Cornell Law Review Volume 96 Issue 4 May 2011 - Symposium: The Future of Legal Article 32 Theory Intellectual History as Legal Analysis Yoram Margalioth Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Yoram Margalioth, Intellectual History as Legal Analysis, 96 Cornell L. Rev. 1025 (2011) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol96/iss4/32 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. COMMENT INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS LEGAL ANALYSIS Yoram Margaliotht The world's GDP per capita has grown significantly since World War II, but the distribution of wealth across countries has been ex- tremely unequal.' As William J. Baumol first noted, two clusters formed: one around wealth and one around poverty.2 The wealthy countries converged.3 While a number of developing countries, most notably China and India,4 also seem to be on the path to prosperity, other countries, home to more than one billion people, seem doomed to their poverty cluster.5 Economists have found that even after controlling for differences in resources, including physical and human capital, large differences in GDP per capita across countries remain.6 This has led them to think that the existence of differences in the quality of institutions across countries explains the persistent divergence in income per cap- ita.7 Their theory's main premise is that institutions influence the form and rate of technological progress, which is the engine of sus- tained economic growth, and shape the incentives of economic and political agents, which are the bread and butter of economics.