The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius famously observed that “the universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.” He thus outlined the essentially voluntary nature of success. Writing two millennia later, biologist Charles Darwin brought scientific reasoning to Aurelius’s observation and took it to another level by emphasizing the inevitability of transformation. In studying what he called “the struggle for existence,” Darwin conjectured:

Economists concerned with the development of poor countries have not pronounced such a stark diagnosis. Economics typically is not a zero-sum game, and even the most egregious policy failures rarely cause a country to disappear from the face of the earth. After all, few national economies perish simply because of natural selection. But the basic insight that underlies Aurelius’s and Darwin’s intuitions applies to economic development: long-term growth depends on continuing structural transformation.