patrick wyman has a new book.will speak with him after the break. ♪ joe: the four decades between 1490 and 1530 saw the development of everything from printing, mass media, globalization. according to our next guest, those years marked a decisive turning point of european history. patrick wyman, author of "the verge." he joins us with more. it's a you could give us a stock tip you learned from the 14 90's or 1500, or you could tell us what it was about that period specifically that we could speak of and find useful for understanding how economic development happens. patrick: i think the biggest thing is to focus on the mechanisms that enable technological change as opposed to innovation itself. gunpowder was not new. the printing press was not exactly new. voyages of exploration had been leaving western europe for several decades by this point. but over the course of four decades, there is a remarkable shift in scale. i think at the root of that were the mechanisms that allowed people to pour money into these coun