3 ms·

> Of course Sweden in 2000 is richer than Sweden in 1800. But it doesn't make any sense to compare things like that. It's definitely possible to get poorer as

• oblio 9y ago
  Yes, of course, there can be major fluctuations in any direction. But the data that we do have (see the Maddison Project) points out to many countries being in roughly the same quartiles across centuries. Sweden or Romania would be some of those. China would be an example of an undeperformer from 1800 to 1990 and Saudi Arabia an overperformer from 1960 (I think). But these scenarios are not the common case, there’s a reason they are called economic disasters or miracles. Oh, and the present day has way more noise than the past, cause of industrialization. Now a country can truly be 10-100 more productive per capita than another. But before the Industrial Age it was waaaay harder to stand out, you needed some exquisite social systems to do it, it happened extremely slowly and rarely.