The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the

By the fourteenth century, Europe had reached broad economic and technological parity with China and the Islamic Near East. Between AD 1000 and c.1350 there was a long phase of economic growth. The population increased. Waste lands were colonized. Technical improvements like the mould-board plough (which opened up heavier lands) and the watermill i

the four “Asian tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—had demonstrated the success of export-led, labor-intensive manufacturing. China embarked on that path decisively with the rise to power of the brilliant pragmatic reformer Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Following Deng’s sage advice on pragmatic market opening and his famed nonideologica

Free trade, and capitalism in general, are constantly creating new wealth and on the whole drive the economy forward. But “on the whole” excludes those who lose their jobs as the economic revolution takes place and never find a new job.