Remarks of Lawrence H. Summers at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship

What I thought I’d do today is start by asking: What in our time is going to be historically memorable 300 years from now?

Perhaps the top story will be the end of the Cold War.  But if you think about major conflicts between pairs of countries that took place three hundred years ago, they are a little hazy in our memory.

Perhaps the large story will be the relationship between the West, broadly defined, and the Islamic world and how that story plays out.

And that is certainly an issue of profound importance.

But I would suggest to you that the greatest likelihood is that what will be remembered is the rise of emerging markets in Asia and beyond, at unprecedented rates.

Consider if you will this.  If you look – and historians have quite carefully – standards of living as best we can judge them in the Athens of Pericles’ time and the London at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had changed very little.

On an optimistic view they had risen 75 percent over that 2,200-year period.

If you look at the Industrial Revolution, the reason they called it the Industrial Revolution was that for the first time in human history, living standards rose at a rate where they were noticeably different at the end of a human lifespan than they had been at its beginning.  Growth had been perhaps 1 or 1.5 percent a year.

If you look at the most rapid period of growth in U.S. economic history, per capita incomes, living standards rose at perhaps 2 or 2.5 percent – a rate at which they rose perhaps as much as five times within a single human lifespan.

If we look at what is happening today in large parts of the world we are seeing growth at a rate of seven, eight, nine, ten percent a year.  A rate at which living standards rise not by a factor of two, not by a factor of five, but by a factor of more than a hundred over a single human lifespan.

We are seeing it not in a single corner of Europe but in a region where the largest share of the world’s population lives.  And we are seeing it in a world that is vastly more interconnected and able to feel its effects than the world that experienced the rise of the United States or experienced the Industrial Revolution