The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession.
It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of
economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the
bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an
explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends
less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole
lot more on ideas and what people believe.
Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in "Bourgeois Dignity," a fiercely
contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in
the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial
revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our
modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations,
but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this
time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie
itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in
the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of
nations, then, didn't grow so dramatically because of economic
factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise
finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent
dignity.
An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book "The
Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity" is a feast of intellectual
riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians--a
work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of
persuasion shapes our economic lives.
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