The Bourgeoise and Economic Growth

I was more than slightly disappointed with Deirdre McCloskey's last book The Bourgeois Virtues but the latest draft of her upcoming work Bourgeois Deeds  looks extremely interesting and stimulating. My disappointment with the first book resulted from the fact that I wanted a work of economic history challenging, revising, and reinvigorating the ideas of Smith, Marx, Weber, Sombart, Pirenne, Schumpeter and Braudel concerning the relationship between ideas, culture, cities, and economic development, and whatever The Bourgeois Virtues was, it wasn't that.  McCloskey, one of the most ingenious economic historians around, however does seems to be addressing the big questions in her latest work.

I'm currently digesting the first few chapters where after laying out her own thesis, McCloskey ably critiques the existing dominant explanations for the quickening of economic growth in the period around 1800 which prolonged over two centuries has had the effect of raising the standard of living in the West by around a factor of 15.  For example, thrift cannot explain the sustained uptake in growth, nor can empire and exploitation:

'After all, conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder—briefly, violence—has characterized the sad annals of humankind since Cain and Abel.  Why didn't earlier and even more thorough expropriations result in an Industrial Revolution and a factor of fifteen or twenty or whatever in the welfare of the average Briton or American or Taiwanese?  Something besides thrifty self-discipline or violent expropriation must have been at work in northwestern Europe and its offshoots in the eighteenth century and later. Thrifty self-discipline and violent expropriation have been too common in human history to explain a revolution gathering force in Europe around 1800.'

Modern growth theorists don't get off any more lightly. They simply insert:

'economies of scale into the story just when it is needed to follow the rumblings of productivity in the eighteenth century and the innovation gone mad of the late nineteenth.'

McCloskey argues rightly I believe that the secrets of growth are not to be found in either Paul Samuelson or in Karl Marx but in a blend of Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter.  She argues that what changed in England between 1600 and 1800 was the rhetoric of virtue and esteem. Commerce and markets had always existed. But in ancient Greece or ancient Rome or in medieval Europe or China throughout its history, commerce, making money through voluntary trade had always appeared disreputable. Thus it was the advent of a bourgeoise culture and society that led to modern economic growth. I plan to blog more about the contents of the book as I read it.