I've often thought that the bourgeois (middle class) values of thrift, diligence, and self-restraint leavened with risk-taking are too often mocked and underappreciated. For that matter, how many Hollywood films can you name where a businessman is portrayed as honest and valuable to society? A business person who uses an economy's scarce resources and transforms them into a product worth more to voluntary buyers than the cost of those resources is earning a well-deserved profit in competitive markets. Professor McCloskey trots out Samuel Johnson's famous quote that "a man is never more harmless than when he's busy making money." The business person is much less fearful than the ideologue or fanatic, e.g., a Lenin, a Robespierre, a Himmler, a Joe McCarthy, a Torquemada. A bourgeois (business) civilization, the author maintains, is far better than a traditional agrarian civilization (dominated by peasants), or an aristocratic civilization (dominated by land-owning warrior lords), or a Christian (medieval) civilization (dominated by bishops), for stimulating economic growth and general economic flourishing (I'm reminded that a medieval monk said that monasteries, being hard to corrupt, were full of demons, while marketplaces, already corrupted, were absent of demons).
The author describes how, after centuries of generations living about the same as previous generations, the world began to show economic growth commencing around 1800 in northwest Europe. This economic growth accelerated to where today's generation in much of the world lives immeasurably better than the folks of the 18th century. The cause of this economic growth was "trade-tested betterment" in the author's words, and was stimulated by a greater respect for the individual (and a less "hierarchical" society), a greater openness to new ideas, and a willingness to test the new ideas in the marketplace. The Netherlands was the initial focus of this economic transformation followed by England, Scotland, and America. The merchant, the banker, the ship-owner, and the factory owner became as respected as the lords and bishops in these lands. To my mind, McCloskey doesn't really apportion the sources of this ideological shift in northwest Europe, soon adopted in the rest of Europe, and in much of the world by this century (as if this might be possible), but she discusses the Protestant Reformation, urbanization, democratization, equality, individualism, and the overall promotion of an exchange economy and suggests they all played a part. Some economic historians have cited capital accumulation from the surplus finally wrung from previous subsistence economies as the cause of this growth; others cite the development of institutional factors, e.g., incentives, intellectual property law, contract law, limited liability corporations. The author minimizes these explanations and maintains that it was essentially due to the acceptance of new and market-tested ideas from anyone as permitted by the new, more democratic social ethos. This is why the author doesn't attribute the take-off in economic growth necessarily to the development of capitalism, which she says pre-dated this growth spurt. (It might be noted that while McCloskey might disparage Solow-type growth models as "Samuelsonian", empirical estimates of Solow growth models in most countries indicate that about one-third of economic growth comes from capital accumulation and about two-thirds comes from efficiency gains from technology and innovation.)
Strengths of the book: (1) the book is well-written and I enjoyed the author's conversational tone, (2) I particularly enjoyed the author's dissection of the Max Weber thesis (the Reformation's effect was more sociological than psychological) and her description of the economic impact of having a less hierarchy-ridden society, (3) I liked her examples from literature illustrating the migration of themes from aristocratic to middle class (She's a professor of English as well as of Economics), and (4) she uses many good examples from economic history from steam power to software innovations.
Some Irritants of the book: (1) the book is too long for its theme (67 chapters!) and is repetitious in too many places, (2) there's a broad display of impressive erudition but it seems to me excessive and extraneous. We get lots of literary analysis, opera dissections, ancient history, political theory. It seems to me that its "wordy" author did a "core dump" of a life time of scholarship, (3) there's too many personal scholarly battles alluded to in the text where her intellectual adversaries are vanquished (however, in the author's defense her notes indicate numerous instances of scholarly debts she pays to colleagues for clarifications, etc.), (4) While she's a strong libertarian, it's ironic to read this tenured professor decry collective bargaining, unemployment compensation, and social security. Even the Reagan administration realized that fostering a dynamic economy required some level of safety net, and (5) more libertarian rhetoric: about 30 times she alludes to "state violence" when she's referring to the regulatory and taxing powers of the government. To call (indirectly) Fines and Cease-and-Desist orders for, say, drug efficacy testing by the FDA, fraudulent advertising monitoring by the FTC, and ensuring accurate financial disclosure by the SEC, "state violence" is rhetorical excess.
But I must have enjoyed the book because I stayed with it and read all of it including most of the notes!
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