Virginia Postrel gives us a mini-book review of McCloskey’s thesis, that capital alone is incapable of explaining how the world raised itself from living on $3 a day to $30 a day to $137 a day in Norway. The previously uncredited crucial factor, McCloskey argues, has been a revolutionary mass pride in individual innovation and achievement, a mass pride in the “dignity” of deliberately becoming “bourgeois”.
The article defies easy snip-block quoting, so if you are interested, read the whole thing.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
McCloskey makes a good argument. From Eli Whitney to Steven Jobs, cheap innovation has created huge wealth for many people. By “huge wealth”, I mean middle class Americans enjoy a lifestyle and standard of living probably no one could imagine in Whitney’s day.
Plus, one thing not mentioned in Postrel’s analysis of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” gaff is that government can’t do anything if there aren’t enough people with enough wealth to pay enough taxes to support government. It originates with the people, flows to government and, sometimes, back again.