Chapter 1. The concept of wealth

Interest in the discussion of why some nations are richer than others peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has been sustained to the present, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Two recent books, one by James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoğlu (2012), and the other by Thomas Pikkety (2013), deal with the question of the cause of the wealth of nations – a very unusual point of interest some decades ago unless it was in relation to development theories. These ...