IL MERCATO NON C’ENTRA

IL MERCATO NON C’ENTRA

E non chiamiamola “economia di mercato”, quella c’è fin dai tempi del medioevo.

Il mondo in cui viviamo da due secoli a questa parte è quello dell’ “economia dell’ innovazione”. Si crea distruggendo.

In principio era il Logos

Chi spiega la rivoluzione industriale di XVIII secolo in Europa spiega molto dell’uomo perché insieme con l’avvento dell’ homo sapiens e dell’agricoltura si tratta forse del fenomeno più importante nella nostra storia materiale.

Deridre McCloskey ci prova con una ponderosa opera in tre volumi: “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World”, la tesi è semplice: si è trattato di una rivoluzione linguistica.

Ma leggiamo le sue parole esatte quando descrive il fattore decisivo di cambiamento…

… A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution…

La dignità accordata al borghese, alla classe media, alla sua azione innovativa, ha fatto la differenza.

La “dignità” si conferisce grazie alla retorica, al linguaggio…

… The cause, in other words, was language, that most human of our accomplishments…

Le cause finora proposte non sembrano tenere…

… 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…

D’altronde la storia si è incaricata di confutare i pessimisti che tentarono di infangare l’opera del borghese…

… 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…

Una rassegna sulle false credenze intorno all’origine della modernità…

… 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…

Le vittime della tesi proposta hanno nomi e cognomi illustri…

… 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…

Il capitalismo – ovvero il sistema dell’innovazione – ha vinto quando l’innovatore è stato visto come un figo…

… 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.”…

E oggi? Oggi in buona parte di quella storia continua. Chiediamoci per un attimo in quale periodo storico stiamo vivendo…

… The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007– 2009… 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…

No. Non il periodo della grande recessione ma in quello della grande uscita dalla povertà di una fetta imponente dell’umanità.

Per Joel Mokyr le idee sono centrali…

… “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.” 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…

Più importanti dei fattori materiali…

… 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…

Quando le virtù borghesi non prosperano, il capitalismo non decolla, anche in presenza di condizioni materiali favorevoli…

… 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…

Il caso delle Bahamas: l’imprenditore è visto come un bandito, e lui si comporta come un bandito…

… 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….

L’egoismo non è la chiave per la prosperità: l’uomo è sempre stato egoista…

… 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…

E l’innovazione ha sempre avuto i suoi “odiatori”: da Thomas Carlyle a Naomi Klein…

… 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…

Gli assunti materialisti incoraggiano quest’odio poiché si coniugano bene con l’efficientismo e lo sfruttamento…

… We will need to abandon the materialist premise that reshuffling and efficiency, or an exploitation of the poor, made the modern world…

Falsa la teoria dell’accumulamento di capitale, falsa la teoria dello sfruttamento del Terzo Mondo, falsa la teoria del commercio estero: molte volte si sono accumulati capitali ingenti, molte volte si è sfruttato il prossimo più debole, molte volte si è commerciato su larga scala… ma la Rivoluzione Industriale non c’è mai stata.

L’uomo è diventato ricco inventando delle cose nuove e ha inventato molto quando l’inventore è stato glorificato e ammirato. Invenzioni:

… 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…

Anche la libertà non è da sopravvalutare. Il caso degli ebrei è un caso di libertà senza dignità, sappiamo come andò a finire…

… 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…

Non è nemmeno un mutamento nella natura dell’uomo: non sono i suoi occhi a cambiare ma gli occhi di chi lo guarda…

… 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…

Eppure, c’è chi insiste molto sui mercati, sulla divisione del lavoro, e vede in questi fattori la fonte delle innovazioni… Sbagliato: sono cose che c’erano anche prima…

… 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… trade, which was routine in the Ottoman Empire, or coal, which was routine in China…

Difficile che chi scrive libri non creda almeno in parte al potere delle idee…

… 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…

Obiezione: le idee seguono l’innovazione anziché precederla.

Un esempio del contrario: la Costituzione americana…

… 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…

Altro esempio del contrario: l’abolizione della schiavitù…

… 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… 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!”…

Le idee contano anche in negativo: dalla guerra delle idee alla guerra materiale…

… 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…. Various nationalisms had spread across Europe in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, but then were matured in poetry and songs…

Serve una nuova economia che dia più peso alle idee dell’uomo, alla retorica, al linguaggio e meno agli incentivi materiali…

… humanomists believe that humans are motivated by more than incentives…

L’uomo non massimizza il profitto ma segue una passione.

La razionalità dell’uomo c’è sempre stata ma non ha mai fatto la differenza…

… 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…

La rivoluzione capitalistica: perché in quel momento e in quel luogo?…

… 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)…

Perché sorsero nuove idee intorno all’uomo e si diffusero, non esiste una causa materiale, l’uomo è un essere libero: noi storici ed economisti possiamo solo limitarci a descrivere la situazione e a confutare le ipotesi alternative.

Il disappunto materialista è chiaro…

… Greg wants Mokyr and me to have a Deep Explanation for the liberal revolutions. He favors very long-run evolution, even genetics…

Tuttavia, bisogna rassegnarsi: è stato un accidente, un felice accidente.

Qualcuno obbietta: la Cina di oggi sembra priva delle autentiche virtù borghesi, eppure va alla grande come nazione capitalistica. Ma, si noti, anche nell’ Inghilterra dei primordi l’onestà non era moneta corrente…

… 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…

La letteratura rende bene il fenomeno…

… 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…

Fu dopo che le cose cambiarono…

… 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.”…

E poi si mantenga la prospettiva corretta: la Cina di oggi si è disincagliata ma la prosperità come la intendiamo noi è ancora lontana…

… 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.”…

Inoltre, la Cina copia chi è più avanti di lei. Percorre un sentiero già battuto, in questo senso ha meno bisogno di innovare, la frontiera tecnologica è per lei di là da venire. Facciamo una predizione…

… 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”…

L’innovazione è cominciata quando gli innovatori, sentendosi ammirati, si appassionavano e discutevano tra loro i loro progetti, la presenza dei caffè è stata più importante della presenza di interessi egoistici…

… 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.”…

Caffè, giornali… e infine Parlamenti: il commercio delle idee espresse con passione conta più di quello delle merci.

L’economista dovrebbe traslare i suoi interessi per passare dal problema allocativo a quello creativo…

… project is to shift attention away from the allocative answers that economists love…towards the creative questions… 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…

HL Bourgeois Dignity A Revolution in Rhetoric Deirdre McCloskey

Notebook per

Bourgeois Dignity A Revolution in Rhetoric

Deirdre McCloskey

Citation (APA): McCloskey, D. (2017). Bourgeois Dignity A Revolution in Rhetoric [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

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Parte introduttiva

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 1

Bourgeois Dignity: A Revolution in Rhetoric By Deirdre McCloskey

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5

A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution,

Nota - Posizione 6

x TESI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8

middle class,

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8

“bourgeoisie”

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8

dignified

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 9

The cause, in other words, was language, that most human of our accomplishments.

Nota - Posizione 10

x LINGUAGGIO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 10

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.

Nota - Posizione 11

x FALSE CAUSE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15

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.

Nota - Posizione 16

x PESSIMISMI CONFUTATI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22

origins of the modern economy

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22

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

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30

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.

Nota - Posizione 33

x LE VITTIME

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 34

John Mueller

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35

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]

Nota - Posizione 36

x CAPITALISMO È FIGO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 39

The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007– 2009,

Nota - Posizione 39

x IL NS TERMPO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 47

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.

Nota - Posizione 48

c LA VERA STORIA DI OGGI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 50

Joel Mokyr

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 50

“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

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 53

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

Nota - Posizione 55

x IDEA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 65

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.

Nota - Posizione 66

x BORGHESE ODIATO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66

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]

Nota - Posizione 68

x BAHAMSS

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 70

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

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 74

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.

Nota - Posizione 75

x DA CALYLE A KLEIN

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 83

We will need to abandon the materialist premise that reshuffling and efficiency, or an exploitation of the poor, made the modern world.

Nota - Posizione 84

x MATERIALISMO EFFICIENTISTA E SFRUTTATORE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 85

Humanomics: Values and Innovation

Nota - Posizione 85

t

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 92

We agree at least that innovation is the key.

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96

capital accumulation,

Nota - Posizione 96

x FALSO 1

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96

exploitation of the third world,

Nota - Posizione 96

x FALSO 2

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96

expansion of foreign trade.

Nota - Posizione 96

x FALSO 3

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96

world got rich by inventing

Nota - Posizione 97

x VERO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 97

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.

Nota - Posizione 98

x INVENZIONI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 101

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.

Nota - Posizione 102

x EBREI: LIBERTÀ SENZA DIGNITÀ

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 107

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.

Nota - Posizione 108

x NON CAMBIA LA NATURA DELL UOMO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 108

Rising trade causes a greater division of labor which causes innovation. Simple.

Nota - Posizione 109

x OB MATT

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 109

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

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 112

trade, which was routine in the Ottoman Empire, or coal, which was routine in China.

Nota - Posizione 113

c

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 138

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.

Nota - Posizione 139

x VENDERE LIBRI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 140

“thinkers follow rather than precede in the innovation story.”

Nota - Posizione 140

x OBIEZIONE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 142

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.”

Nota - Posizione 145

x ES CONTRAR. COST

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 145

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

Nota - Posizione 147

x SCHIAVITÙ

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 147

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!”

Nota - Posizione 149

c

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 149

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.

Nota - Posizione 151

x AES

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 152

Various nationalisms had spread across Europe in reaction to Napoleon’s conquests, but then were matured in poetry and songs

Nota - Posizione 153

x ES

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 157

humanomists believe that humans are motivated by more than incentives,

Nota - Posizione 157

x NUOVA ECON

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 158

We abhor Max U

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 161

I Too Was Once a Materialist

Nota - Posizione 161

t

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 174

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,

Nota - Posizione 175

x LA RAZIONALITÀ NN È NUOVA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 178

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).

Nota - Posizione 180

x PERCHÈ QUI ED ORAS

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 184

accidental liberals

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 188

Greg wants Mokyr and me to have a Deep Explanation for the liberal revolutions. He favors very long-run evolution, even genetics.

Nota - Posizione 189

x DISAPPUNTO MATERIALISTA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 192

It was an accident, a happy accident

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 194

Reply to Greg Clark on China’s Dishonesty

Nota - Posizione 194

t

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 199

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.

Nota - Posizione 201

x LA DISONESTÀ ERAS DIFFUSA ANCHE IN GB

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 201

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.

Nota - Posizione 202

x LETTERASTURA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 202

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.”

Nota - Posizione 204

x LA PAROLA ONESTÁ

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 204

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.”

Nota - Posizione 206

x LA CINA È LONTANA DALLO SVILUPP

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 207

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”

Nota - Posizione 208

c MENO INTERESSI PIÙ SVILUPPO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 209

The Same Anti-Economic Project of Creativity: Reply to Jonathan Feinstein

Nota - Posizione 209

t

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 229

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.”

Nota - Posizione 230

x DISCVUTERE DEI PROPRI INTERESSI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 237

coffee houses

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 237

newspapers

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 237

parliaments.

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 238

theory of economic language,

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 239

project is to shift attention away from the allocative answers that economists love,

Nota - Posizione 240

x DALL ALLOCAZ ALLA CREATIV

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 240

towards the creative questions

Nota - Posizione 241

c

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 242

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.

Nota - Posizione 243

c

HL How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich

• Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning. And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services. Today’s concerns over the stagnation of real wages in the U.S. and other developed economies are overblown if put in historical perspective. As the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry have argued in these pages, the official figures don’t take account of the real benefits of our astonishing material progress.
• What caused it? The usual explanations follow ideology. On the left, from Marx onward, the key is said to be exploitation. Capitalists after 1800 seized surplus value from their workers and invested it in dark, satanic mills. On the right, from the blessed Adam Smith onward, the trick was thought to be savings. The wild Highlanders could become as rich as the Dutch—“the highest degree of opulence,” as Smith put it in 1776—if they would merely save enough to accumulate capital (and stop stealing cattle from one another).
• A recent extension of Smith’s claim, put forward by the late economics Nobelist Douglass North (and now embraced as orthodoxy by the World Bank) is that the real elixir is institutions. On this view, if you give a nation’s lawyers fine robes and white wigs, you will get something like English common law. Legislation will follow, corruption will vanish, and the nation will be carried by the accumulation of capital to the highest degree of opulence.
• What enriched the modern world wasn’t capital stolen from workers or capital virtuously saved, nor was it institutions for routinely accumulating it. Capital and the rule of law were necessary, of course, but so was a labor force and liquid water and the arrow of time. The capital became productive because of ideas for betterment... The Rational Optimist” (2010), what happened over the past two centuries is that “ideas started having sex.”
• If capital accumulation or the rule of law had been sufficient, the Great Enrichment would have happened in Mesopotamia in 2000 B.C., or Rome in A.D. 100 or Baghdad in 800. Until 1500, and in many ways until 1700, China was the most technologically advanced country. Hundreds of years before the West, the Chinese invented locks on canals to float up and down hills, and the canals themselves were much longer than any in Europe. China’s free-trade area and its rule of law were vastly more extensive than in Europe’s quarrelsome fragments, divided by tariffs and tyrannies. Yet it was not in China but in northwestern Europe that the Industrial Revolution and then the more consequential Great Enrichment first happened.
• To use another big concept, what came—slowly, imperfectly—was equality. It was not an equality of outcome, which might be labeled “French” in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Piketty. It was, so to speak, “Scottish,” in honor of David Hume and Adam Smith: equality before the law and equality of social dignity