Economic History

Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family—the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in...

In How Economics Explains the World, Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is the story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and...