Introduction to Modern Economic Growth on the broad outlines of a number of alternative fundamental causes of economic growth and had at first look at the long-run empirical evidence relevance to these hypotheses We argued that approaches emphasizing institutional differences (and differences in policies, laws and regulations) across societies are most promising for understanding both the current growth experiences of countries and the historical process of economic growth We have also emphasized the importance of studying the political economy of institutions, as a way of understanding why institutions differ across societies and lead to divergent economic paths 4.9 References and Literature The early part of this chapter builds on Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2006), who discuss the distinction between proximate and fundamental causes and the various different approaches to the fundamental causes of economic growth North and Thomas (1973) appear to be the first to implicitly criticize growth theory for focusing on proximate causes alone and ignoring fundamental cause of economic growth Diamond (1997) also draws a distinction between proximate and fundamental explanations The importance of population in generating economies of scale was first articulated by Julian Simon (1990) The model presented in Section 4.2 draws on Simon’s work and work by Michael Kremer (1993) Kremer (1993) argues for the importance of economies of scale and increasing returns to population based on the acceleration in the growth rate of world population Another important argument relating population to technological change is proposed by Esther Boserup (1965) and is based on the idea that increases in population creates scarcity, inducing societies to increase their productivity Other models that build economies of scale to population and discuss the transition of the world economy from little or no growth to one of rapid economic growth include Hanson and Prescott (2001), Galor and Weil (2001), Galor and Moav (2002) and Jones (2004) Some of these papers also try to reconcile the role of population in generating technological progress with the later demographic transition Galor (2006) provides an excellent summary of this literature and an extensive discussion McEvedy and Jones (1978) provide a concise history of world population and relatively reliable information going back to 10,000 B.C Their data 208