Liberty and dignity explain the modern world by Deirdre and
McCloskey PhD from Harvard University a change in how
people honored markets and Innovation caused the Industrial
Revolution. And the modern world, the old
conventional, wisdom by contrast has no place for Attitudes about
trade and Innovation and no place for Liberal.
Thought the old materialist stories says that Industrial
Revolution came from Material causes from investment or theft
or from higher savings rates, or from imperialism.
You heard it. Europe is Rich because of its
Empires. The United States was built on
the backs of slaves. China is getting rich because of
trade, but what if, the Industrial Revolution was parked
instead By changes in the way people thought, and especially
by how they thought about each other suppose, steam engines and
computers. Came from a new honor for
innovators. Not from piling brick on brick
or dead African on dead African economists and historians are
starting to realize that it took much, much more than theft or
capital accumulation to ignite the Industrial Revolution.
It took a big shift in how westerners thought about
Commerce and Innovation. People had to start liking
creative destruction. The new idea that replaces.
The old, it's like music and you band gets a new idea in rock
music and replaces the old if enough people for Ali adopt the
new. If the old music is thought to
be worse. It is destroyed by the
creativity in the same way, electric lights, destroyed
kerosene, lamps and computers destroyed typewriters to our
good. The correct history goes like
this until the Dutch around. Teen hundred or the English
around 1700 change their thinking, you got honor in only
two ways being a soldier or being a priest in the castle or
in the church, people who merely bought and sold things for a
living or innovated were scorned, as sinful cheaters, a
Jailer in the 1200s rejected a man's plea for Mercy come
master. Arnaud TSN re you have wallowed
in such opulence. How could you be without sin in
1800? The average income per person
per day, all over the planet was in present-day money.
Anything from $1 to $5, call it an average of $3 a day.
Imagine living in present-day, Rio or Athens or Johannesburg on
three dollars a day. Some people do even now.
That's three. Or it's of a cappuccino at
Starbucks. It was and is appalling, then
something changed in Holland. And then in England the
revolutions and Reformation of Europe. 1517 to 1789 gave voice
to Ordinary People outside the Bishops and Aristocrats
Europeans, and then others came to admire entrepreneurs like Ben
Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. And Bill Gates, the middle
class, started to be viewed as good and started to be allowed
to do good and do well, people signed on to a middle-class deal
that has characterized. Now wealthy places such as
Britain or Sweden or Hong Kong ever, since let me innovate and
make piles and piles of money in the short run out of innovation.
And in the long run. I'll make you rich and that's
what happened. In the 1700s with Franklin's
lightning rod and W a steam engine, and going nuts in the
1800's in still not a year, in the 2000s, the West, which for
centuries, had lag behind China and Islam became astonishingly
Innovative, give the middle class, dignity and liberty, for
the first time in human history. And here's what you get, the
steam engine, the automatic textile Loom, the assembly line
the symphony, orchestra the railway, the corporation Abba.
Listen, ISM, the steam printing, press cheap, paper wide
literacy, cheap steel cheap plate glass, the modern
University, the modern newspaper clean water, reinforced
concrete. The woman's movement, the
electric light, the elevator the automobile petroleum vacations
in Yellowstone, Plastics half a million new english-language
books. A year, hybrid corn, penicillin,
the airplane clean Urban are civil rights open, heart
surgery, and the computer. The result was that uniquely in
history, The Ordinary People and especially the very poor were
made much much better off. Remember the middle class deal
the Porsche 5% of Americans are now about, as well, off in air
conditioning and Automobiles, as the richest 5% of Indians.
Now, we're seeing the same shift play out in China and India 40%
of the world's population. The big economic story.
Of our times is not the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009
unpleasant, though. It was the big story.
Is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted
liberal ideas in their economies and welcomed creative
destruction. Now, their goods and services
per person are quadrupling in every generation.
By now, in the numerous places that have adopted, middle-class
Liberty and dignity, the average person makes and consumes over
$100 a day. Remember two centuries ago.
It was three dollars a day in the same prices and that doesn't
take into account of the great Improvement in the quality of
many things from electric lights to antibiotics.
Young people in Japan and Norway and Italy are even
Conservatively measured terms around 30 times better off in
material circumstances than their great great.
Great. Great.
Grandparents.
All the other leaps into the modern world for democracy, The
Liberation of women Improvement of life, expectancy greater
education spiritual growth. Artistic explosion are firmly
attached to the great fact of modern history.
The increase by the two thousand nine hundred.
Went in food and education in travel, it is so big.
So unprecedented, the great fact that it's impossible to see it
as coming out of routine causes such as trade, or exploitation,
or investment or imperialism. That's what economists are good
at explaining routine. Get all the routines.
Had occurred on a big scale in China and the Ottoman Empire in
Rome and South Asia slavery was common in the Middle East.
Trade was large in India investment in Chinese canals and
Roman roads was immense yet? No, great fact happened.
Something must be deeply wrong with explanations of the usual
economic sort. In other words, depending
exclusively on economic materialism, to explain the
modern world, whether left-wing historical materialism, or
right-wing, economics is mistaken.
Ideas of human dignity, and Liberty did the trick as the
economic historian Joel Schumacher.
Puts it, economic change in all periods.
Depends more than most economists.
Think on what people The gigantic material changes or the
outcome, not the cause it was ideas or rhetoric that caused
our enrichment. And with it, our modern
liberties.