The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II
The industrial revolution didn’t happen everywhere at the same time, but it did have the sam effect everywhere: massively rising GDP/person.
The Japanese and Chinese stories are the most dramatic. Japan, which was behind Eastern Europe before World War I, nearly caught the United States by the end of the 20th century. China, which fell behind Africa in the middle of the 20th century, is now perhaps the most massive success story in industrialization history.
The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph
…One way to read the graph, very broadly speaking, is that everything to the left of 1800 is an approximation of population distribution around the world and everything to the right of 1800 is a demonstration of productivity divergences around the world — the mastering of means of manufacturing, production and supply chains by steam, electricity, and ultimately software that concentrated, first in the West, and then spread to Japan, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and beyond.
The Internet Is 20% Of Economic Growth
McKinsey report: The Internet is a huge driver of economic growth. Internet as a sector is about 3% of GDP, or bigger than agriculture or energy, and represents over 20% of economic growth in the past 5 years, and growing. For every job that the Internet destroys, 2.6 new net jobs are created.
$1.2 trillion: How much Americans spend annually on goods and services they don’t absolutely need. (via WSJ)
Royal Pingdom » The world’s billionaires, a statistical overview
- Total number of billionaires in the world: 1,210
- Combined fortune: $4.5 trillion (USD)
- Combined fortune of US billionaires: $1,5 trillion
- Number of billionaires in tech and telecom: 109 (9% of billionaires)
- Countries with the most billionaires: USA (413), China (115), Russia (101), India (55) and Germany (52).
- Countries with at least 10 billionaires: 22
- Billionaires with at least $10 billion: 88
- The average billionaire age: 61.8
- Billionaires under the age of 30: 6 (half of which have made their fortune off Facebook)
- Share of billionaires below 40: 3%
