather a lot. As anyone who braved Pro Voth’s course will tell you, economic growth as we know it is a very recent phenomenon. Up until before the Industrial Revolution, economic growth had remained stagnant for hundreds of years. This is a thought that should fester when considering that during the lifetime of the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Gutenberg etc. incomes and living standards remained essentially unchanged. As such, The Rise of the Global Economy set out to answer the questions: when did growth occur, why did it take so long, what finally caused it and what did we do with it.
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