I find it incredible that the economy has grown so much in the past 1000 years compared to the previous 1000 years. Even more incredible to me is how it has grown even bigger in the last 200 years alone. According to the book, life expectancy in the west in 1820 was about 36 years, now that number is close to 80 which means that in the past 200 years or so our life expectancy has more than doubled. It is also interesting how there is such a large disparity between the largest and the smallest economies in the world, with the West almost always having the larger economies even though a much larger percentage of the population does not live in the west. Throughout this course I will be interested to see why these things have happened the way they have.