Economist Writing Every Day

That is the title of a 2020 book by Dierdre McCloskey and Art Carden. It attempts to sum up McCloskey’s trilogy of huge books on the “Bourgeois Virtues” in one short, relatively easy to read book. I haven’t read the full trilogy, so I can’t say how good the new book is as a distillation, but I found that it was easy to read and at least makes me think I understand McCloskey’s basic thesis for why the world got rich. I share some highlights here.

Part 1 of the book aims to establish that the world did in fact get richer over recent centuries, plus give a basic explanation of liberal political thought. If you already know this you could skip this part and cut down an easy 189 page read to a very easy 106 page read (part 1 is for some reason written in a way that assumes you disagree with the authors, which grates when you don’t, or perhaps also if you do).

Part 2 gets to what I at least came for- digging into the history to solve the puzzle of why the Industrial Revolution / Great Enrichment took off when and where it did. Which means first, explaining why many things people think made 18th century England special were actually common elsewhere, like markets:

In the European Middle Ages one could buy almost anything- wheat and iron, yes, but also husbands, marketplaces, kingdoms, eternal salvation…. before 1933 a market logic pretty much ruled, in China and India as much as in England and Italy

England was as ‘capitalist’ in 1250 as in 1550 or 1750

Or property rights:

The first person who made a spear out of a haft and glue and twine and a stone point and called it “mine” made Homo sapiens into a property owner and a trader. Property rights in ancient Rome and medieval China were as good as in eighteenth-century Scotland. Yet the Scots, not the Chinese, made the modern world. Property is not a sufficiency. Necessary? Sure.

Or science:

Modern medicine and “science” came from enrichment more than causing it…. the Great Enrichment got going without much schooling and without much in the way of “high” science…. Until 1900 or so, neither was very important to the economy.

Or conquest:

Imperial exploitation was the least original thing Europeans did after 1492. Slavery and empires have been commonplace yet have never produced a Great Enrichment.

So, if those things weren’t the key causes, what was? They argue for Reading, Reformation, Revolt, and Revolution. The printing press came at a time when Europe was too politically fragmented to enforce censorship everywhere. Collectively, these things allowed people to develop, spread, and implement new ideas:

They led to the fifth R, a reevaluation of commerce and betterment, plain in literature and political thought, we have shown, of England and Scotland, culminating in the Bourgeois Deal

The problem in the Middle Ages was the absence of new ideas for investment, not the absence of a fund for saving. Savings rates in enriching England, actually, were lower than the European norm

A combination of happy accidents, we have said, beginning in 1517 led ordinary people in northwestern Europe to revalue the bourgeoisie and embrace dissent with modification. The bourgeoisie itself did not become greedier, or thriftier, or more hardworking, or more law-abiding…. What happened, rather, was the coming…. of a bourgeois dignity. In the eyes of the rest of society, businesspeople acquired a new dignity

Besides this main thesis, the book has a McCloskeyan focus on literature and language. Like the long explanation of how the word “honest” changed from an aristocratic to a bourgeois meaning, and takes on authors:

Like Dickens (and unlike, say, Jane Austen or Herman Melville or Emile Zola or John Steinbeck or Robert Frost), [Balzac] did not trouble to know economics or the economy

Adam Smith is “the hero of our book”, though his two books mean:

Such a meager output would make him a borderline case for tenure nowadays in many universities, and a sure-fire no in most departments of economics. “Good Lord”, the economists would say after a hurried look at his academic credentials, “he didn’t publish any articles in the American Economic Review reporting statistical tests or field experiments or mathematical proofs of existence”

Overall, the book is a quality entry in the field of “figure out why Britain, then the West and the World got rich”, worth checking out if you missed it because you were focused on other things when it was first published in 2020.