Bourgeois dignity: why economics can't explain the modern world

The modern world was an economic tide, but did not have economic causes

Liberal ideas caused the innovation

And a new rhetoric protected the ideas

Many other plausible stories don't work very well

The correct story praises capitalism

Modern growth was a factor of at least sixteen

Increasing scope, not pot-of-pleasure happiness, is what mattered

And the poor won

Creative destruction can be justified therefore on utilitarian grounds

British economists did not recognize the tide

But the figures tell

Britain's (and Europe's) lead was an episode

And followers could leap over stages

The tide didn't happen because of thrift

Capital fundamentalism is wrong

A rise of greed or of a Protestant ethic didn't happen

Endless accumulation does not typify the modern world

Nor was the cause original accumulation or a sin of expropriation

Nor was it accumulation of human capital until lately

Transport or other domestic reshufflings didn't cause it

Nor geography, nor natural resources

Not even coal

Foreign trade was not the cause, though world prices were a context

And the logic of trade-as-an-engine is dubious

And even the dynamic effects of trade were small

The effects on Europe of the slave trade and British imperialism were smaller still

And other exploitations, external or internal, were equally profitless to ordinary Europeans

It was not the sheer quickening of commerce

Nor the struggle over the spoils

Eugenic materialism doesn't work

Neo-Darwinism doesn't compute

And inheritance fades

Institutions cannot be viewed merely as incentive-providing constraints

And so the better institutions, such as those alleged for 1689, don't explain

And anyway the entire absence of property is not relevant to the place or period

And the chronology of property and incentives has been mismeasured

And so the routine of Max U doesn't work

The cause was not science

But bourgeois dignity and liberty entwined with the Englightenment

It was not allocation

It was words

Dignity and liberty for ordinary people, in short, were the greatest externalities

And the model can be formalized

Opposing the bourgeois hurts the poor

And the bourgeois era warrants therefore not political or environmental pessimism

But an amiable, if guarded optimism.