The income per capita in the United States and Western Europe is around fifty times greater than in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This prompts the question: Why are some countries rich and others poor? From around 1870 until the Second World War, Japan’s income per capita remained around 25 percent of U.S. income per capita. After the substantial reforms put in place at the end of the war, Japanese relative income rose sharply so that today Japanese standard of living is roughly two-thirds that...

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