Restoring the Bourgeois Deal.

• Author: Leef, George

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make Your Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden

227 pp.; University of Chicago Press, 2020

How did most of humanity go from bare subsistence living, stalked constantly by famine, disease, and violence, to today's vastly better living conditions? Just a few centuries ago, almost all people lived a Hobbesian existence. Now, even residents of very poor countries are enjoying unprecedented increases in prosperity. For most of human history, there was no economic progress, then suddenly the Great Enrichment bloomed. Why?

According to Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden's new book Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich, the answer is that people accepted what they call "the Bourgeois Deal." In a nutshell, the deal allows innovation that can displace traditional social and economic order in return for the widespread improvement in living standards that such innovation yields. The book explains that progress happens when humans (all of them, not just a few) have the liberty to work to better themselves. The resulting innovations and other "betterments" will provide spillover benefits to others. The authors argue that the catalyst for humanity's rapid advancement over the past few centuries was liberty, and liberty alone.

McCloskey, an interdisciplinary professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Carden, an economist at Samford University, argue that the idea of liberty began in northwestern Europe. The old social order (in Europe and elsewhere) placed nobles, clergy, and military men at the top of the social hierarchy, while merchants, artisans, and farmers were on a low plane. This began to change, beginning in the Dutch Republic around the year 1500, as people started to think that it was good to produce, trade, and earn profits. Thus began not "capitalism" (a term the authors disdain), but "innovism" and, with it, the Great Enrichment. People with a head for business were free to produce and trade, gaining for themselves if they produced what others were willing to pay for, or losing when they did not.

Liberalism and statism / Enrichment thus comes from liberty. What extinguishes liberty is force, and the worst wielders of force are governments. Write McCloskey and Carden:

Big governments exercise more power over more people--people harmlessly chatting or strumming or knitting or dealing in the economy. We believe, and so should you, that the more involuntary...