World Economic Primacy: 1500 To 1990

Rating:
Summary: From a brilliant economic historian...
Review: ... one likely to be unappreciated in his time.

Seldom do the social sciences permit such an overarching treatise on what has been the greatest and, at the same time, most tragic four centuries in (in)human history.

Mr. Kindleberger captures the essence of the "age of acquisitors" in an unprecedented manner. Hats off to Professor Kindleberger.

Rating:
Summary: Tour-de-force.
Review: In this small book, Charles Kindleberger succeeds in giving us an insight why and which countries got and lost the world economic primacy : the Italian city-states (Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan), Portugal and Spain, the Low Countries, Great-Britain, the US.
His main sources are F. Braudel, I. Wallerstein and M. Olson.

This book is a short but eminent course in economic history, from which we can learn a lot for our actual economic policies (e.g. the causes for decline).
The external causes are wars, and new discoveries (gold) and inventions in other countries.
The internal causes are risk aversion, increased consumption, decreased savings, reduced gains in productivity, decline in innovation, resistance to taxation, mounting debt, rent-seeking, speculative bubbles, gambling, corruption, increasing governmental and corporate bureaucracy, unwillingness to adapt to change. (p. 215-7)

A must for every economist and also for the layman.