For 200 years—from 1800 to 2000—first the Industrial Revolution Age and next the Modern Economic Growth Age rolled forward, bringing previously unimaginable wealth to the global north. And the global south fell further and further behind. Don’t get us wrong—life expectancy, nutrition standards, and material well-being in 2000 were all much higher in the global south in 2000 than in 1800. But the proportional gap vis-a-vis the global north had grown to staggering and awful proportions that were a scandal, a disgrace, and a crime. But since 2000 the worm may have turned: now it looks as though the global south—virtually the entire global south—is now “converging” and catching up to the global north.

References:

William Baumol (1986): Productivity, Convergence, & Welfare: What the Long-Run Data Show http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Baumol1986.pdf>

J. Bradford DeLong (1988): Productivity, Convergence, & Welfare: Comment https://www.jstor.org/stable/1807174>

Paul Krugman (1991): _ Increasing Returns and Economic Geography_ https://pr.princeton.edu/pictures/g-k/krugman/krugman-increasing_returns_1991.pdf>

Lant Pritchett (1997): Divergence, Big Time https://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Courses/Readings/Pritchett.pdf?seq=14>

Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, & Anthony J. Venables (1999): The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, & International Tradehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spatial-economy>

Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, & Janina Matuszeski (2009): Artificial States https://wcfia.harvard.edu/files/wcfia/files/alesina_artificialstates.pdf>

Joe Studwell (2013): How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World's Most Dynamic Region https://books.google.com/books?id=dNs33Q1cAX0C>

Noah Smith (2021): _All Futurism is Afrofuturism https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/all-futurism-is-afrofuturism>

Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur, & Arvind Subramanian (2021): The New Era of Unconditional Convergence https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/new-era-unconditional-convergence.pdf>

Michael Kremer, Jack Willis, & Yang You (2021): Converging to Convergence https://scholar.harvard.edu/yangyou/publications/converging-convergence>

Noah Smith: Checking in on the Global South: ‘Developing countries are catching up, but not evenly… LINK: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-south>