I read this book last year, and wrote this review like two months ago... somehow, editorial process was slow and I didn't think about it again and vóila, now it's out. Funz-funz.
tl;dr =
What I can’t grasp, and what leaves a bad taste from what otherwise is a pretty enjoyable and enriching book, is what happens on the very last few pages: the left-wing, globalist, intellectual biases re-assert themselves.
Just straight-up pathetic, and I prey it was on the urging of some woke low-lifer at Oxford University Press rather than Meissner seriously entertaining these anti-human climate-change-stupidity things.
As for the book itself, it's pretty good -- a nice rundown of the world economy in the last 175 years. Here are some extracts:
The most important thing a book on the economic history of the world must emphasize, again and again, is the incredible, unbelievable, unrivaled improvement in the standard of living since preindustrial times. Economics terms like “growth,” “wealth,” or “division of labor” just never seem to do that shift justice.
Up until fairly recently, almost everyone in every society of every civilizational age in every part of the world toiled the earth for some meager, grain-dominated subsistence living. Little variety, poor hygiene, none of the technical and material comforts we take for granted — death and suffering always within terrifying proximity.
Very few innovations or revolutions in the history of mankind — perhaps the internet or the internal combustion engine, or the expanded franchise or the contraceptive pill in the social sphere — can even rival the extreme human revolution, over the relatively short arc of the last 175 years.
"In One From the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850, Christopher Meissner, UC Davis economics professor and longtime scholar of international and financial economics, takes us on a journey through a century and a half of international trade. We’re treated to a slightly different flavor of that exact Great Enrichment point. A few stunning charts reproduced in the opening of the book tell precisely that story from a global trade point of view: nothing-nothing-nothing-hockey-stick-up."
Out of many, our global economy became one.
Nice to be back writing again!