Deirdre McCloskey:
"A crucial point is that the greatly enriched world cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as to the contrary economists have fervently believed from Adam Smith through Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, and as the very word “capitalism” implies. The word embodies a scientific mistake. Our riches did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor’s degree on bachelor’s degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The bricks, BAs, and bank balances—the capital accumulations—were of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. It would be unhelpful, though, to explain the Chicago Fire of October 8-10, 1871 by the presence of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. Better: a long dry spell, the city’s wooden buildings, a strong wind from the southwest, and, if you disdain Irish people, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. The modern world cannot be explained, I show in the second volume, Bourgeois Dignity, by routine brick- piling, such as the Indian Ocean trade, English banking, canals, the British savings rate, the Atlantic slave trade, the enclosure movement, the exploitation of workers in satanic mills, or the original accumulation of capital in European cities, whether physical or human capital. Such routines are too common in world history and too feeble in quantitative oomph to explain the thirty- or one-hundred-fold enrichment per person unique to the past two centuries."
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