Second Interview with Professor Deirdre McCloskey

We are honored to welcome back Professor Deirdre McCloskey to discuss her work. No other body of work has had such a profound influence on our worldviews, especially with respect to how what she calls the Great Enrichment came about. Her latest scholarly book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, was the final volume of the Bourgeois Era trilogy. It argues for an “ideational” explanation of the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person from 1800 to the present in places like Britain and Japan and Finland. The second book in the trilogy, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, had shown that materialist explanations such as saving or exploitation, don’t have enough economic oomph or historical relevance to explain the Enrichment. The inaugural book in the trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues, had established that the bourgeoisie is pretty good, and that commercially tested betterment is not the worst of ethical schools.