9 Quotes by Deirdre N. McCloskey

Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.

That businesspeople buy low and sell high in a particularly alert and advantageous way does not make them bad unless all trading is bad, unless when you yourself shop prudently you are bad, unless any tall poppy needs to be cut down, unless we wish to run our ethical lives on the sin of envy.

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.

Ideas of human dignity and liberty did the trick, making the inventions and then investments profitable for entrepreneurs and the nation. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.

Modern liberals do not sit anywhere along the conventional one-dimensional right-left spectrum of governmental coercion.

The economy, like science or art, is more like an organism growing uncertainly toward the light than a steel machine repeating exactly today and tomorrow what it did yesterday.

The way to help the poor, in short, is to let the Great Enrichment proceed by commercially tested betterment, as it has widely since 1800 and especially in the past forty years.

People are motivated in varying proportions by prudence, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, and love, together with the corresponding vices.

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. Now it’s over. The big story is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 began to adopt liberal ideas in their economies, and came to welcome creative destruction.