The Bourgeois Virtues

Author: Deirdre Nansen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226556670
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Book Description
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.

The Bourgeois Virtues

Author: Deirdre N. McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226556635
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 634

Bourgeois Dignity

Author: Deirdre Nansen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226556662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Book Description
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.

Bourgeois Equality

Author: Deirdre N. McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652793X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 830

Book Description
The last 200 years have witnessed a 100-fold leap in well-being. Deirdre McCloskey argues that most people today are stunningly better off than their forbearers were in 1800, and that the rest of humanity will soon be. A purely materialist, incentivist view of economic change does not explain this leap. We have now the third in McCloskey's three-volume opus about how bourgeois values transformed Europe. Volume 3 nails the case for that transfiguration, telling us how aristocratic virtues of hierarchy were replaced by bourgeois virtues (more precisely, by attitudes toward virtues) that made it possible for ordinary folk with novel ideas to change the way people, farmed, manufactured, traveled, ruled themselves, and fought. It is a dramatic story, and joins a dramatic debate opened up by Thomas Piketty in his best-selling Capital in the 21st Century. McCloskey insists that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving, arguing against the position (of Piketty and most others) that capital induces a tendency to get more, that money reproduces itself, that riches are created from riches. Not so, our intrepid McCloskey shows. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among the biggest wealth accumulators in our era, didn't get rich through the magic of compound interest on capital. They got rich through intellectual property, creating billions of dollars from virtually nothing. Capital was no more important an ingredient to the original Apple or Microsoft than cookies or cucumbers. The debate is between those who think riches are created from riches versus those who, with McCloskey, think riches are created from rags, between those who see profits as a generous return on capital, or profits coming from innovation that ultimately benefits us all.

Economics of Good and Evil

Author: Tomas Sedlacek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831904
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

The Cult of Statistical Significance

Author: Stephen Thomas Ziliak
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472050079
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
How the most important statistical method used in many of the sciences doesn't pass the test for basic common sense

The Economist's Oath

Author: George F. DeMartino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199813736
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Economics is today among the most influential of all professions. Economists alter the course of economic affairs and deeply affect the lives of current and future generations. Yet, virtually alone among the major professions, economics lacks a body of professional ethics to guide its practitioners. Over the past century the profession consistently has refused to adopt or even explore professional economic ethics. As a consequence, economists are largely unprepared for the ethical challenges they face in their work. The Economist's Oath challenges the economic orthodoxy. It builds the case for professional economic ethics step by step-first by rebutting economists' arguments against and then by building an escalating positive case for professional economic ethics. The book surveys what economists do and demonstrates that their work is ethically fraught. It explores the principles, questions, and debates that inform professional ethics in other fields, and identifies the lessons that economics can take from the best established bodies of professional ethics. George DeMartino demonstrates that in the absence of professional ethics, well-meaning economists have committed basic, preventable ethical errors that have caused severe harm for societies across the globe. The book investigates the reforms in economic education that would be necessary to recognize professional ethical obligations, and concludes with the Economist's Oath, drawing on the book's central insights and highlighting the virtues that are required of the "ethical economist." The Economist's Oath seeks to initiate a serious conversation among economists about the ethical content of their work. It examines the ethical entailments of the immense influence over the lives of others that the economics profession now enjoys, and proposes a framework for the new field of professional economic ethics.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

Author: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673983X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
A “thought-provoking” one-volume distillation of the author’s powerful trilogy in praise of the middle class’s role in creating a better, and richer, world (Library Journal). 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 Art 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 from 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, this book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought. Praise for the Bourgeois Era Trilogy “A contender for the great book of our age.” —The Times, Book of the Week “Persuasive . . . richly detailed and erudite.” —Financial Times

Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue

Author: Mark Garrett Longaker
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271074779
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.

The Invisible Heart

Author: Russell Roberts
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026225039X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
A lively, unorthodox look at economics, business, and public policy told in the form of a novel. A love story that embraces the business and economic issues of the day? The Invisible Heart takes a provocative look at business, economics, and regulation through the eyes of Sam Gordon and Laura Silver, teachers at the exclusive Edwards School in Washington, D.C. Sam lives and breathes capitalism. He thinks that most government regulation is unnecessary or even harmful. He believes that success in business is a virtue. He believes that our humanity flourishes under economic freedom. Laura prefers Wordsworth to the Wall Street Journal. Where Sam sees victors, she sees victims. She wants the government to protect consumers and workers from the excesses of Sam's beloved marketplace. While Sam and Laura argue about how to make the world a better place, a parallel story unfolds across town. Erica Baldwin, the crusading head of a government watchdog agency, tries to bring Charles Krauss, a ruthless CEO, to justice. How are these two dramas connected? Why is Sam under threat of dismissal? Will Erica Baldwin find the evidence she needs? Can Laura love a man with an Adam Smith poster on his wall? The answers in The Invisible Heart give the reader a richer appreciation for how business and the marketplace transform our lives.