READ Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey selling mobile read italian txt

Book description

Book description
My ancestors were illiterate peasants living in their own filth. But that’s okay – so were yours, and you probably don’t have to go back very far to find them (mine crawled out of the rural idiocy of the Scottish Highlands a mere six or seven generations ago). Unless you happen to be reading this in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, you are enormously, fantastically richer than your great-great-grandparents ever dreamed of being. Even if your Visa card is maxed out and your ’92 Honda Accord is emitting its death rattle, you’re immeasurably better off than your forebears. Why? Among other reasons: because you can read and write; because you aren’t going to die of starvation or malaria or while giving birth to your tenth underweight child; because you have a cell phone in your pocket and Skechers on your feet and, just maybe, in spite of your “poverty”, a 36-inch Sony flat screen in your living room. This is what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Fact” or simply the “Fact”: i.e. that almost all of us, pretty much across the board, have gotten filthy rich in the last two-hundred years. Since 1800 or so, incomes in the developed world have increased by something like 1500%. Probably much more, in fact, if we could measure the real value of things like Internet access and air conditioning. And contrary to what Michael Moore may have told you, it’s not just those cigar-chomping plutocrats who’ve benefited. Everybody else has made out alright, too. Whereas the poor of two hundred years ago were sometimes reduced to eating grass, the poor of today are reduced to eating KFC Double Downs: a culinary disaster, if you like, but an economic miracle.To hear McCloskey tell it, no reputable economist disputes the Fact, not even the odd Marxist who’s still skulking around Berkeley. The question is: why? Why did incomes suddenly start shooting up 200 years ago, first in Britain and Holland, then in New England and France, and finally across much of the world? This, apparently, is one of the great white whales of economic history: everybody from Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi has tried to harpoon the sucker. In Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey examines each theory in turn and patiently explains why it’s total, irredeemable bullshit; then she peddles her own theory. Basically, she says the bourgeoisie did it – or more accurately, a liberated bourgeoisie that was finally empowered to let loose its innovations and creative destruction on the world. Now, being a largely innumerate English major, I have to take McCloskey’s statistics on faith, but my mushy, liberal-arts-fed brain tells me there’s something to this idea of hers. And then, being an aspiring member of what Keynes used to call the “educated bourgeoisie,” I’m flattered by it. It appeals to my class pride. We created modernity. Fuck, yeah. I wish I could recommend Bourgeois Dignity to the many Naomi Klein fans I know, just as a neoliberal counterweight. Unfortunately, this isn’t the book that’s finally going to persuade them to get off the bong and go start an IT company. It could have been that book, if it didn’t suffer from some weird chemical imbalance that makes it alternately brilliant and tedious, insightful and repetitive, like that under-medicated guy at the donut shop ranting about the Arian heresy. The cliché that socialism looks great on paper but falls down in practice can be inverted with neoliberalism: it works okay in practice (except when it doesnt), but the theory is homely as all get-out. Meaning, its prosaic and flawed, but fundamentally right. The way I see it—and Im comparing great things with small here—is that 20th-century humanity found itself in roughly the same position as Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful: faced with two very different visions of the future, we chose the Mary Stuart Masterson of capitalist democracy, which was the right call, but were collectively haunted by an inner voice that says, Man, you totally could have banged Lea Thompson. Id still like to think theres a Molly Ringwald of radical centrism out there somewhere, but thats a whole different movie.
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READ Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey selling mobile read italian txt

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