Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Art Carden

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English

University of Chicago Press
30 October 2020

History; Political ideologies; Economic history

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.

For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.

By: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Art Carden
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780226739663
ISBN 10: 022673966X
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 30 October 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce; Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World; Economical Writing; and Crossing: A Memoir, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. Art Carden is associate professor of economics at the Brock School of Business at Samford University.

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

Read this book and learn why you must know the truth, what truth you need to know, and why the freedom it brings has made almost everyone better off than their parents and grandparents. --Vernon L. Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics If you are feeling down about the state of the world or pessimistic about its prospects then this is the book to cheer you up. Carden and McCloskey show how much off everyone is today compared to everyone who lived before, and how this is explained not bye the usual suspects such as institutions, or capitalism or the profits of slavery and colonialism, or the exploitation of natural resources, but simply by the practice of liberty, letting people be and allowing them to do their thing (and, crucially, to innovate). They also show how fashionable pessimism about the future is wrong in all its modish variants--as it has been since 1798. This is a work for economists, historians, and anyone who wants to understand why the world has become so much better for human beings in the last two hundred and fifty years and is set to continue doing so. --Stephen Davies, Institute of Economic Affairs