The virtue of riches: how wealth makes us more moral.

• Author: McArdle, Megan
• Position: Book review

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman, New York: Knopf 592 pages, $35

FOR MANY Americans, riches are so disreputable that taking them away is a goal in itself. The left used to offer the misery of the poor as a reason for redistribution, but these days an increase in inequality is just as likely to be the rallying cry for higher taxation. In a savage New York Times column this past March, the economist Paul Krugman turned rising inequality--a trend that has persisted for decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents into a frontal assault on the hated Bush tax cuts. More generally, the chief plaint of Democrats about those cuts has been not that they are economically inefficient, or even that they are leaving wonderful programs starved for funds, but that they primarily went to "the rich."

That same suspicion is often applied to the vast wealth we enjoy as a society. Spend time at an antiglobalization rally, and you'll inevitably hear someone complain that Americans are less than 5 percent of the global population yet consume 25 percent of its output, as if we were somehow stealing the difference from the world's poor. Such critics also cite the social, economic, and environmental dislocations caused by a vibrant free market. We're too rich, the activists are basically saying, and our wealth has too high a cost; it's time to stop thinking about making money and start thinking about all the suffering in the world.

Even those who think wealth is good (or at least harmless) often implicitly suggest that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of moral goals are separate questions. They would do well to read Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The author, a professor of political economy at Harvard, has written an economic tome that is accessible to the average reader without failing to offer something new to specialists as well: a compelling argument that rising incomes make us not just richer people, but better ones.

Friedman's definition of better will irritate libertarian-minded readers, who will quarrel with his decision to count support for generous government expenditures among the "moral consequences" of economic growth--or, at least, with his implication that such support is among the positive effects. But most of the consequences he discusses would impress nearly everyone. When earnings are growing, Friedman says, people are more tolerant of minorities, more welcoming to...