Bourgeois Dignity

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 onideasand what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey inBourgeois 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, didnrs"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 bookThe Bourgeois Virtues,Bourgeois Dignityis 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.

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xi
The Modern World Was an Economic Tide, But Did Not Have Economic Causes	p. 1
Liberal Ideas Caused the Innovation	p. 10
And a New Rhetoric Protected the Ideas	p. 20
Many Other Plausible Stories Don't Work Very Well	p. 31
The Correct Story Praises ôCapitalismö	p. 40
Modern Growth Was a Factor of at Least Sixteen	p. 48
Increasing Scope, Not Pot-of-Pleasure ôHappiness,ö Is What Mattered	p. 60
And the Poor Won	p. 70
Creative Destruction Can Be Justified Therefore on Utilitarian Grounds	p. 78
British Economists Did Not Recognize the Tide	p. 86
But the Figures Tell	p. 93
Britain's (and Europe's) Lead Was an Episode	p. 101
And Followers Could Leap over Stages	p. 113
The Tide Didn't Happen because of Thrift	p. 125
Capital Fundamentalism Is Wrong	p. 133
A Rise of Greed or of a Protestant Ethic Didn't Happen	p. 140
ôEndlessö Accumulation Does Not Typify the Modern World	p. 146
Nor Was the Cause Original Accumulation or a Sin of Expropriation	p. 153
Nor Was It Accumulation of Human Capital, Until Lately	p. 161
Transport or Other Domestic Reshufflings Didn't Cause It	p. 168
Nor Geography, nor Natural Resources	p. 178
Not Even Coal	p. 186
Foreign Trade Was Not the Cause, Though World Prices Were a Context	p. 197
And the Logic of Trade-as-an-Engine Is Dubious	p. 207
And Even the Dynamic Effects of Trade Were Small	p. 217
The Effects on Europe of the Slave Trade and British Imperialism Were Smaller Still	p. 229
And Other Exploitations, External or Internal, Were Equally Profitless to Ordinary Europeans	p. 239
It Was Not the Sheer Quickening of Commerce	p. 249
Nor the Struggle over the Spoils	p. 256
Eugenic Materialism Doesn't Work	p. 266
Neo-Darwinism Doesn't Compute	p. 277
And Inheritance Fades	p. 286
Institutions Cannot Be Viewed Merely as Incentive-Providing Constraints	p. 296
And So the Better Institutions, Such as Those Alleged for 1689, Don't Explain	p. 310
And Anyway the Entire Absence of Property Is Not Relevant to the Place or Period	p. 325
And the Chronology of Property and Incentives Has Been Mismeasured	p. 336
And So the Routine of Max U Doesn't Work	p. 346
The Cause Was Not Science	p. 355
But Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty Entwined with the Enlightenment	p. 366
It Was Not Allocation	p. 377
It Was Words	p. 385
Dignity and Liberty for Ordinary People, in Short, Were the Greatest Externalities	p. 393
And the Model Can Be Formalized	p. 406
Opposing the Bourgeoisie Hurts the Poor	p. 420
And the Bourgeois Era Warrants Therefore Not Political or Environmental Pessimism	p. 430
But an Amiable, if Guarded, Optimism	p. 439
Notes	p. 451
Works Cited	p. 493
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

FREE SHIPPING

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials