Deirdre Nansen McCloskey - Leave Me Alone and Ill Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73966-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73983-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226739830.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCloskey, Deirdre N., author. | Carden, Art, author.

Title: Leave me alone and Ill make you rich : how the bourgeois deal enriched the world / Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden.

Other titles: How the bourgeois deal enriched the world

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022827 | ISBN 9780226739663 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226739830 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Economic history17501918. | Economic history1918 | Economic historyMoral and ethical aspects. | Free enterpriseSocial aspects. | LibertyEconomic aspects. | LiberalismEconomic aspects. | LibertarianismEconomic aspects. | Capitalism. | Progress. | EconomicsPhilosophy.

Classification: LCC HC51 .M396 2020 | DDC 330.12/209dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022827

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

What is crucial is our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends questions and objections.

Amlie Oksenberg Rorty

To the socialists of all parties

F. A. Hayek

I give you the toast... of economics and economists, who are the trustees not of civilization, but of the possibility of civilization.

John Maynard Keynes

The theme of our book is simple and true. But controversial.

It is that human libertyand not the machinery of coercion or investment, or even science by itselfis what made for a Great Enrichment, from 1800 to the present. The Enrichment was really, really great: three thousand percent per person. Liberated people devising new technologies and institutions did an amazing job from 1800 to the present and will keep doing it. Liberty will make the Enrichment worldwide. And the Enrichment will not corrupt the human soul. The news, in short, is very, very good.

The Enrichment wasnt achieved by governmental coercion, which is usually counterproductiveexcept maybe in plagues and invasions. Nor was it achieved by science unassisted, or the exploitation of slaves, or the routine accumulation of capital, or a profound dialectic of history, or a deep specialness of Europeans. It was achieved by liberty alone, a necessary and pretty much sufficient cause, which came tentatively to northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century. Give people liberty, and by uncoerced cooperation through commerce they become adults, enriched in body and soul.

You are doubtful and pessimistic. You worry quite understandably about populism or the environment or the decay of standards. We offer, though, an optimistic prediction and give ample evidence for it. The world will prosper mightily, if people play their cards right to favor liberty and its theory, liberalismliberalism in the classic sense, born two centuries ago.

We make a little joke in the title of the book and throughout, in referring to the Bourgeois Deal. The word bourgeois (boor-ZWAH) means of the urban middle class, businesslike. Imagine our master proposition, articulated by either a bourgeois man in a London coffeehouse in 1820 or a bourgeois woman (Deirdre Nansen McCloskey) addressing a chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners in 2020:

Leave me, a bourgeois businessperson, pretty much alone, subject to sober ethics learned at my mothers knee, and a few good and restrained laws, with an effective social safety net. In a word, give me and my fellow citizens liberty. Do not envy the rewards I get for selling innovations. They are tested by your willingness to buy them. If you dont like them, and I fail, I wont ask the government to coerce you into buying. The happy result will be that the innovations will make everyone enormously better off, by 3,000 percent, especially the formerly pooryour ancestors and mine.

Youve heard a lot of dismal chatter since the Great Recession of 2008. As it, the most recent of the successively trademarked Final Crises of Capitalism, recedes into memory, we do well to remind ourselves that median weekly real earning of wage and salary workers is setting all-time highs every time the data are reported and is, the COVID-19 dip aside, about 10 percent above where it was at the depths of the Great Recessionand is well above its recent nadir in the second quarter of 2014.

You might recoil at the notion that we live in a blessed age. After all, hundreds of millions of people around the world remain in dire poverty. The United States government is separating immigrant children from their parents, holding them in cages, on the economically silly and morally obnoxious notion that by doing so they are somehow making America great again. We arent saying there arent serious problems. We are saying that things have gotten better, are getting better, and will continue to get better for the vast majority of humanity, and in a few generations for everyone on the planetas long as we keep our ethical wits about us and opt for true liberalism.

Think it possible that the nonstop torrent of bad news filling your newspapers and e-readers and social media time lines is not giving you the complete story. Be wary, for example, of headlines about the exploits of Florida Man, a popular meme spawned by a loose public records law in the Sunshine State. It makes it exceptionally easy to write stories with headlines like Florida Man Arrested for Burglarizing Cars in Jail Parking Lot Moments after Being Released and Florida Man Charged with Impersonating Officer for McDonalds Discount. There are roughly 10.5 million actual Florida men. If only 0.01 percent of them are idiotic criminals, its still enough for about three outrageous Florida Man stories every day for a year. We admit that even in an innovation-embracing, bourgeois-dealing society, an occasional evil nitwit will show up and an occasional paragon of virtue will slip through the cracks into a life of destitution or just plain bad luck. We are claiming, on the basis of overwhelming evidence, that the bourgeois deal has made the cracks a lot smaller. Long may it reign.

So we beseech you, dear reader: dont let the much larger positive story get lost amid the vivid and rare counterexamples, or even the miseries of mishandled plagues. On a long view, even since 2008, and since 1960 or 1900 or 1800, the economic world has leapt far, far beyond the zero-sum game of olden days. You need to stop thinking zero-sum. A liberal world is stunningly positive sum. The hands-off ideology of liberalism has allowed an invisible hand to push forward any society that permits it to worknot toward