Historical Literacy: Analysis of Bourgeois Equality - How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey
Analysis of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World
by Deirdre McCloskey
Abstract
Individuals are both ethically and practically working to establish a standard for what constitutes a dignified existence within society. The key goal is the ethical and apparent improvement of conditions, such as reducing poverty or decreasing inequality in access to basic necessities. For example, Rosie the Riveter was able to benefit from improved tools and higher wages due to increased competition among employers for her enhanced productivity, allowing her to provide better for her children. During the Industrial Revolution, workers did not experience wage reductions or starvation. instead, they migrated to industrialized cities because of the opportunities available. The author of Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, Deirdre McCloskey, implies the environmental challenges we face today may be addressed by the same ingenuity that drove the Great Enrichment. She asserts that it was the creation of abundance that generated power, rather than the other way around.
Literary Review
In Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, Deirdre McCloskey ponders what a person gains if they obtain everything but lose their own essence in the process. The book examines how the virtues of hope, faith, and love for pursuits like science, sports, medicine, or spirituality are possible due to the wealth in our current lives, by contrasting them with practical virtues like prudence and temperance pertinent to those in living in extreme poverty. The economist/historian suggests, “The betterment stands in human history as that Great Enrichment, the most important secular event since we first domesticated squash, chickens, wheat, and horses. The Enrichment has been and will continue to be more important historically than the rise and fall of empires or class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Such perennial fascinations of historians, entranced by the realpolitik that accompanies empires rising and classes struggling, had little to do with our enrichment.” (Page 74) McCloskey contends that in contemporary society, even less meaningful uses of higher income, such as snacking on the sofa while or watching TV, are an improvement from ancient times when people suffered from extreme poverty. She also adds the idea that the spiritual changes are just as significant as the material changes that have taken place, and that increased wealth leads to further enrichment without loss of one's essence. (Page 138 paraphrased) In McCloskey’s opinion. “The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since the invention of agriculture. It has restarted history.” (Page 58)
Part of Deidre’s philosophy is that many people feel that pessimism is sophistication. She highlights the old pessimism from medieval times as one of the catalysts of the Great Enrichment. The texts states, “The seven old pessimisms, still dusted off for blog posts and newspaper editorials from both left and right, and built into most alert minds as obvious truths, immune to factual amendment, and justifying if challenged a hot indignation unaccompanied by scientific evidence, have proven mistaken.” (Page 843) Here, McCloskey contests the pessimistic perspective by insisting “we have achieved over the past two centuries for ordinary people worldwide, materially speaking, unevenly, for the first time, a pretty good purgatory.” (Page 54) Her philosophy also credits free market enterprise for improvements like bringing down the prices on items and making them affordable for most, like appliances and mental health medicines. In this ideal, different act of the Great Enrichment, enrich separate social classes in three separate phases beginning with the Bourgeois and subsequently benefiting people in social classes lower on the hierarchy. She advises, “Two centuries ago, fully four out of five U.S. adults worked to grow food for their families and for the remaining nonagricultural fifth. Now a single American farmer feeds three hundred people. Since 1800 worldwide the life expectancy at birth has doubled.” (Page 57) From an economists perspective, McCloskey proposes that Scottish equality overtook the norms of French equality and that the ideology supporting the Bourgeois Deal displaced that of the Aristocratic Deal, describing the tenets of the agreement as one where “You honor me, an aristocrat by natural inequality, and give me the liberty to extract rents from you in the first act, and in the second and in all subsequent acts. I forbid you under penalty of death to seek competitive ‘protection.’”(Page 75)
The book illustrates an Idea of two freedoms and two liberties, one with equality of social standing and dignity, and another with democratic equality instead of hierarchy. The latter as a shift from feudal practices to the possibility of climbing a social or economic “ladder.” The historian’s description of the former idea of freedoms and liberties states, “The abundance, according to the logic of lordship, went to priests and knights and other people able to make good with sword and horse their claim to ownership of the land. It did not go to most of our ancestors, the poor. The philosopher Gerald Gaus notes the consequence, namely, ‘the extraordinarily rapid displacement over most of the world of small-scale egalitarian culture with agricultural-based states and empires that were hierarchically organized’.” (Page 71) She does not believe that proletariats are particularly exploited during the Industrial Revolution, despite the harsh living and working conditions and poverty wages. Instead, McCloskey stresses, “Nor does the capitalist machinery automatically exploit and alienate the proletariat. It did not in the United States, which was and is in its working class notoriously antisocialist, and whose comparative wealth even in its poor argues against a theory of economic exploitation.” (Page184)Obviously, this concept is not relevant to those involuntarily exploited for labor or land resources and/or their subsequent societal and economic struggles.
Deirdre McCloskey supports her argument with radical and new ideals prevailing in the 17th century. She speaks of biological atrocities and accidents in European political history as precursors to the adoption of the Bourgeois Deal, offering the argument that murder rates in medieval English villages were higher than those in the most violent police districts in today’s United States. And that in contemporary society, murder rates have decreased. Additionally, there is a reference to alcohol addiction, which has also declined. During medieval times, peasants, bourgeois, and members of the gentry and aristocracy frequently consumed alcohol and American men in the early Republic often carried their firearms while under the influence of alcohol. It was so prevalent that in early modern European cities, a huge portion of the grain crops were used for beer making. Another causation included in the text is the Black Death of 1348–1350 and its subsequent reappearances, which reduced the population in many areas of Europe by one-third to one-half. Because of this, the tangible wages of farm laborers doubled. However, by 1600, as the population recovered, these wages in Europe returned to half of their previous numbers. “In the Great Hunger, though, the crop failure was 90 percent, and the people starved too. In the late 1840s one million out of Ireland’s eight million souls died of starvation and disease. Another million—especially those with the money to do so, or relatives established abroad—escaped to Boston or Liverpool, to Canada or Chile. Irish population has never recovered its level in 1845, unless you include the tens of millions of Irish descendants in land-rich places abroad, such as my father’s family.” (Page 68) There were occurrences such as these all over Europe and in other regions during this period. But there were other factors at play in European countries McCloskey insists influenced the ascension of the Bourgeois Deal. “The other mechanism keeping the poor in poverty was class violence, such as Rousseau adumbrated in his seminal attack in 1754 on private property. Half a century later, Malthus, though a friend of private property, viewed property as characteristic of the uneven distribution of income in a “civilized,” that is, an arable-crop, society. Although bands of hunters-gatherers and independent-minded herder/highlanders might escape lordship, arable farmers in their dense and fixed populations in the lowlands could not. If you followed the plow you followed the local lord, perforce.” (Page 71)
McCloskey does not illustrate the Bourgeois Deal as a doctrine of salvation but rather change in church governance with a unique perspective on economics, society, and power like the Quakers who employ no hierarchy and no minister during worship. She proposes that a prosperous country imperatively must exist and operate as a free country, adding that imperialism and colonialism were not the foundation of the British economic growth, but rather tolerance through liberties and freedoms for all in a society. McCloskey says, “Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine. The real engine was the expanding ideology of liberty and dignity that inspired the proliferating schemes of betterment by and for the common people. Liberty and dignity for ordinary projectors yielded the Bourgeois Deal: ‘You accord to me, a bourgeois projector, the liberty and dignity to try out my schemes involuntary trade, and let me keep the profits, if I get any, in the first act—though I accept, reluctantly, that others will compete with me in the second act’.” (Page 74) Deirdre McCloskey’s take on the onset of the Great Enrichment is that ideas make the modern world and that what she terms “Humanomics”, which are economics that emit the force of language and culture. She contends, “The Great Enrichment after 1800 came from human creativity unleashed by liberty and dignity for ordinary people, through trade-tested betterment resting on a new equality in the eyes of others and spread by the overturning of monopoly in competition.“(Page 98)
Deirdre’s point of view is that Intellectuals are expensive to build and to sustain, though dependent on the enterprise system they are opposed to, which supports them. But she also maintains that if ideas matter, then intellectuals matter too. She pulls ideas from philosophers such as Fernand Braudel and John Locke while highlighting principles like that of the Aristotelian principle of motion.(Page 176) Intellectuals were initially considered a part of the bourgeoisie but became more liberal in later centuries as education became more accessible to those of different social classes. “The percentage of people with advanced degrees has shot up since the 1960s and is hugely higher now than it ever has been.” (Page 83) From a historical perspective, McCloskey identifies two strains of enlightenment which individually focus on making things new and fostering liberty, asserting that commercial improvements would not happen without liberty for ordinary people. “The enrichment came mainly from bourgeois liberty and creativity unbridled, not from piling up constraints on voluntary deals or from redistributing what income we get from the deals.” (Page 89)
According to McCloskey, the Great Enrichment fostered by the Bourgeois Deal highlights all aspects of capitalism and society, including creative and entrepreneurial acts. She suggests that contemporary society has seen an increase in individuals who pursue higher aspirations. The advent of mass-produced food and education has enhanced, rather than diminished, modern life. Individuals whose ancestors were “ditchdiggers and lumberjacks” are now “CEOs and senators.” The decline in illiteracy means that the number of literate individuals has increased since 1850, indicating a rise of about 3,900 percent. While educational advancement leading to social mobility did occur occasionally before 1800, it became significantly more prevalent after 1800. Individuals operate within their given circumstances in areas such as language, religion, and technology. McCloskey feels that treating ordinary people as free and honorable has led to considerable economic increase throughout modern history. The contemporary concept of "rules of the game," fails to consider that these rules are continually being debated and redefined.
McCloskey suspects that in order to understand Bourgeois Equality and how it influenced the Great Enrichment, it is important to consider both its strengths and weaknesses, as well as the ethical theories that shape societal discussions about it. She thinks when viewed with insight, this frustration with the modern world can be seen as a form of present mindedness accompanied by longing for earlier times. The Great Enrichment also refers to a considerable economic shift where individuals emerged above a life of poverty through their own efforts, made more effective by the adoption of innovative practices. This transition was enabled by allowing the bourgeoisie to continue modernizing for the long-term benefit of society, known conceptually as the Bourgeois Deal which facilitated the Great Enrichment, where according to the author/historian, the idea of upliftment of all was envisioned and manifested.
Sources
Secondary Sources
McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Digital Secondary Sources
McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World: Deirdre McCloskey. YouTube. Jul 17, 2014. https://youtu.be/x-rf66RRtx4?si=mNtQEHC2M-ynbGGL.
McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Changed the World with Deirdre McCloskey (Lecture). YouTube. Sep 24, 2015. https://youtu.be/Fq6XqbEN2aE?si=kP1TdpmjsaT8NR5b.
McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. Ethics for an Age of Commerce – Deirdre McCloskey. YouTube. May 9, 2016. https://youtu.be/Q4S_9PadODs?si=t7PwqPZ6v5Mm9Tpp.
McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. How Freedom Made Us Rich. YouTube. Aug 9, 2017. https://youtu.be/Wu9HbHY8jMM?si=r64zxitqxEJcV2SF.
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