Notebook per
Bourgeois Dignity A Revolution in Rhetoric
Citation (APA): McCloskey, D. (2017). Bourgeois Dignity A Revolution in Rhetoric [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 1
Bourgeois Dignity: A Revolution in Rhetoric By Deirdre McCloskey
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A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution,
Nota - Posizione 6
x TESI
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middle class,
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“bourgeoisie”
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dignified
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The cause, in other words, was language, that most human of our accomplishments.
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x LINGUAGGIO
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The cause was not in the first instance an economic/ material change— not the rise of this or that class, or the flourishing of this or that trade, or the exploitation of this or that group.
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x FALSE CAUSE
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The outcome has falsified the old prediction from the left that markets and innovation would make the working class miserable, or from the right that the material gains from industrialization would be offset by moral corruption.
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x PESSIMISMI CONFUTATI
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origins of the modern economy
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People believe, for example, that imperialism explains European riches. Or they believe that markets and greed arrived recently. Or they believe that “capitalism” required a new class or a new self-consciousness about one’s class (as against a new rhetoric about what an old class did). Or they believe that economic events must be explained “ultimately,” and every single time, by material interests. Or they believe that it was trade unions and government protections that have elevated the working class. None of these is correct,
Nota - Posizione 26
x FALSE CREDENZE
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The book tests the traditional stories against the actually-happened, setting aside the stories that in light of the recent findings of scientific history don’t seem to work very well. A surprisingly large number of the stories don’t. Not Karl 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 and its capital accumulation. Not the left-wing’s theory of working-class struggle, or the right-wing’s theory of spiritual decline.
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x LE VITTIME
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John Mueller
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capitalism— or as I prefer to call it, “innovation”— is like Ralph’s Grocery in Garrison Keillor’s self-effacing little Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon: “pretty good.”[ 2]
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x CAPITALISMO È FIGO
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The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007– 2009,
Nota - Posizione 39
x IL NS TERMPO
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The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth.
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c LA VERA STORIA DI OGGI
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Joel Mokyr
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“economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.”[ 5] The Big Story of the past two hundred years is the innovation after 1700 or 1800 around the North Sea, and recently in once poor places like Taiwan or Ireland,
Nota - Posizione 51
x MOKYR
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And contrary to the usual declarations of the economists since Adam Smith or Karl Marx, the Biggest Economic Story was not caused by trade or investment or exploitation. It was caused by ideas. The idea of bourgeois dignity and liberty
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x IDEA
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When bourgeois virtues do not thrive, and especially when they are not admired by other classes and by their governments and by the bourgeoisie itself, the results are sad.
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x BORGHESE ODIATO
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Virgil Storr and Peter Boettke note about the Bahamas, “Virtually all models of success to be found in the Bahamas’ economic past have to be characterized as piratical,” with the result that entrepreneurs there “pursue ‘rents’ rather than [productive] profits.”[ 6]
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x BAHAMSS
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Bernard Mandeville and Ivan Boesky got it wrong. Prudence is not the only virtue of an innovative society. People (not to speak of grass and bacteria and rats) have always been prudent, and there have always been greedy people among them unwilling to balance prudence with other virtues.
Nota - Posizione 72
x L EGOISMO NN È L ORIGINE. L UOMO È SEMPRE STATO EGO
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Yet innovation, even in a proper system of the virtues, has continued to be scorned by many of our opinion makers now for a century and a half, from Thomas Carlyle to Naomi Klein.
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x DA CALYLE A KLEIN
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We will need to abandon the materialist premise that reshuffling and efficiency, or an exploitation of the poor, made the modern world.
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x MATERIALISMO EFFICIENTISTA E SFRUTTATORE
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Humanomics: Values and Innovation
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t
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We agree at least that innovation is the key.
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capital accumulation,
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x FALSO 1
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exploitation of the third world,
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x FALSO 2
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expansion of foreign trade.
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x FALSO 3
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world got rich by inventing
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x VERO
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cheap steel, electric lights, marine insurance, reinforced concrete, coffee shops, saw mills, newspapers, automatic looms, cheap paper, modern universities, the transistor, cheap porcelain, corporations, rolling mills, liberation for women, railways.
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x INVENZIONI
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The history of the European Jews 1800 to 1945 exhibits the unhappy results of according legal liberty without also the dignity that protects and encourages liberty to innovate.
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x EBREI: LIBERTÀ SENZA DIGNITÀ
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It’s not the “mind of the innovator” or his genes that changed but his (or in more cases than one might think, her) social standing and political liberty.
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x NON CAMBIA LA NATURA DELL UOMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 108
Rising trade causes a greater division of labor which causes innovation. Simple.
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x OB MATT
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Greg Clark, Jack Goldstone, Joel Mokyr, and I reply that, no, large trades were commonplace in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean for centuries before the stirring of Atlantic trade, yet resulted in no sustained industrial revolution.
Nota - Posizione 111
x RISP: ANCHE PRIMA
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trade, which was routine in the Ottoman Empire, or coal, which was routine in China.
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c
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I write books trying to change people’sminds. If we were consistent materialists we would put down our pens and start offering people large bribes to become liberals.
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x VENDERE LIBRI
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“thinkers follow rather than precede in the innovation story.”
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x OBIEZIONE
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The U.S. Constitution, for example, as the historian Bernard Bailyn argues, was a creative event in the realm of ideas— and its economic origins are easily exaggerated. “The Atlantic democratic revolutions of the later eighteenth century,” writes Jonathan Israel, “stemmed chiefly from a general shift in perceptions, ideas, and attitudes,” a “revolution of the mind.”
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x ES CONTRAR. COST
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The abolition of slavery, a policy once advocated merely by a handful of radical churchmen (and the Baron de Montesquieu), played in the 1820s and 1830s a role in British politics, and later of course a much bigger role in American politics. It had less to do with the North’s material interests than with cheap printing
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x SCHIAVITÙ
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As Lincoln famously said on being introduced to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”
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c
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Books can indeed make big wars; as another example, Erskine Childers’s spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (1903), was no minor influence on the Anglo-German naval rivalry.
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x AES
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Various nationalisms had spread across Europe in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, but then were matured in poetry and songs
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x ES
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humanomists believe that humans are motivated by more than incentives,
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x NUOVA ECON
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We abhor Max U
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I Too Was Once a Materialist
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t
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Greg and I and Mokyr and Goldstone want economic historians, and especially economists, to stop claiming that rationality is new, or that activating it explains the modern world,
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x LA RAZIONALITÀ NN È NUOVA
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Greg claims that Mokyr and I have “no account for why the Industrial Revolution waited so long.” Oh, yes we do. We say that social ideas changed in a thoroughly liberal direction for the first and only time in history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first in Holland, then in England and Pennsylvania, and then Massachusetts, Scotland, and the world. They changed for reasons that were sometimes material (London was unusually big and strong when the bumbling Stuarts came to the throne) and sometimes non-material (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith lived and wrote as they did) and sometimes both (Protestant presses vied with Catholic ones for new readers).
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x PERCHÈ QUI ED ORAS
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accidental liberals
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Greg wants Mokyr and me to have a Deep Explanation for the liberal revolutions. He favors very long-run evolution, even genetics.
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x DISAPPUNTO MATERIALISTA
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It was an accident, a happy accident
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Reply to Greg Clark on China’s Dishonesty
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t
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Greg Clark says that cheating in China means that the “bourgeois virtues” I touted in the book of the same name (2006) aren’t the ticket. But cheating was rampant in England in the early seventeenth century, as it is in most poor countries.
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x LA DISONESTÀ ERAS DIFFUSA ANCHE IN GB
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Look at the Bard’s obsession with dishonesty, in honest, honest Iago, say, or Falstaff’s robbery and exaggerations, or Shylock’s contract and Portia’s quibble.
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x LETTERASTURA
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Late in the seventeenth century Quakers and other worthies drove dishonesty underground, and gave us the modern world. The very word “honesty” changed in meaning, from “aristocratically glorious” to “sober and truth-telling.”
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x LA PAROLA ONESTÁ
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To say that China is a counterexample because it “seems set soon to take its place among the developed countries” is strange. At a daily production of $ 13 a head (the United States now is at $ 130 a head), it’s going to be a long, long time before China looks “developed.”
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x LA CINA È LONTANA DALLO SVILUPP
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My prediction? Like Japan and Korea and the United States and England, a future China will get very rich when it gives up its rampant culture of “old fashioned greed”
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c MENO INTERESSI PIÙ SVILUPPO
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The Same Anti-Economic Project of Creativity: Reply to Jonathan Feinstein
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t
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economists don’t acknowledge how productive it is to “discuss your creative interests with those around you” and to work so that “society encourages everyone to engage in their own personal process of creative development.”
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x DISCVUTERE DEI PROPRI INTERESSI
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coffee houses
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newspapers
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parliaments.
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theory of economic language,
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project is to shift attention away from the allocative answers that economists love,
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x DALL ALLOCAZ ALLA CREATIV
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towards the creative questions
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c
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I call it the Bourgeois Revaluation arising from a new Bourgeois Dignity and liberty, expressed as a change in the Bourgeois Virtues, and resulting in the Great Fact of wider scope for creativity in the Bourgeois Era.
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c
