- England got to the American colonization party late
- The Spaniards colonized highly populous areas giving them coercive labor
- The English colonized sparse areas that required everyone to walk
- Broad political power is important for a functional democracy
- Democracy is not important for wealth but respect of private property is
- “State” is “legitimized violence”
- The black plague created a critical juncture that allowed Western Europe to break serfdom while Eastern Europe reinforced it
- Extraction can create short-term growth by redeploying resources; however, it cannot sustain this growth through reallocation
- Maize stores well
- Conflict and property resolution is more complex when you can’t freely move
- Allowing upward mobility enables new blood and ideas
- Creative destruction is important to drive innovation
- There needs to be incentives to adopt changes
- Sometimes changes are rejected because they fear empowering those who rule over them
- South East Asia countries reverted development as a result is Dutch conquest
- When the external slave markets dried up, slavers redeployed to internal use
- Political centralization with plurality is how you maintain growth
- Modernization does bring growth if it enables creative destruction