Destruction and Creation ♠

Virginia Postrel, who is always an educating writer, talks about the Obama comments from three weeks ago.  She sees the problem as being an assault on "Bourgeois Dignity".  The lede is:

The controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s admonishment that “if you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen” has defied the usual election-year pattern.

Normally a political faux pas lasts little more than a news cycle. People hear the story, decide what they think, and quickly move on to the next brouhaha, following what the journalist Mickey Kaus calls the Feiler Faster Thesis.  A gaffe that might have ruined a candidate 20 years ago is now forgotten within days.

Where Ms Postrel sees the problem is that it fails to recognize that we didn't trade the economy of 600 years ago for the economy of today by capital accumulation, but by a change in (or development of) Bourgeois values.♥  Ms Postrel directs us to a relatively new book by Professor Deirdre N. McCloskey, titled Bourgeois Dignity:  Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World.  From the Postrel article we have this quote from Professor McCloskey:

What made us rich, was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imagination, alertness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfulness—not individual accumulation restlessly stirring, or mere duty to a calling, which are ancient and routine and uncreative.

Here is the book description from Amazon:

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession.  It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long.  The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.

Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West.  Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism.  According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them.  During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old.  The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors:  it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity.

An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.

Hat tip to the Althouse blog.
Hat tip to the InstaPundit blog.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  The 1976 paper by John Boyd can be found here.
♥  In a way this takes us back to the flare-up over Governor Romney's comments about the Palestinians, culture and economic growth.  One place this was noted was the Richard Howe blog.