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Author McCloskey, Deirdre N.

Title Bourgeois dignity : why economics can't explain the modern world / Deirdre N. McCloskey.

Imprint Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe 3rd Floor Stacks  330.09 M132b 2010    ---  Available
Description xvi, 571 p. ; 24 cm.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. [493]-533) and index.
Contents The modern world was an economic tide, but did not have economic causes -- Liberal ideas caused the innovation -- And a new rhetoric protected the ideas -- Many other plausible stories don't work very well -- The correct story praises capitalism -- Modern growth was a factor of at least sixteen -- Increasing scope, not pot-of-pleasure happiness, is what mattered -- And the poor won -- Creative destruction can be justified therefore on utilitarian grounds -- British economists did not recognize the tide -- But the figures tell -- Britain's (and Europe's) lead was an episode -- And followers could leap over stages -- The tide didn't happen because of thrift -- Capital fundamentalism is wrong -- A rise of greed or of a Protestant ethic didn't happen -- Endless accumulation does not typify the modern world -- Nor was the cause original accumulation or a sin of expropriation -- Nor was it accumulation of human capital until lately -- Transport or other domestic reshufflings didn't cause it -- Nor geography, nor natural resources -- Not even coal -- Foreign trade was not the cause, though world prices were a context -- And the logic of trade-as-an-engine is dubious -- And even the dynamic effects of trade were small -- The effects on Europe of the slave trade and British imperialism were smaller still -- And other exploitations, external or internal, were equally profitless to ordinary Europeans -- It was not the sheer quickening of commerce -- Nor the struggle over the spoils -- Eugenic materialism doesn't work -- Neo-Darwinism doesn't compute -- And inheritance fades -- Institutions cannot be viewed merely as incentive-providing constraints -- And so the better institutions, such as those alleged for 1689, don't explain -- And anyway the entire absence of property is not relevant to the place or period -- And the chronology of property and incentives has been mismeasured -- And so the routine of Max U doesn't work -- The cause was not science -- But bourgeois dignity and liberty entwined with the Englightenment -- It was not allocation -- It was words -- Dignity and liberty for ordinary people, in short, were the greatest externalities -- And the model can be formalized -- Opposing the bourgeois hurts the poor -- And the bourgeois era warrants therefore not political or environmental pessimism -- But an amiable, if guarded optimism.
Summary Bourgeois Dignity retells the story of modern economic growth, recasting what we thought we knew from 1776 to the present. McCloskey tests the traditional stories against what actually happeneduand the usual stories don't work very well. Not Marx and his classes. Not Max Weber and his Protestants. Not Fernand Braudel and his Mafia-style capitalists. Not Douglass North and his institutions. Not the mathematical theories of endogenous growth. Not the left wing's theory of working-class struggle, nor the right wing's theory of spiritual decline. What works is "rhetoric." What people said about markets and innovation changed in Holland and then England and then the world. --Book Jacket.
Subject Economic history.
Economics -- Philosophy.
Europe -- Economic conditions.
Middle class.
ISBN 9780226556659 (cloth : alk. paper)
0226556654 (cloth : alk. paper)

 
    
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