Unit 1 - Prosperity, Inequality, and planetary limits

1.1 - Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century travels in a flat world

• Moroccan scholar, Ibn Battuta (1304-1368) visited the Indian subcontinent in the 14^th century

  • Plentiful provisions, country of great extent

    • Three centuries later, Jean Baptiste Tavernier (French diamond merchant) expressed the same sentiment

  • During the time of Battuta’s visit, Europe was reeling under the impact of the bubonic plague - India wasn’t richer than the other parts of the world, but wasn’t much poorer either

• Average people were better off in some Western countries, but the vast differences between the rich and the poor in any given country were much more striking than these differences across regions

  • Different titles: feudal lords and serfs, royalty and their subjects, enslaved people and their owners, etc.

  • Your prospects depended on your parent’s position on the economical ladder and on your gender

  • The part of the world you were born in mattered much less back then

• The standards changed a lot - people might have been better off than a couple centuries ago, but they are poor by today’s standards

• Back then, people learned about the world from explorers’ impressions - we have proper data now

• Collecting data is essential

  • Data allow us to discriminate among alternative explanations

  • Measuring things to make proper comparisons

  • To produce legal and statistical categories

1.2 - History’s hockey stick

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP): A measure of how much is produced in a particular country in a year, the ‘output’ of the country