How the West got healthy and prosperous

Several years ago, physician, statistician, sword swallower and vibrant lecturer Hans Rosling produced a fascinating 4-minute video that presented 120,000 data points and showcased how mostly western nations became healthy and prosperous in just 200 years--after countless millennia of malnutrition, disease, wretched poverty and early death. More recently, professor of history and economics Deidre McCloskey provided some clues as to why and how this happened. In a Wall Street Journal articleoutlining "how the West (and the rest) got rich," she notes that it wasn't just Karl Marx's "exploited workers" or Adam Smith's "virtuously saved capital, nor was it only Hernando DeSoto and Douglas North's essential property rights and other legal institutions.