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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. |
