Chapter 89: Notes - Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2023)

Notes

Exordium

1. I owe the phrase to Alberto Mingardi of the Istituto Bruno Leoni.

2. Inoue 1991, 2001. For additional reflections on Inoue’s work, see McCloskey 2006b, pp. 296–297.

3. Mokyr, forthcoming (2016). Mokyr’s name, which will come up frequently, is pronounced “moh-KEER.”

4. “Having a go” is a British idiom, used in this application in the 1970s by the economic historian Peter Mathias (1972 [1979], p. 66). I remember Peter using the expression at a dinner discussion I attended at Oxford then, and I remember with embarrassment my callow scorn at its lack of (irrelevant) mathematics. Now I agree with him.

5. Conze and Kocka, eds. 1985.

6. Flaubert (May 10, 1867), in Oeuvres complètes et Annexes: p. 5883.

7. Huizinga 1935 (1968), p. 112.

8. Leoni 1965 (2009), p. 83.

9. “Samuelsonian” is historically more accurate than the more usual word, “neoclassical,” which includes for example Austrian and Marshallian economists who do not think much of modeling exclusively with constrained maximization and are more concerned with entry and evolution. It is a term of affection, not of dismissal. During the 1960s I myself was trained at Harvard in Samuelsonian economics, and during the 1970s I taught at the University of Chicago, which was at the time turning away from Marshall and Knight and toward Samuelson and Arrow. Samuelsonian economics was invented in the 1940s and 1950s by the brilliant and amiable Paul Anthony Samuelson (1915–2009)—long my mother’s mixed-doubles tennis partner—together with his equally brilliant and equally amiable brother in law, Kenneth Arrow (1921– )—long a distantly friendly colleague of mine. Startlingly, they are joint uncles of the crown prince of Samuelsonian economics, Lawrence Summers.

10. Haidt 2006; Epley 2014.

11. For example, Wilson 2010, which is the only substantive use in economics of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Wilson coined the word “humanomics.”

12. Herb Gintis, listen up.

13. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 112.

14. I am using the word “Marxian” for “influenced by Marx,” as against “Marxist,” that is, following the Master in more orthodox and often violent fashion. A Marxian such as Donna Haraway, for example, might argue in her books that social class is a crucial element in history. A Marxist such as Antonio Negri might assist in the kidnapping and murder of businesspeople.

15. Edwards (2013, 2014) makes a brave attempt, though one can criticize his methods. More grounded is Deng 2013.

16. Berndt and Berndt 1964, pp. 302–305. On forming property rights in beaver, see Demsetz 1967. But see Carlos and Lewis 1999, pp. 709, 726. Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People (1972) is the classic, if vigorously disputed, picture of a war of all against all, among the Ik of Uganda.

17. In speaking of “alertness” I refer to Israel Kirzner’s Austrian economics of the entrepreneur, as in Kirzner 1979, 1989.

18. A discussion of the matter by Donald Boudreaux, John Nye, Joel Mokyr, and me, in which I concede some ground to the neo-institutionalists, is Hart and Richman, eds. 2014. See also McCloskey 2014.

19. Kurzban, DeScioli, and O’Brien 2007.

20. Jacob D. Rendtorff of Roskilde University of Copenhagen pointed out to me the friend-to-friend “corruption” in Scandinavia. But its order of magnitude is not the same as it is in more normal parts of the world.

21. The point comes from Bart Wilson.

22. Ostrom 1990, 2010; Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994.

23. Once again, McCloskey 2011a. On children’s games, see Piaget 1932 (1965), pp. 13, 25; Tomasello 2014.

24. White 1984, citing Thucydides, bk. 3, 3.82–[4].

25. North 1990; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012.

26. Allen 2009. Against his skewed logic and evidence, see Humphries 2011; Hudson 2010; Kelly, Ó Gradá, and Mokyr 2013; McCloskey 2010a, pp. 188–189.

27. Smith 2007. The Chinese economist Ning Wang has observed to me that constructivist economics fails because it relies on theorems subject to a fundamental arbitrariness, which I have called the A-Prime-C-Prime Theorem (McCloskey 1994). Evolution, such as that experienced in China after 1978, on the other hand, explores without prejudice and judges by results.

28. Kelly, Ó Gráda, and Mokyr 2013, p. 1.

29. Meisenzahl and Mokyr 2012, p. 447.

30. Bowden, Karpovich, and Usher 1937, p. 311. It was Usher who wrote the technological history in the book.

31. Jacob 2014, p. 148.

32. Sobel 1995.

33. Van der Beek 2013, p. 1.

34. Piketty 2014, p. 418.

35. Boudreaux 2014, personal correspondence.

36. Ibsen 1879 (1965), pp. 132.

37. Peart and Levy 2005; Levy 2001; Peart and Levy, eds. 2008. Kim Priemel of Humboldt University of Berlin suggests to me that “equity” would be a better word for the Scottish concept. But I do not want to surrender so easily an essentially contested concept such as French which indeed in its original bourgeois-revolutionary meaning was more Scottish than what I am here calling “French.”

38. Smith 1776, 4.9, p. 664. Following, for example, the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, when quoting earlier English, even so recent as Smith (by which time English spelling had pretty much settled down), I regularly modernize the spelling and punctuation. The past is a foreign country, but the foreignness should be exhibited in its strange behavior and strange ideas, not in its conventions of printing.

39. Waterman 2014b, pt. 1.

40. Waterman 2014b, pt. 2; Smith 1759 (1790), 4.1.10. Waterman also notes the dissipation of such rents causing waste. It is a balance.

41. Arendt 1951 (1985), p. 54. It is unclear in the passage whether Arendt means “equality in the opinion of others,” as I do, or “equality of material outcome,” as conventional socialists do. Probably the latter.

42. Mill 1859 (2001), pp. 86–87.

43. MacLeod 1998, 2007. The statue ended up in St. Paul’s.

44. Kelly and Ó Gráda (2014) seem to have put paid to one of the older claims about the sources of the turmoil, China to Europe: the Little Ice Age. “Black swan” refers to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a highly improbable, and unpredictable, event (Taleb 2007).

45. On perspective, see the astonishing book by Lepenies 2013.

Acknowledgments

1. Cavell 2002, p. xvii.

Chapter 1

1. When I use the phrase “pretty good” here, as I will often do again, I am referring to the Ohio State political scientist John Mueller’s important book Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (1999), which in turn refers to the comically modest marketing in Garrison Keillor’s hometown of Lake Wobegon. For example, “If you can’t find it at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, you can probably get along without it.”

2. The figures are Angus Maddison’s estimate of world income before 1800 in 1990 prices, brought up by me to the prices of 2010 or so. Maddison 2001, appendix B, table 21, p. 264.

3. I use throughout for recent times the readily available figures of real income per person in U.S.-equivalent prices from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the so-called Penn Tables (devised by Alan Heston and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania). The Penn Tables are conceptually the best, but in truth there is little at stake in the choice among the three. Roughly speaking—which suffices for present purposes—they tell the same story. For example, for 2012 the World Bank and for 2010 the IMF both put Brazilian real GDP at about $33 a head per day, 24 percent of the U.S. level in the corresponding year (and equal, as I have noted, to the average for the world). For 2010 the Penn Tables put it at $27 a head, or 21 percent of the their estimate of the U.S. level. A difference between 24 and 21 percent does not change any conclusion here or elsewhere in the book. We are dealing throughout with rough figures of how much people make, earn, and consume. The three sets of estimates (and a fourth, from the CIA, giving much the same results) are conveniently gathered (for 2011/2012) at and for the Penn Tables

4. “Make, earn, and consume” because in a correct accounting (but see note 6) the figures would show that what an economy produces is the same to the last cent as what its people earn as income and what they consume, whether in the marketplace, in homework, or in leisure. The figures are from the IMF and World Bank, in 2010. Gregory Clark (2009) argues that Maddison’s figure of a little over a dollar a day in 1800 is too low for subsistence.

5. “World,” CIA World Factbook (accessedApril 10, 2013).

6. The economic historian Stefano Fenoaltea and the economist Philipp Lepenies have both pointed out to me recently that for short-run reasons of policy at the time, the concept of national product used by Simon Kuznets, the deviser of the modern program of income measurement, and eventually by Maddison, did not go beyond trading figures, that is, what people could buy. Homework is mostly ignored. It is a major error for the long run (as Kuznets and other students of the matter realized), since production in the home of, say, made clothing and processed food was a large part of consumption in earlier times, as was at all times the care industry for children, husbands, and parents (as the economist Nancy Folbre has persuasively argued). The money value of sheer leisure—the merry beggar singing careless by the highway—is ignored as well. That last item at least might be equal in ancient and in modern times, and its value would rise along with the opportunity cost in making goods and services (but see de Vries 2008; Voth 1998). On the other hand, much of modern consumption is understated in the same figures—the quality point I make below. Let us hope the errors offset. But not to worry, and if to worry not to worry too much: errors at such magnitudes do not matter for anything I say here, because we are concerned with orders of (very great) magnitude. Any factor of 10 or 30 or 100 will do, and some such factor is justifiable by all manner of evidence.

7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development Indicators.

8. In Maddison’s tables, which seem best for the purpose, Brazilian GDP per person in 2001, deflated to 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, was $5,570 (Maddison 2007, table 4c, p. 522). From Index Mundi, which collected its numbers from the annual CIA Factbook one can reckon from the ratio of Brazil’s real per-capita income in 2010 to that in 2000/2002 that the Maddisonian figure for 2010 would have been about $8,021. One looks through Maddison’s tables, then, for the United Kingdom (table 1c, p. 441) and for the United States (table 2c, p. 466) to find the years in which they achieved the 2010 Brazilian level. Other methods I have tried do not yield believable results. Having visited Brazil four times briefly over the past few decades (though wholly ignorant of Portuguese), I am an Expert on Brazil; and having lived in England for a few months as a teenager in 1959 (Woodbine cigarettes, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer), and having been a small child in the United Statesin the 1940s (radio drama, penny candy), I can attest that the present result seems about right.

9. For example, the OECD’s instruments, overlapping with mine, agree. See van Zanden et al., eds. 2014.

10. Gilmour 2011, p. 20.

11. Quoted in Robb 2007, p. 84.

12. Robb 2007, p. 78.

13. For recent expositions, see Fogel 2004; Floud et al. 2011. But on Fogel, see de Vries 2008, pp. 117–120. A judicious survey is Kelly and Ó Gráda 2012.

14. Quoted from Moburg’s memoir in Brown 2008, pp. 9–10.

15. Examine Wikipedia’s astonishing “List of Tuberculosis Cases” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tuberculosis_cases (the editors, to be sure, plead for “citations to reliable sources”). Beyond those mentioned in the text there were, for example, Burns, Schiller, Scott, Balzac, Chopin, John C. Calhoun, nearly the entire Brontë family, Delacroix, Thoreau, Napoleon II, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, Chekhov, and Orwell.

16. James 2007, pp. 350, 352.

17. Brown 2008, p. 16, the year corrected by Myllyntaus and Tarnaala 1998, p. 36.

18. Levi 1945.

19. Poznik et al. 2013, p. 565.

20. Mithen 2003, p. 60.

21. Parkin 1992.

22. Goldstone 2009 is an excellent guide to the recent scholarship, for example pp. 80–81. I have depended on Goldstone’s little book, and look forward to a big one he is writing.

23. Connelly 2008, chap. 4.

24. Hamashita 2007; Bayly 2004.

25. Broadberry and Gupta 2012, Table 12.

26. Li 2011.

27. Li and van Zanden 2012.

28. Drelichman and Voth 2014.

29. Gilmour 2011, p. 319.

30. Levi 1945, p. 3.

Chapter 2

1. Lepenies 2014 shows that Malthus’s logic, and elevation of the logic to a “natural law,” was taken from another anti-poor-law pamphlet by Joseph Townsend thirteen years earlier.

2. Ross Emmett and Anthony Waterman set me straight on the differences between Malthus Mark I and Malthus Mark II.

3. Quoted in Lepenies 2014, p. 450.

4. Voigtländer and Voth.

5. Galor 2005.

6. On the excellence of potatoes with milk, see Cook 2013.

7. Startlingly, Townsend articulated exactly such a model in 1786 (Lepenies 2014).

8. Mokyr 1983 and Ó Gráda 2010.

9. Waterman 2012, p. 425.

10. G. Clark 2007a, table 4 and figure 10.

11. G. Clark 2007a, figure 8.

12. Malthus 1798, chapter 2, end.

13. Attenborough 1998.

14. McGuire and Coelho 2011 is an excellent recent treatment of a large literature using such an argument.

15. Haensch et al. 2010. In 2015 it was claimed by students of the matter that the Plague was spread from Central Asia not by flea-bearing rats but by, of all things, (flea-bearing) gerbils.

16. Alfani 2013, for example on p. 427.

17. Ross Emmett emphasizes Malthus’s notions here, Emmett n.d., p. 3.

18. Sahlins 1972 (2004).

19. Gaus 2013, p. 13.

20. Olson 1993 is the seminal paper. Thus Scott 2009, and for a West African example, from my beloved colleague the late James Searing, Searing 2002.

21. Mayshar, Moav, and Neeman 2011.

22. Weatherford 2004; Perdue 2005, Hellie 2003, McNeill 1964, Lattimore 1940.

Chapter 3

1. Gerschenkron 1971.

2. Nordhaus 2004.

3. Gaus 2013, p. 8. Richerson and Boyd 2004.

4. Ó Gráda 2010.

5. McCloskey 1976, 1989.

6. Appleby 1980, p. 643 for Britain and France.

7. For present-day figures (the “Penn Tables”), see Heston, Summers, and Aten 2012 and updatings such as For 1800, see Maddison. Luxembourg’s half million folk earn on average $252 a day, the highest (Maddison 2007).

8. Fallows 2010, p. 72.

9. Leon 2012, p. 171.

10. As Czarniawska 2013 shows.

11. Sandberg 1979.

12. I am indebted to the philosopher Kenneth Stikkers at Southern Illinois University for stressing to me this quasi-pun in the phrase the “Great Enrichment.”

13. Coase and Wang 2013b, p. 207.

14. Harcourt 1994, p. 207; Röpke 1958 (1960), p. 8.

15.

16.

17. Rosling 2013.

18. Levi 1945, p. 30.

19. Hanawalt 1976.

20. Unger 2007, p. 132. Actually in 2009 Belgium ranked only twenty-second worldwide, half as avid as the Czech Republic or Venezuela.

21. Nelson 2015, p. 15. See Nelson 2013a, 2013b, 2010.

22. F. Smith n.d.

Chapter 4

1. Ridley 2010, p. 8.

2. Adrian Bowyer of the RepRap Project suggested the survival point to me.

3. Smith 1776, 1.2.

4. The factor of 100 is argued in a little more detail in Bourgeois pp. 54–59, using Nordhaus on lighting and his suggested extrapolations (Nordhaus 1996). Fouquet and Pearson (2011) confirm Nordhaus on lighting.

5. Macaulay 1848, end of chap. 3. Tom G. Palmer drew my attention to the passage.

6. Braudel 1967 (1973), p. 235. And yet rich Romans had floor heating from hot water, denied to rich Europeans until recently.

7. Bailey 1999.

8. See, for example, Kenny 2011, Kenny n.d.

9. Simon 1981 (1996).

Chapter 5

1. Schumpeter 1942 (1950), pp. 67–68.

2. Boudreaux 2013.

3. Smith 1776, 1.1.11.

4. The figure of 9,900 percent derives from the fifth-grade arithmetic I mentioned earlier. A factor of 100, if expressed as a percentage change over the base, is calculated as 100 minus the base of 1 (in the year 1800), which is by the subtraction 99, divided by the same base, 1, but then multiplied by 100 to get it into per hundred terms, that is, [(100 – 1)/1] × 100 percent, or 9,900 percent.

5. Professor Eduard Bonet of Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas, Barcelona, drew my attention to Follett’s point about democracy.

6. Here I diverge, reluctantly, from Margaret Jacob’s view (for instance in Jacob 2014), which Mokyr follows.

7. Ó Gráda 2014, p. 8.

8. I am indebted to Marlies Mueller for reminding me of Popper’s usage.

9. See the lucid treatment in Wagner 1994. The capitalization and italicization of ORDO refers to the title of a yearbook published from 1948 by the Freiburg (Germany) School of economists recommending “order policy.”

10. Bell 2014; and Boldrin and Levine 2008.

11. Smith 1759 (1790), 4.1.11, para. 9.

12. Reich 2014.

13. Gobry 2014.

14. That was the point of my early supply-side essay about British economic growth in the late nineteenth century, McCloskey 1970.

15. See for example Lawrence 2015; and for Canada Grubel 2015, making the point that a person’s mobility through the quintiles over her life changes the picture dramatically.

16. Whitford 2005.

17. Boudreaux and Perry 2013.

18. Deaton 2013, p. 231.

19. Fogel 1999, p. 190.

20. Horwitz 2013, p. 11 of the working paper, now published as Horwitz 2015.

21. Horwitz 2013, p. 2 of the working paper.

22. Horwitz’s table 4 reports the percentage of poor households with various appliances: in 1971, 32 percent of such households had air conditioners; in 2005, 86 percent did.

23. Klinenberg 2002.

24. Barreca et al. 2013 show the large effect in the United States of air conditioning in reducing excess mortality during heat waves.

Chapter 6

1. Reich 2014.

2. Isaacs 2007, quoted in Horwitz 2013, p. 7.

3. Saunders 2013, p. 214.

4. Frankfurt 1987, pp. 23–24.

5.

6. Sen 1985; Nussbaum and Sen 1993.

7. Trollope 1867–1868, vol. 1, pp. 126, 128.

8. Gazeley and Newell 2010, abstract, p. 19, chart 2 (p. 17).

9. Frankfurt 1987, p. 34; my italics.

10. Margo 1993, pp. 68, 65, 69.

11. Brennan, Menzies, and Munger 2013.

12. Smith 1776, 1.1.10, p. 22.

13. Nozick 1974, p. 164.

14. Benjamin 1936.

15. Boudreaux 2001.

16. Saunders 2013, pp. 213, 215.

Chapter 7

1. See S. Williamson,

2. Short 2012, especially his chart “Real GDP per Capita Percent Off High,” extrapolated into 2013; and for international comparisons, 2008–2012,

3. Hobsbawm 2011, p. 419 (the last page). I knew Hobsbawm a little when we were colleagues in the Department of History at Birkbeck College back in 1975–1976, and I have long admired his historical scholarship, without always agreeing with it.

4. Hobsbawm 2011, p. 417.

5. Mishra 2011, p. 12.

6. Reich 2014.

7. Reich 2014.

8. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 43.

9. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 117.

10. Postrel has written the book on glamour (2013).

11. Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. 68–70.

12. Quoted in Kristin Ross’s introduction to Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. xi–xii; the italics are Zola’s.

13. Simmel 1908 (1955), pp. 61–62; his italics.

Chapter 8

1. Robert Gordon 2012; Summers 2014; Brynjolfsson and McFee 2014; Phelps 2013; Edward Gordon 2013; Sachs and Kotlikoff 2012; Cowen 2011, 2013.

2. Fogel 2005.

3. National May 19, 2014.

4. Cowen 2013, pp. 4, 6.

5. Cowen 2013, p.20.

6. Cowen 2013, p. 39.

7. Cowen 2013, p. 3.

8. Mokyr 2013, 2014.

9. Pagano and Sbracia 2014; compare again Fogel 2005.

10. Macaulay 1830 (1881), pp. 186, 187.

11. Macaulay 1830 (1881), p. 185.

12. Phelps 2013, pp. viii, x, 14, 15, 21, and throughout.

13. Population shares from Maddison 2007, p. 378.

14. I realize that a Rule of 69 would be a little more accurate for continuous as against periodic (that is, annual or quarterly) compounding, and that perfectly accurate continuous compounding would involve e = 2.718281... But 72 has lots of integer divisors, is pretty accurate except at very high (for example, 30 percent) interest rates, and is honored by history.

15. Wall Street October 7, 2013, p. A14.

16. Quoted in Brandt, Ma, and Rawski 2014, p. 99.

17. Simon 1981 (1996).

18. Wuetherick, personal communication, January 26, 2014.

19. June 17, 2014, p. 9.

20. Troesken 2014.

21. Barreca, Clay, and Tarr 2014, p. 5, table 1 (p. 37). I can remember my father shoveling coal in the basement of our apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947, and my mother can remember trying to keep clothing and windowsills clean in the face of coal heating and coal smoke outside in winter.

22. The Danish philosopher of science Hans Siggaard Jensen tells me in a personal communication that windmills are designed with three vanes mainly because farmers have always used three vane is from an engineering point of view more efficient.

23. Chapman 2014.

24. Stone 2013.

25. Denyer 2014.

26. Stone 2013, quoting studies following Chernobyl. One student of the matter concludes that “losses arising from Chernobyl were not of sufficient magnitude and the event was so long ago that the accident should not be definitive in decisions about investment in new reactors” (Simmons 2011, p. 12). Cleanup workers at Fukushima have no discernible rise in disease. See Rivkin 2013.

27. Maddison 2007, p. 383. I am aware that China and India should be removed from the 1973–2003 rate to make the hypothetical exact, which would make it a trifle lower—say, 4 percent. But 4 percent is still, as I say, unprecedented.

28. Mencken 1917 (2006), p. 63.

29. Knight 1923 (1997), p. 137.

30. For example, “The migration of modern humans out of Africa resulted in a population bottleneck [in the small bands of humans migrating] and a concomitant loss of genetic diversity”(Campbell and Tishkoff 2008); “all systems show greater gene diversity in Africans than in either Europeans or Asians” (Jorde et al. 2000, abstract). There is, they say, “a marked founder effect associated with the expansion out of Africa.”

31. Pritchard et al. 1999, pp. 1795, 1797.

32. Personal communication at HedgePo’s Global CIO Summit, Gleneagles, Scotland, October 23, 2014.

Chapter 9

1. Klein 2007. For another view from the left, this time based on facts, see Mirowski 2013 and Mirowski and Plehwe, eds. 2009.

2. Collier 2007.

3. World Bank, “Remarkable Decline in Global Poverty, But Major Challenges Remain,” April 17, 2013. I join you in being puzzled by the divergence between such figures and the one-out-of-seven estimate by Collier. I think it is because Collier was speaking of the distribution by country instead of by individual. But the statistical methods strongly converge. Extreme poverty, however you measure it, has fallen dramatically during the era of “neoliberalism.”

4. “China Experiments with Free Trade Zone,” Chicago October 1, 2013, sect. 2, p. 6. That such news was buried on the last page of the business section shows how routine the liberalization of China and India has become. Even Cuba promises a free port: “Former Exit Port for a Wave of Cubans Hopes to Attract Global Shipping,” New York January 27, 2014.

5. McCloskey 2006a.

6. Friedman 2005.

7. World Bank, “Economy Ratings,”

8.

9. “GNI per capita, PPP (current international $),”

10. Pomeranz 2000.

11. Needham 1954–2008.

12. Gwei-djen and Needham 1980, p. 231; Mokyr 2008, p. 257.

13. Comin and Mestieri 2013, table 1.

14. Klíma 2002, p. 52.

15. Mabhubani 2013.

16. Prados de la Escosura 2014, figure 4.

17. Maddison 2007, p. 303.

18. Sala-i-Martin and Pinovsky 2010; Sala-i-Martin 2002, 2006.

Chapter 10

1. O’Brien and Hunt 1993.

2. Voigtländer and Voth 2013.

3. McCloskey 2010a, pp. 313–315; Peter Murrell 2009 shows that there is no break in trend in 1688.

4. Pollock and Maitland 1895. As early as 1171 Henry II imposed an already flourishing English common law on the Pale of his newly conquered Irish properties.

5. Boswell 1791 (1984), vol. 2, p. 203 (April 14, 1778). For a fuller argument see McCloskey 2010b.

6. Douglas 1972 (1979); Sahlins 1972 (2004).

7. Ferguson 2011, pp. 12–14; “dominate,” pp. 3, 5, and throughout.

8. For similar views of dominance and decline see Kindleberger 1996.

9. Ferguson 2011, pp. 9, 11.

10. Ferguson 2011, p. 8.

11. Mishra 2011.

12. Quoted in Martin 2014, p. 38.

13. The contumely of the MCC toward Indian cricket is documented in Astill 2013.

14. Davis and Huttenback 1993 and works cited there.

15. Davis and Huttenback 1993, p. 28.

16. See Maurer 2013; Schlesinger and Kinzer 1982.

17. Quoted in Palmer 2014, p. 70.

18. Notwithstanding O’Brien 2011, and again Reinert 2011.

19. Parker 1989, pp. 84 (quoting Tojo), 280–285 (reviewing mortality statistics).

20. Morris 2010, 2014. True, headlines are not written by professors but by headline writers, and so Morris is not to be blamed directly for the assertion in the headline. But the body of the text supports the headline.

21. Einaudi 1908–1946 (2000), p. 273.

22. Kealey 2001, p. 243.

23. Frank 1998, pp. xxv, 282.

24. For additional evidence, see McCloskey 2010a, chaps. 26, 27.

Chapter 11

1. Easterly 2001.

2. The exact item in the website from which I retrieved the quotation, does not work anymore.

3. Clayton, Dal Borgo, and Hasekl 2009, p. 22.

4. Walzer 1983, p. 11.

5. Einaudi 1943, p. 42.

6. Wallerstein 1983, p. 13. So, since the first part of the word “astrology” is derived from the Latin for “star,” it would be legitimate to presume that stars are a key element in human fate.

7. Marx 1867, chap. 24, sect. 3.

8. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 471.

9. Toynbee 1884 (1887), p. 87.

10. Goldstone 2002, abstract.

11. Clapham 1926, p. 74. Compare Pollard 1981, pp. 24–25; Tunzelmann 1978; Kanevsky 1979.

12. Musson 1978, pp. 8, 61, 167–168.

13. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, pp. 471–472.

14. Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, pp. 318–319.

15. Quoted in Kenyon 1983, p. 272. We can only hope that the result will not be, as she continues, that they are “replaced not by new, better and truthful fables, but by furious arguments.”

16. Friedman 1970.

17. Friedman 1970, p 33; emphasis added, as Daniel G. Arce M takes care to do when quoting this passage (Arce M 2004, p. 263).

Chapter 12

1. Keynes 1936, p. 16, sec. 4; chap. 24, sec. 2 (“depriving capital of its scarcity-value within one or two generations”).

2. J. Williamson 1993, p. 15.

3. Quoted in Das 2009, p. 295.

4. Augustine, Tractate 7 (John 1:34–51).

5. Diamond 1997, p. 258.

6. Ward-Perkins 2005, pp. 102, 112, 117, 118, 146. He notes, in Ward-Perkins 2000, that the loss of Roman techniques was true even in the wide areas that remained for a long time afterward populated by Celtic (Welsh, that is) people, formerly thoroughly Romanized, and explains it with the prestige of the Germanic overlords of the other parts of the island.

7. Acemoglu, Gallego, and Robinson (2014) point out the biases in cross-time measures of the return to human capital, noting that they are alleged to be dramatically higher, for no good reason, than the estimates by Jacob Mincer and followers based on cross sections. McCloskey 2010a also made this point. It seems to me a decisive argument against accumulation of human capital as an exogenous explanation of the Great Enrichment.

8. Prak 2011, p. 10.

9. Weber 1923 (1981), p. 355.

10. Weber 1904–1905 (1958), p. 17.

11. Ridley 2010, p. 5.

12. Though see the recent work by Bessen and Nuvolari (2012).

13. Ridley 2010, p. 8.

14. A clarion call is Sutch 1991.

15. Chamberlain 1959 (1976), pp. 10–11.

16. See again Grafe 2012.

17. Bartlett 2010, pp. 43, 49–50.

18. Mithen 2003, pp. 68, 84, and throughout.

19. Berndt and Berndt 1964, p. 113.

20. See McBrearty 2007 and other essays in Mellars et al., eds. 2007.

21. Braudel, 1967 (1973), pp. 620–621.

22. On Athens, see Cohen 1992.

23. Mielants 2008, p. 15.

24. The evidence for this surprising fact is examined in McCloskey 2010a, pp. 131–137.

25. Engerman and Sokoloff 2012.

26. Steele 2001.

27. Marx 1867 (1887), pp. 170–171; my italics.

28. Karl Marx–Friedrich Engels–Werke, Band 23, S. 11–802, Dietz Verlag, Berlin/DDR 1962, p. 168,

29. Megill 2002, p. 262.

30. Maurizio Viroli (2014, p. 3)would argue that Guicciardini is the better choice for a “realist”

31. Hardy 1886, chap. 14.

Chapter 13

1. Weatherford 2004, p. 69.

2. Weatherford 2004, p. 224.

3. Brennu-Njǻls Saga, 70 kalfi. Njǻl is speaking to Mord at the Althing, the Icelandic gathering for trade and law reading and dispute settling. In the translation in the Gutenberg Project it is in chapter 69, not 70.

4. All the learning here is extracted from

5. Compare Robert Higgs’s argument (2012, introduction) that families and neighborhoods could enforce most laws better than a remote state.

6. James VI of Scotland 1598 (1996), p. 69.

7. Kimbrough, Smith, and Wilson 2010; Wilson, Jaworski, Schurter, and Smyth 2012.

8. Kimbrough, Smith, and Wilson 2010, p. 208.

9. Mokyr 2010, p. 378 and following.

10. Yoffee 2005, p. 112.

11. Parks 2013, pp. 8–9, 18, 143–144.

12. Davis 2012, pp. 453–455.

13. Rossi and Spagano 2014.

14. Fish 1980; Fish 2001, e.g., pp. 47, 57, 92.

15. The neo-institutionalist tale told by people such as North, Greif, Acemoglu, Robinson, and others is treated more fully in McCloskey 2010a, chaps. 33–37.

16. Mokyr 2010, p. 1.

17. McCloskey 2008.

18. Carlos and Lewis 1999, p. 726.

19. Adams 1994.

20. I learned to add the L to the analysis by speaking to the Bruno Levi Institute in Milan and the WIPCAD Lecture series at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Chapter 14

1. Coate 2010, p. 15.

2. Chamlee-Wright and Storr, eds. 2010.

3. O. Williamson 1999, p. 322.

4. O. Williamson 1999, p. 324.

5. McCloskey 2001. Compare Cowan (1983), who makes a similar point: ideology, not vacuum cleaners or washing machines relieving them of home duties (with a net yield, she argues, merely of cleaner homes and clothing), led women into paid work.

6. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 126.

7. As Donald Boudreaux has persuaded me to admit, and as Joel Mokyr and John Nye have helped me to see more clearly (Hart and Richman, eds. 2014).

8. Again, Mueller 1999.

9. A referee for the Journal of Institutional Economics pointed this out to me in January 2015.

10. Bostrom 2014, p. viii.

11. Lepenies 2006, p. 16.

12. Kelling and Wilson 1982.

13. Searle 2010, p. 95.

14. Searle 2010, pp. 95–96; my italics.

15. Searle 2010, p. 115.

16. Searle 2010, p. 113.

17. Searle 2010, p. 122.

18. For a fuller discussion of “conjective,” see McCloskey 1994. I recently discovered that Charles Taylor was making the same point as early as 1971, under the label of “intersubjectivity” (in “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Review of Metaphysics 25 [September]: 3–51). Again, I should have been reading Taylor thirty years ago, when John Nelson of the University of Iowa first suggested I do so.

19. Searle 2010, p. 10.

20. The example is due to my officemate in the late 1960s, the economist Steven N. S. Cheung.

21. Tallis 2011.

22. Searle 2010, p. 8.

23. Wilson 2010.

24. Quoted in Hodes 1972, pp. 71–72.

25. Searle 2010, p. 121.

26. All this in Tomasello 2014, pp. ix, 3, 5, and following.

27. Searle 2010, p. 7.

28. Searle 2010, p. 9.

29. Searle 2010, p. 106.

Chapter 15

1. Zamagni 2010, p. 63.

2. Das 2009, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv.

3. The stunning corruption of the federal government in the nineteenth century is detailed in Cost 2015.

4. For detailed justifications for what follows, see McCloskey 1985b, chaps. 22–25.

5. Spaulding 2014.

6. Dutton 1984; MacLeod 1988; MacLeod and Nuvolari 2006; Mokyr 2009; Boldrin and Levine 2008.

7. Smith 1776, 4.9, p. 664.

8. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2012,”

9. World Bank, “Doing Business,” doingbusiness.org/rankings (real income, Penn Tables for 2010).

10. I owe this remark to Pal Sandvik of the University of Berlin.

11. Lebergott 1984, p. 61. Donald Boudreaux reminded me of the passage. It is rather in contradiction to what Lebergott says on the previous page, that inputs accounted for all output.

12. Razafindrakoto, Roubaud, and Wachsberger 2013, English abstract.

13. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 450.

14. Epstein 2009, p. xii.

15. Parks 2013, p. 51.

Chapter 16

1. Easterly 2001, pp. 27–28.

2. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2013,”

3. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2013.”

4. The four states are the worst as reported in Liu and Mikesell 2014.

5. A gripping summary of the evidence worldwide, starting with Afghanistan, is Chayes 2015. Both Chayes and Cost (2015) are optimistic that better institutions without ethical reformation can save us. One doubts it.

6. Madison in The Federalist no. 51, 1787.

7. Ó Gráda 2014, personal conversation.

8. Kiesling 2008, 2012.

9. Phillips and Zecher 1993.

10. Editorial, Washington October 8, 2014.

11. Higgs 2012, p. 12.

12. Kolko 1965.

13. De Soto 2000.

14. McCloskey 1972, 1975.

15. Todorov 2000 (2003), p. 83.

16. Frost 1946, p. 118 (“Christmas Trees: A Christmas Circular Letter,” 1916). Frost is the most economistic of major poets.

17. McCloskey 2012b.

18. Zamora 2014.

19. Again, Ridley 2010.

Chapter 17

1. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 2, p. 191 (April 10, 1778).

2. Johnson 1775 (1984), p. 141.

3. Johnson 1775 (1984), p. 99; punctuation modernized.

4. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 1, pp. 155–157 (1755).

5. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 2, p. 16 (April 5, 1776). On which Boswell commented, “Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.”

6. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 1, p. 532 (March 27, 1775).

7. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 1, p. 273 (July 20, 1763). And Joan Rivers: “People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.”

8. Boswell 1791 (1949), vol. 2, p. 447 (1783).

9. Johnson 1753, pp. 238–223.

10. Quoted in Wood 2004, p. 66.

11. That was the problem, a sociological and political one, not the psychological one that Weber posited.

12. The discussion of Austen has benefited in many ways from comments by Anthony Waterman.

13. Hughes-Hallett 1991, p. 118.

14. Austen 1813, vol. 2, chap. 6. So many are the editions of Austen’s novels, and so short are her chapters, and so easily searched, and so healthful is it at any time to pause to reread a few of her pages, that I give only chapter citations.

15. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 30.

16. Quoted in Moretti 2013, p. 11.

17. Thompson 1963.

18. Hollander 1994.

19. See Terry 1988.

20. Woolf 1925, p. 142.

21. Ellis 2005, p. 416.

22. Austen 1815, chap. 4. “Country” here means “county” or “region.”

23. Wood 2004, p. 38. I cannot resist the musician’s definition of a “gentleman”: someone who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn’t.

24. Trollope 1874, vol. 1, pp. 226, 155. The theme persists throughout the novel, e.g., vol. 1, pp. 149, 183, 214, 269.

25. Wahrman 1995.

26. Austen 1813, vol. 2, chap. 2, I thank Jan Osborn of Chapman University for drawing my attention to the passage.

27. Butler 1975, p. 298.

28. Cowper, 1785 (1997), bk. 4, lines 671–682.

29. Ellis 2005, p. 416.

30. Ellis 2005, p. 417.

31. Wiltshire 2009, p. 167.

32. As Jason Douglas pointed out to me.

33. Auden 1936 (1976), p. 79.

Chapter 18

1. Ellis (2005, p. 423) applies it to the slave trade, and implies that Austen took the slave trade as a synecdoche for bourgeois life. Since the people who, as Ellis notes, “have some recent losses” on their West Indian estates are the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, the epitome of the gentry, not the bourgeoisie, Ellis’s figure does not seem to compute.

2. Copeland 1986, 1997, 2005.

3. MacDonagh 1993, p. 44.

4. Chapman, ed. 1955 (1985), p. 175–176.

5. Le Faye 2011, p. 205 (letter 77 to Martha Lloyd, November29–30, 1812).

6. Butler 1985, p. xxvi.

7. Waterman 1991.

8. Chwe 2013.

9. As Chris Findeisen pointed out to me.

10. As Don Boudreaux pointed out to me.

11. Haidt 2006; March 1971; Nye 1991; Akerlof and Shiller 2009.

12. Austen 1787–1790. She continues in the crazy humor of her juvenilia, “Their children were too numerous to be particularly described; it is sufficient to say that in general they were virtuously inclined & not given to any wicked ways. Their family being too large to accompany them in every visit, they took nine with them alternately.”

13. Einaudi 1919 (1961), p. 272. Alberto Mingardi directed me to the passage.

14. Ibsen 1892 (1965), act 1, p. 800.

15. Austen 1811, vol. 2, chap. 14.

16. Austen 1813, vol. 1, chap. 19.

17. Sun Tzu, The Art of trans. 1910, chap. 4, at A few paragraphs here are taken from The Bourgeois

18. Jullien 1996, p. 197.

19. Earle 1989, p, 73.

20. Parker 1989, p. 66.

21. Parker 1989, p. 76.

22. Michie 2000, p. 6. Compare Michie 2011.

23. Wheeler 2005, p. 409.

24. No. 108 (November 18, 1814), in R. W. Chapman, ed., 1955 (1985), p. 174.

25. Wheeler 2005, p. 412.

26. Waterman, personal correspondence.

27. Austen 2004, p. 143 (to Cassandra, December 27, 1808).

Chapter 19

1. Hume 1741–1742 (1987), p. 546.

2. Smith 1759 (1790), 1.1.1.

3. Smith 1776, 1.11.

4. Smith 1977, p. 188.

5. Smith 1776, 1.10.

6. Joy 1877.

7. Hovenkamp 1990.

8. Boldrin and Levine 2008; Lienhard 2006, p. 101.

9. Walton 1993, pp. 146–148.

10. Smith 1776, 4.2.44.

11. Dupré 2004, p. 337.

12. Smith 1776, 4.5.55.

13. Smith 1776, 4.5.55.

14. Smith 1776, 1.10.118.

15. Fleischacker 1999, 2014. Compare Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, and later prime minister, in a speech at the University of Edinburgh, claiming Smith for the center left (Brown 2002).

16. Berry 1992, p. 84.

17. Stewart 1793 (1980), p. 266.

18. Stewart 1793 (1980), p. 326.

19. Stewart 1793 (1980), p. 307; my italics.

20. John Kirby (1990) is my source for allotting the Greek peitho in the diagram.

21. Hursthouse 1999, pp. 102–103, 107, 111.

22. Canetti 1973 (1985), p. 26.

23. Smith 1980, p. 262.

24. Stewart 1793 (1980), p. 300.

25. Kuehn 2001, pp. 153–163.

Chapter 20

1. Rothschild 2002.

2. Leo Strauss 1953; John Finnis 1980. Compare Hont and Ignatieff 1983; but then see Fleischacker 2004, pp. 221–226.

3. Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Rawls 1971; Nussbaum 2006; and criticism in McCloskey 2011a.

4. Anscombe 1958, MacIntyre 1981; Nussbaum herself again 1986; Hursthouse 1999.

5. Knight 1923 (1977), p. 62.

6. Canetti 1973 (1985), p. 218.

7. Leopardi 1845 (1985), p. 28.

8. Smith 1776, 4.2.

9. See Brown 1994, pp. 165–166 and footnotes, for a discussion of such an “overly economistic” readings of The Wealth of and Evensky 2005, chap. 10, on the “Chicago Smith” versus the “Kirkaldy Smith.”

10. Taylor (1989) makes much of the rise of individualism. It would be unwise to dismiss the argument of so wise a scholar that individuality is novel. But one wonders. From the documents we have, Israelites and Romans and the English peasants of Piers Ploughman or the people of The Canterbury or for that matter the blessed of Il do not look collectivist or communitarian or whatever alternative to “individualist” people have in mind when they make the argument.

11. Das 2009, chap. 1.

12. Frank 2005, p. 141. Frank claims the losses are “large and avoidable” but does not inquire into how large and avoidable the losses would be from having the government help us to avoid them.

13. Frank 2005, pp. 140–141.

14. Das 2009, p. 11.

15. For the Dalai Lama’s opinion of the matter, see Brooks 2014.

16. Das 2009, p. 73.

17. Cicero 44 BCE, 32.

18. And compare Nygren 1930/1936 (1982).

19. Prestona and de Waal 2002.

20. Again, McCloskey 2011a.

21. Aquinas 1269–1272, art. 1, p. 112.

22. Brown 1994, pp. 7, 53, 177.

23. Fleischacker 2004, pp. 34–35, 97, 99. See also Peart and Levy 2005; Peart and Levy, eds. 2008.

24. McCloskey 2007, 2011b.

25. Simmel 1907 (2004), p. 240.

26. Smith 1759 (1790), 7.2.1.6–7.2.110, pp. 268–270. I will also give page numbers, to the Glasgow edition.

27. Smith 1759 (1790), 7.2.1.28, p. 282.

28. Smith 1759 (1790), 6.concl.1, p. 262.

29. Smith 1759 (1790), 6.concl.1, p. 262.

30. Smith 1759 (1790), 3.3.35, p. 152.

31. Smith 1759 (1790), 3.3.34, p. 152.

Chapter 21

1. Smith 1759 (1790), 1.1.2.1, pp. 13–14.

2. Shaftesbury 1699, 1732 (2001), Vol. 2, p. 135.

3. Klamer, like Mokyr, figures heavily in my writings, and so you might as well know that his first name is pronounced “ARE-yoh,” and his last “KLAH-mer.”

4. Anscombe 1958 (1997), p. 34.

5. Smith 1759 (1790), 7.2.2.14, p. 299.

6. Peterson and Seligman 2004, p. 30.

7. Hooker 1594 (1888), bk. 1, 40, 4.

8. Smith 1759 (1790), 3.3.43, p. 156.

9. Taylor 1989, p. 503. I am leaning here also on the lucid commentary on Taylor by Anna Wierzbicka (2006, pp. 80–82).

10. Taylor 1989, p. 242.

11. Porpora, Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (Oxford, 2001), pp. 71–72, quoted in Wierzbicka 2006, p. 81.

12. Fleischacker 2004, pp. 61, 63.

Chapter 22

1. Smith 1776, 4.7, pt. 3.

2. Smith 1977, pp. 196–197 (June 3, 1776).

3. Hume 1741–1742 (1987), p. 548.

4. Smith, “Letter to Gilbert Elliot,” October 10, 1759, in Smith 1977, p. 54.

5. Smith 1977, p. 54.

6. Smith 1977, p. 55.

7. Gratia non tollit naturam sed Aquinas 1251–1273 1, Q8, ad 2.

8. Epictetus 8, 14, 17.

9. Epictetus 1.

10. Smith 1977, p. 52.

11. The same letter to Elliott, in Smith 1977, p. 53.

12. Hayek 1979, vol. 3, p. 76.

13. Again, Hayek 1979, vol. 3, p. 76. I refer to Peart and Levy 2005; Peart and Levy, eds. 2008.

14. I am indebted Peter Calcagno for a conversation that discovered what follows.

15. Smith 1776, 4.2.9, p. 456.

16. Smith 1776, 2.3.36, p.346.

17. Smith 1776, 4.2.9, p. 456.

18. Examples of the error from two economists whom I greatly admire are Boettke in Boettke, Caceres, and Martin 2013, p. 91, top line; and Gintis 2013, p. 119, top paragraph. Neither can be imagined not to have read The Wealth of as most people who commit the error can, and so I cannot explain it.

19. Fleischacker 2004, pp. 90–91.

20. Schumpeter 1949, p. 353.

21. Again, Peart and Levy 2005.

22. Smith 1762–1766, (A) 6.56, p. 352.

23. Montesquieu 1748, bk. 20, 1. See Henry Clark 2007.

24. Smith 1759 (1790), 2.1.3, p. 111.

25. Boettke 2011. Lynne Kiesling kindly set me straight on all this (see Kiesling 2011).

26. Schumpeter 1912 (1934); Kirzner 1973, 1989.

27. Field 2011.

28. Epstein 2009, p. xi.

29. I thank Graham Peterson for this insight.

30. Smith 1776, 4.9.51, p. 687.

31. Skinner 1969, reprinted in Tully, ed. 1989, p. 55; Austin is discussed on p. 61.

32. Kagan 2006, p. 133.

33. Smith 1759 (1790), 4.2.2.17, pp. 233–234.

34. Skinner 1969, in Tully, ed. 1989, p. 62.

Chapter 23

1. Huang 1998, p. 246.

2. Auden, “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),” pt. 3, p. 184.

3. Anton Howes of King’s College London set me straight on an ungenerous and inaccurate interpretation of Weber.

4. Lawrence 1923 (2003), p. 30.

5. Baudelaire 1857 (1986), p. 101.

6. Moretti 2013, p. 47.

7. Wood 2004, pp. 5–6.

8. Baudelaire 1857 (1986), p. 99.

9. MacIntyre 1981, pp. 171, 185.

10. Franklin, p. 143.

11. Wood 2004, p. 36.

12. Wood 2004, p. 12 and chap. 1, “Becoming a Gentleman.”

13. Franklin, p. 115.

14. Franklin, p. 115.

15. Franklin, p. 113.

16. Wood 2004, p. 27.

17. Franklin, chap. 4.

18. Franklin, p. 106; my italics.

19. Franklin, p. 166.

20. Kant 1785 (2002), p. 10 (AK 4:395).

21. Franklin, p. 159. The Lopez remark is from a television interview I saw many years ago.

22. Franklin, p. 190.

23. Lawrence 1923, chap. 2.

24. Franklin, p. 114; his italics suppressed, mine added.

25. Franklin, p. 158.

26. Franklin, p. 54.

27. Franklin, p. 58.

28. Franklin, pp. 153 (Proverbs 3:16), 144 (Proverbs 22:29); Weber 1904–1905 (1958), p. 53.

29. Franklin, pp. 92, 83.

30. Field 2002.

31. Smith 1759 (1790), 1.3.2.7, p. 57.

32. Juvenal 4:86–93. Polonius was not so lucky.

33. Smith 1977, p. 121.

34. Smith 1977, p. 44 (Hume to Smith, July 28, 1759,).

35. Smith 1980, p. 243.

36. Herman 2001, p. 59.

Chapter 24

1. Andrew 1980, p. 432.

2. Fischer 1989; Grosjean 2014.

3. McCloskey 2006c, pp. 219–221.

4. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 21.

5. Andrew 1980, p. 429, n97.

6. Wahrman 1995.

7. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 152.

8. MacCulloch 2010, p. 754.

9. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 450.

10. MacCulloch 2010, p. 754.

11. Crystal and Crystal 2002, p. xx.

12. Austen 1815, chap.25.

13. Quoted to this effect in Moretti 2013, p. 135n.

14. Smiles 1859 (1958), p. 368.

15. McKeon 1987 (2002), p. 191.

16. Maine 1861 (1905), chap. 9, pp. 297–298.

17. Miller, 1957, p. 170.

18. Bismarck quoted in Taylor 1955, p. 101.

19. Temple 1673, IV, p. 83.

20. Hirschman 1977, p. 58.

21. Trump 1987.

22. Mann 1901 (1952), p. 200.

23. For a persuasive call to think again, see Lauck 2013.

24. Mann 1901 (1952), pp. 42, 380, 209, 320, 144, 370, 34, 400.

25. Mann 1901 (1952), pp. 124, 57, 215.

26. Mann 1901 (1952), p. 243.

27. Mann 1901 (1952), p. 215.

28. Mokyr 2009, p. 8.

Chapter 25

1. James 2007, p. 217.

2. Taylor 2007, p. 171.

3. Thomas 2009, pp. 122, 114.

4. Waterman 1994, p. 48.

5. Armstrong 2009 (2010), pp. 167, 171, and throughout. It is her main point, and is derived from the theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Belief in History (1977) and Faith and Belief (1979).

6. Armstrong 2009 (2010), p. 187.

7. Luther, Sermon 25:7, quoted in Armstrong 2009 (2010), p. 171.

8. For a fuller discussion of “honest” in the play see McCloskey 2006b, pp. 294–295; and Empson 1951 (1989), p. 218.

9. Moynahan 2002, p. 402.

10. Paradise 2nd ed. (1674), 4:313f.

11. 2 Henry 5.1.

12. Quoted in Thomas 2009, p. 52.

13. Shaftesbury 1713, vol. 4, p. 4.

14. “The Putney Debates,” Online Library of Liberty,

15. Quoted in Johnson 1779–1781, “Addison.”

16. Searches from the Bibliomania version of Tom

17. Smith 1759 (1790), 3.3.6, p. 138.

18. Smith 1759 (1790), 7.4.28, p. 337.

19. Project Guttenberg text, as also for the counting of “honest” and compounds. Anthony Trollope, Phineas

20.

21. Trollope 1867–1868, vol. 1, pp. 322, 323, 325.

22. Compare Moretti 2013, p. 173: “Honesty is for this [bourgeois] class what honor had been for the aristocracy; etymologically, it even derives from honor.... The word of the merchant is as good as gold.”

23. The searchable Italian text is available at

24. Machiavelli 1513 (1964), 9, para. 2, pp. 76, 77 (El principato); 19, para. 6, pp. 160, 161 (Da queste); 21, 5, pp. 188, 189 (E sempre interverrà).

25. Huppert 1999, pp. 99–102.

26. Moliere 1670, act 3, scene 12.

27. Balzac 1835 (1946), pp. 26, 64.

28. Stendhal 1830, pp. 44 monsieur, car d’après mes 47 scène valut à Julien le titre de Moretti (2013, p. 151) recounts a similar struggle over the honorific Don and the sarcastic Mastro-Don (craftsman-“Don”) in Giovanni Verga’s novel of a borghese in Sicily, Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889; translated into English in 1923 by, of all people, D. H. Lawrence).

29. Devoto and Oli 1990, p. 1279.

30. Ragazzini. ed. 1993, p. 443.

Chapter 26

1. Pleij 1994, p. 64.

2. “honest,” sense 3c.

3. Mandeville 1714 ed., lines 409–410; “honest” in various forms occurs at lines 118, 225, 233, 257, 295, 334, as the silly virtue of a hive of bees who are therefore neither prosperous in economy nor great in power.

4. I am under the impression, perhaps false—I cannot get my Slavic-speaking and Spanish-speaking friends to set me straight, and therefore if I am wrong they are, you see, to blame—that the Slavic languages in modern times, like Spanish, appear not to have separated the two meanings as sharply. In Czech, for example, čestný means both “honorable” and “honest,” as does the Polish Latin-imported meaning both “noble” and “truth-telling.” On the other hand, the non-imported Polish word for “noble” is cognate from the same root cześć with the Czech word, and uczciwy (note the u-) is now “that will not cheat.”

5. Bybelgenootskap van Suid-Afrika, Die Nuwe Testament en Capetown: CTP Boekdrukkers, 1983.

6. For all this, see the astonishing website The Unbound

7. Elias 1939 (2000), p. 88.

8. Rose 2002, p. 35.

9. Quoted in Thomas 2009, p. 55.

10. Emmanuel van Meteren (1535–1612). The quote is given in many places, such as Paxman 1998, p. 35.

11. Paxman 1998, p. 63.

12. Heal and Holmes 1994, pp. 39–42.

13. Holmes, personal correspondence, July 2014.

14. Clark et al. 2014.

15. Adhia 2013, p. 106.

Chapter 27

1. As J. Paul Hunter (1990) argues.

2. Coetzee 1986, p. 18. I might as well share with you my hard-won knowledge of how his name is pronounced: “kuut-SEE.” No extra charge.

3. Watt 1957, p. 65.

4. Coetzee 2001, p. 24.

5. Hippolyte Taine 1866–1878, Histoire de la Littérature quoted in Coetzee 2001, p. 25.

6. Defoe 1719 (1993), pp. 41–42.

7. Defoe 1719 (1993), p. 41.

8. Defoe 1719 (1993), p. 68.

9. Austen 1818b, p. 1.

10. Coetzee 1994 in 2001, p. 227.

11. Langford 1992, pp. 5, 61, 105.

12. Langford 1992, pp. 5, 30, 107.

13. Willey 1964, pp. 221, 223, 228; italics suppressed.

14. Sturkenboom 2004.

15. See McCloskey 2006b, chaps. 17–18.

16. Addison 1713 (2004), act 1, scene 4, lines 33–38.

17. Addison and Steele 1711–1712 (1926), no. 287 (Tuesday, January 29, 1712).

18. Addison 1713, act 4, scene 4, line 81.

19. Wright 1935, p. 656.

Chapter 28

1. Loftis 1959.

2. Viner 1970, p. 316.

3. Taylor 2007, pp. 178–179.

4. See the discussion in McCloskey 2006b, pp. 121–122.

5. Stone and Stone 1984, p. 192.

6. Addison and Steele 1711–1712 (1926), no. 55 (Thursday, May 3, 1711).

7. Steele 1722, act 4, scene 2, as also the next quotation.

8. Voltaire 1733, 1734, p. 19.

9. Emerson 1844, 3rd paragraph.

10. My learning here comes from the literary historian Beatrice Schuchardt, who informed me of the work of Fuentes (1999) and García Garrosa (1999).

11. Child 1860.

12. Nettleton, Case, and Stone 1969, p. 595.

13. Lillo 1731 (1952), act 1, scene 1, p. 293. Act, scene, and page references are to the Modern Library edition, edited by Quintana.

14. Lillo 1731 (1952), p. 294.

15. Lillo 1731 (1952), 3.1.3–9. Laurent Volkmann of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena reminded me of the passage. Notice that the word “science” has not yet been specialized, as it was in English in the middle of the next century, to “physical and biological science.”

16. Cumberland 1771, act 1, scene 1, lines 3–5, in Nettleton, Case, and Stone 1969, p. 715.

17. Lillo 1731 (1952),I 1.1, p. 295.

18. Lillo 1731 (1952), 5.2, p. 331.

19. Lillo 1731 (1952), prologue and prose preface.

20. Quoted in Nettleton, Case, and Stone 1969, p. 596.

21. Fields 1999, p. 2.

22. Lillo 1731 (1952), 1.2, p. 296.

23. Lillo 1731 (1952), 4.2, p. 329.

Chapter 29

1. Sombart 1913 (1915), p. 115.

2. “Stevinus,” Encyclopaedia 11th ed., 1910–1911.

3. Temple 1673 (1972), 4, p. 87.

4. Knighton 2013, for example chap. 7, “Creating a Standard.”

5. Petty 1690 (1890), preface.

6. Nye 2007, p. 153.

7. Nye 2007, p. 153.

8. Nye 2007, p. 52: “the Portugal trade furnishes us with some dying Commodities.” Spelling and punctuation modernized.

9. Moretti 2013, p. 88.

10. See Ziliak and McCloskey 2008.

Chapter 30

1. Tocqueville 1840 (1945), vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 9.

2. Nee and Swedberg 2007, pp. 4–5.

3. On Whorf, see McWhorter 2008, pp. 137–169, and especially his vexation on p. 144.

4. Storr 2013, p. 59.

5. Storr 2013, pp. 66–69.

6. Letter to Francisque de Corcelle, quoted in Swedberg 2009, p. 280.

7. Weber 1904–1905 (1958), p. 53.

8. Weber 1904–1905 (1958), p. 53.

9. Weber 1904–1905 (1958), p. 31. Again I thank Anton Howes of King’s College, London for making me think this through again.

10. Swedberg 2009, p. 279.

11. Jones 2010, p. 8.

12. The late David Landes’s writings provide cases in point of the Weberian mistake, from Landes 1949 onward.

13. Jones 2010, pp. 2, 4.

14. Jones 2010, p. 36.

15. This and the two quotations following, Niebuhr 1952, chap. 3, sec. 1.

16. Mote 1999, p. 391.

17. So, about China, Kenneth Pomeranz tells me.

18. Professor Françoise Lavocat of Université Paris 3 tells me this.

19. Simmel 1907 (2004), p. 444. Compare Shils (1957, p. 599), who brackets Simmel with Tönnies and early Sombart (and I would add, though I think Shils would not have, Weber) as “German sociological romanticism.”

20. Oschinky 1971.

21. Kimbrough, Smith, and Wilson 2008; Kimbrough, Smith, and Wilson 2010; Wilson, Jaworski, Schurter, and Smyth 2012.

22. Quoted in Wood 1999, p. 262.

23. Pipes 1999 (2000), p. 25.

Chapter 31

1. Guttman 2014. I thank Lynn Greenhough for drawing my attention to the piece.

2. Berg 1985, 2004; Berg and Hudson 1992.

3. De Vries 2008.

4. McCloskey 1970.

5. Mokyr 2010, p. 35.

6. Mackenzie 1771, chap. 28, 127.

7. Temple 1672, chap. 6.

8. Montesquieu 1748 (1777), bk. 20, sect. 7.

9. Coase and Wang 2013a, p. 10.

10. Coase and Wang 2013a, p. 9.

11. Quoted in Phillipson 2010, p. 35.

12. Pat Hudson (1992, pp. 218–225) gives a brief but penetrating introduction to the issue.

13. Hume 1741–1742 (1987), “Of Civil Liberty,” p. 93.

14. Coleman 1973.

15. See the factual doubts concerning “failure” expressed in McCloskey 1970, 1973; Edgerton 1996, 2007.

16. Heston, Summers, and Aten 2012,

17. As is argued in detail in Edgerton 1996, 2007.

18. Kennedy 1976, p. 59, which is the source for the popular verse quoted as well.

19. Kadane 2008. Kadane’s research is fine, as is his writing. But, remarkably, he reads Smith as “demoralizing” (that is, allowing in an amoral sense such behaviors as worldly vanity, pp. 253–254). It is the left’s and the right’s misreading, both, that Smith was about justifying the worst of greed. Kadane makes Smith into Mandeville, claiming that “for Smith, ‘vanity’ augmented national wealth” (p. 259). One can find a little textual justification for such a claim, I admit. But Smith is fierce against vanity.

20. Kindleberger 1996, p. 93, quoting Letwin, Josiah Child, Merchant Economy (1969).

21. Sprat 1667 (1958), p. 88.

22. Dryden 1672, 2.1.391–393. Compare Van der Welle 1962, p. 140. I am indebted for the Dryden scholarship here to Kevin Vanden Daelen.

23. Child 1668 (1698), pp. 148, 68.

24. The Swedish historian Erik Thomson (2005) has shown that the English were not the only Europeans startled by the economic success of the United Provinces and ready, with some reluctance, to imitate them.

Chapter 32

1. “2015 Index of Economic Freedom,” In his reworking of the statistics of (negative) market liberty, Leandro Prados de la Escosura wisely excludes the share of government expenditure (2014, pp. 8–10). He quotes Hayek writing in 1960: “A government that is comparatively inactive but does the wrong things may do much more to cripple the forces of the market economy than one that is more concern with economic affairs but confines itself to actions which assist the spontaneous forces of the economy.”

2. Edgerton 1996. For a heavy use of the biological metaphor of birth, growth, maturity, and decline, see Kindleberger 1996.

3. Smith 1776, 4.9, p. 664.

4. Quoted in Brailsford 1961, p. 624. Thomas Jefferson, the driver of slaves, had the temerity to use Rumbold’s words. Compare Jefferson’s behavior, unto death, with John Lilburne’s charge in 1646 that the upper house of Parliament was now acting as the king had: “All you intended... was merely to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants, that so you might get up, and ride us in their stead” (Brailsford 1961, p. 93).

5. Maus 2002, p. 1837.

6. More 1516 (2010), p. 179.

7. I give the English translation of the Scots original. Lindsay 1542–1544 (2000), lines 4070–4075; the next quotations are 4082–4083 and 4085–4087. I thank my vriendinnetje Margaret Raftery of the University of the Free State for the reference.

8. Lindsay 1542–1544 (2000), lines 4187–4189 (bakers), 4194–4195 (cordiners).

9. Quoted in Marcus, Mueller, and Rose, eds. (2000), p. 328.

10. Filling 2009, p. 9.

11. 1.1.158–167.

12. A point the English historian David Cannadine makes (Cannadine 1990).

13. Quoted in Wilson 1965, pp. 155–156.

14. Jardine and Stewart 1999, p. 433.

15. Burton 1621, pp. 352–361.

16. Akerlof 1970.

17. Davis 2012, p. 136.

18. Storr, personal correspondence, 2008.

Chapter 33

1. Marlowe 1592, 1.1.113, 2.2.56.

2. Bevington 2002, p. 483.

3. On the joke, sense 2b in the

4. McNeir 1938.

5. Bevington 2002, p. 485.

6. It was a convention not always exploited. In Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (mid-1620s) everyone, high and low, speaks in blank verse.

7. Thus: “For he that sheds his blood with iambic pentameter.

8. Magnusson 1999, p. 120: the lower orders “lack the mastery to assimilate the prestige forms successfully to their actual performance.”

9. Google Books scan of the reprinted 1698 edition, p. 117. The first public edition had been 1664, well after Mun’s death. Bizarrely, this famous remark (and “One man’s necessity becomes another man’s opportunity,” p. 116) is in aid of showing that expenditure on a suit at law is a good thing, because at least the money “is still in the kingdom,” and so foreign trade is unaffected, and so all is well in the crucial matter of acquiring bullion from abroad. It is the usual trickle-down or trickle-up economics of “keeping the money at home,” which nowadays lies behind, say, schemes to subsidize new sports stadiums.

10. Quoted in Waterman 2014b.

11. Cf. Bevington 2002, p. 484: “his ship literally comes in.”

12. Deloney 1597, quoted in Stevenson 1976, p. 13.

13. Stevenson 1976, p. 14.

14. Mortenson 1976, p. 252.

15. Bevington 2002, p. 484.

16. McBurney 1965, pp. xi–xiii.

17. 17:38–49. The “gentlemanlike” is a little odd, though attested in the OED from 1557 to 1882. Perhaps it is a Dutchism from

18. Stevenson 1976, pp. 8, 7.

19. Quoted in Stevenson 1976, pp. 3–4; my italics.

20. Stevenson 1976, p. 5.

21. Frey 2012.

22. Stevenson 1976, p. 18.

23. Alger 1868, p. 1.

24. Alger 1868, chap. 24; in chap. 20 the overslick salesman Coleman is called a “capitalist,” in the earlier meaning of a substantial wealth holder. Alger was no enthusiast for trade-tested improvement, though he is routinely cited as one.

25. Multatuli 1860 (1988), p. 15. By the way, the real name of “Multatuli” (Latin for “many things have I borne”) was in fact Dekker (which means “roofer”), like the Elizabethan dramatist.

26. Quoted in Watt 1957, p. 210.

Chapter 34

1. Sombart 1913, p. 17.

2. Sombart 1913, pp. 118, 128.

3. A’Hearn, Baten, and Crayen 2009; Dore 1965; Rawski 1979.

4. 1 Henry 2.5.160–199, condensed.

5. Boswell 1791 (1949), 2, 1783, p. 456.

6. Boswell 1791 (1949), 2, p. 458.

7. G. Clark 2007b, pp. 175–180.

8. Maynial 1911, pp. 7, 10.

9. Johnson 1775 (1984), p. 139.

10. Johnson 1775 (1984), p. 104.

11. Quoted in Mathias 1979, p. 312.

12. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 26.

13. Goethe 1796, chap. 10, para. 13.

14. Quoted in Mathias 1979, p. 296.

15. Tufte 1982, pp. 28, 32f, 44ff.

16. Bryson 2003, p. 57.

17. See, for example, Lane 1973, p. 142.

18. Wardley 1993.

19. Fussell, ed. 1936.

20. Jones 2010, p. 22.

21. Titow 1972.

22. I owe this idea to Professor Shan Chun of the Chinese University of Politics and Law, Beijing.

23. Keegan 1976, p. 90.

Chapter 35

1. McCormick 2001, pp. 14, 671–672.

2. I use throughout the Mattingly and Handford translation (Penguin, 1970), compared occasionally with the Stuart 1916 Latin. Tacitus, sect. 5, p. 105.

3. Tacitus, sect. 16, p. 114.

4. Tacitus, sect. 29, p. 125.

5. Huizinga 1935 (1968), p. 25.

6. Huizinga 1935 (1968), pp. 110–112.

7. Hohenberg and Lees 1985; Mann and de Vries 1984.

8. Schama 1987, pp. 47, 420.

9. Pleij 1994, p. 74.

10. Pleij 1994, p. 63.

11. Pleij 1994, p. 67.

12. Pleij (1994, p. 64) makes this point in quoting the printed edition of Heinric en Margriete.

13. Alpers 1983.

14. Fuchs 1978, p. 8.

15. Fuchs 1978, p. 115.

16. Sluijter 1991, p. 184.

17. Cicero nowhere gives the tag in so many words, but it is implied in several places, for instance de Oratore 27.115.

18. Brettell manual to accompany Brettell 2002, p. 14.

19. Kiers and Tissink 2000, p. 173.

20. My colleague long ago at the University of Iowa, the political philosopher John Nelson, taught me this.

21. Deursen 1999, p. 173.

22. For the interesting textual rise and fall of “earnest,” see Moretti 2013, pp. 131–133.

23. Larkin 1970 (1983), p. 297.

24. Schama 1987, pp. 452–453.

25. Fuchs 1978, p. 147.

Chapter 36

1. Churchill, 1764 (1997), lines 185–196.

2. Temple 1673 (1972), 4, p. 88.

3. Wilson 1968, p. 55.

4. Jaume 2008 (2013), p. 147.

5. All this, McCants 1997, pp. 2, 4, 5.

6. McCants 1997, p. 201.

7. Hobbes 1640 (1650), chap. 9, para. 10. I admit that he might be anticipating moral sentiments. It is unwise to read Hobbes uncharitably, as Michael Oakeshott once noted, calling “the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language” (Oakeshott, “Introduction to [1946],

8. Israel 1995, p. 352.

9. Israel 1995, p. 355.

10. Simmel 1908 (1955), p. 154. Simmel continues, “so as to make their reduced energies more productive,” and then finally in a eugenic gesture typical of his times, “so as to prevent the degeneration of their progeny.”

11. Israel 1995, p. 358.

12. Langford 1992, p. 136.

13. But see the proposals for social insurance from businessmen in Aachen decades earlier (Reckendrees 2014b).

14. Israel 1995, p. 360.

15. De Vries and der Woude 1997, pp. 659, 661.

16. Parker 1985, p. 25.

17. Zagorin 2003, p. 259.

18. Huizinga 1935 (1968), p. 53.

19. Israel 1995, p. 673.

20. Wilson 1968, p. 18.

21. Wilson 1968, p. 17.

Chapter 37

1. MacCulloch 2010, p. 686.

2. Herman 2001, pp. 2–10.

3. Union of Utrecht, art. 13.

4. Nadler 1999, p. 11.

5. MacCulloch 2010, p. 640.

6. MacCulloch 2010, p. 677; his italics.

7. Zamoyski 1987, pp. 90–91.

8. MacCulloch 2004, p. 187.

9. Zamoyski 1987, p. 144. The declarations by Erasmus and Grotius are mottoes for Zamoyski’s chap. 7, “The Kingdom of Erasmus,” and chap. 5, “God and Caesar.”

10. Zamoyski 1987, p. 75.

11. Zamoyski 1987, p. 149.

12. Toulmin 1992, p. 53.

13. Vondel 1632, line 2:

14. Zeeman 2004.

15. Israel 1995, pp. 640, 638, 535.

16. I am following here Stephen Toulmin’s interpretation in Toulmin 1992, pp. 47–55.

17. Israel 1995, p. 536.

18. Quoted in Zagorin 2003, p. 149.

19. Temple 1673 (1972), chap. 6.

20. 1670 figures from Maddison 2001, p. 77, with a rough guess for countries not covered.

21. Israel 1995, p. 639.

22. Hansen 2014.

23. Butler 1725, p. 349.

24. Smith 1759 (1790), 7.2.4.12, p. 312.

25. Rotter 1966.

26. Khurana 2007.

27. Israel 1995, p. 504.

28. Stark 2001 (2003), p. 25.

29. Trevor-Roper 1940 (1962), p. 3.

30. The Italian historian Antonino de Stefano, quoted in Stark 2003, p. 61.

31. Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationism (1929), p. 12, quoted in Stark 2001 (2003), p. 25.

32. Bakunin 1869, Third Letter.

33. Stark 2001 (2003), p. 61. Compare pp. 24, 27, 55, and throughout.

34. Butterfield 1980.

35. Zagorin 2003, pp. 10, 12.

Chapter 38

1. Hobsbawm 2011, p. 324.

2. Bakunin 1869, Second Letter.

3. Quoted in Sinyavsky 1959 (1960), p.159.

4. Rev. Brian Hastings helped me see this.

5. On the army’s Ft. Myer, Virginia. tests of 1909, see Kenneth Chafee McIntosh, “Sudden Greatness,” Atlantic September 1921,

6. Taleb 2007.

7. Hayek 1960, p. 62.

8. Lienhard 2006, p. 118.

9. “Leveller Principles,” section 8 of “Supplementary Documents” in Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); accessed in Online Library of Liberty,

10. “The Putney Debates,” Online Library of Liberty, The Jack quotation is from Mercurius Pragmaticus, 9–16 November 1647.

11. Marchamont Nedham, quoted in Brailsford 1961, p. 309.

12. Milton 1649 (1957), pp. 255, 257.

13. Jacob 2001, p. 57.

14. Blackstone 1765–1769, 1, p. 153.

15. Mielants 2008, p. 40.

16. I take the vocabulary of the Church of Faith versus the Church of Power from Rodney Stark’s sociological histories, such as Stark 2001 (2003).

17. MacCulloch 2010, p. 592.

18. Dewald 1993, p. xii.

19. Dewald 1993, p. 15.

20. Skwire 2013.

21. Surowiecki 2008.

Chapter 39

1. Rev. Brian Hastings in conversation; Tickle 2008; inspired by the ideas of the Episcopal bishop Mark Dyer.

2. Luther, ca. 1525, Point 48 (“On the Third Article”).

3. Shorto 2013, p. 42.

4. Hegel 1821–1831 (1953), p. 122.

5. Quoted in Rasmusson 1995, p. 24.

6. Rasmusson 1995, p. 26.

7. Grice-Hutchinson 1952; Fernandez 2010.

8. René Taveneaux, writing in 1965, quoted in Jaume 2008 (2013), p. 149.

9. Jaume 2008 (2013), p. 166.

10. MacKinnon 1987, p. 242–243.

11. Taylor 2007, p. 735.

12. Vidal-Robert 2013.

13. Trevor-Roper 1940, pp. 2, 4.

14. Taylor 2004, p. 106.

15. Herman 2001, p. 19.

16. MacCulloch 2010, p. 718.

17. MacCulloch 2004, p. 171.

18. MacCulloch 2004, p. 508.

19. MacCulloch 2010, p. 685.

20. Huppert 1977.

21. On the dramatic fall in the cost of printing, see Baten and van Zanden 2008; Plopeanu et al. 2012.

22. Hill 1972, p. 11.

23. Moore 2000, p. 3.

24. Taylor 1989, pp. 20, 13, and throughout; McCloskey 2006b, chaps. 10–13, esp. p. 151.

25. Taylor 1989, p. 23.

26. Lienhard 2006, p. 57.

27. I owe this point to Marcel Becker of Radboud University.

28. Haskell 1999, p. 10.

Chapter 40

1. McMahon, p. 176, from Christopher Hill. As many do, McMahon retains Hill’s interpolation, “that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth,” as though Winstanley had written it.

2. See for the analysis Watt 1957, p. 209.

3. Quoted by Huppert 1999, p. 101.

4. Wootton 2005.

5. Quoted in Bruckner 2000 (2010), p. 1.

6. Taylor 1989, p. 267.

7. Lawrence 1901. For an elaboration of the argument, see McCloskey 2010a, pp. 446–450.

8. Quoted in Sherman 1976.

9. As Robert Sessions reminded me.

10. As Anthony Waterman reminded me.

11. McMahon 2005, p. 15.

12. Taylor, “A Sermon Preached,” quoted in McKeon 1987 (2002), p. 203.

13. Appleby 1978, p. 9. Elsewhere she has frequently used the phrase “rooted in human nature,” noting the use of the idea by Locke and Jefferson.

14. Morrill 2001, p. 380. In this form the source is an acquaintance of King Charles, Bishop Gilbert Burnet (Burnet, A History of His Own 1850 ed., p. 236).

15. Nygren 1930/1936 (1982), pp. 739–740.

16. Greeley 2000, p. 7 and chap. 2, “Sacred Desire.” And Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2005): “Eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated.... Man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive” (para. 7).

17. Second Vatican Council, “Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church,” Rome, October 28, 1965

18. John XXII’s bull is In the Lord’s item 8: In agro translated from Meister Eckehart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag AG, 1979), p. 449 ff,

19. Jacob 1976, p. 51.

20. Goldstone 2002, citing Jacob 1988.

21. Oslington 2008, p. 63.

22. Edwards 1739, pt. 2, period 3, pp. 347, 351, 353.

23. MacCulloch 2010, p. 759.

24. Phillips 1996, p. 5.

25. Nisbet 1980, p. 180.

26. Nye 2007; McCloskey 1980.

27. Waterman 2004, chap. 3; Waterman 2008.

28. Book of Common Prayer 1662 (1999), p. 539.

Chapter 41

1. Jacob 2014, p. 148. Jack Goldstone challenges me with the counterexample of what he supposes are the small number of copies of The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd ed., 1967) “in private libraries.” Yet it is surely an order of magnitude, maybe two, more than twenty or sixty-six.

2. Landes 1998, chap. 4.

3. Moynahan 2002, p. 140.

4. Rubin 2014.

5. Lehmann 1970, p. 4.

6. Rietbergen 1998, p. 230.

7. MacCulloch 2010, p. 617.

8. Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig 1989, pp. 234, 486.

9. Coşgel, Miceli, and Rubin 2012.

10. Clegg 1997, chap. 6.

11. In the opinion of Hutton (1567), writing to the mayor and council of York, “See I many things that I cannot allow, because they be disagreeing with the sincerity of the Gospel,” that is, with the Protestant reading of it. Compare Walker’s introduction to Hutton 1567, p. ix.

12. Milton 1644 (1957).

13. Cowan 2005, p. 30.

14. Pettegree 2014, pp. 11, 368.

15. Barnhurst and Narone 2001, pp. 20, 190.

16. Greteman in discussion at the Newberry Library Milton Seminar. See Greteman 2012.

17. Marvel and others 2013. I am indebted to Graham Peterson for the citation.

18. Onela et al. 2007, p. 7334.

19. Johnson 1754, No. 137, 1754.

20. Hayek 1960, p. 15.

21. Jones 2010, pp. 96–97.

22. Allen 1983; Jacob 2014.

23. Dodgson and Gann 2010, p. 7.

24. Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925, pp. 83–84.

25. Neal 1817, vol. 4, chap. 1, p. 49.

26. Baechler 1971 (1975), p. 113.

27. Macfarlane 2000, p. 274.

28. Mokyr 2002, p. 278.

29. McNeill 1980, p. 63.

30. As William Ruger points out to me.

31. Parker 1988 (1996), pp. 140, 143.

32. On the ornamental character of modern mathematics, see Kline 1982.

33. The Euratlas Periodis Web shows a picture of the chaos of sovereignties and dependencies in Europe, and especially in what is now Germany. It gives detailed maps at every century mark from 1 to 2000 CE. If you want more detail, and 8,000 percent zoomability, you can acquire for 55 euros the Euratlas Periodis Expert English Version 1.1 by Marc-Antoine Nüssli and Christos Nüssli.

34. Ringmar 2007, p. 227.

35. Ringmar 2007, pp. 18, 160, 252, 270, 289.

Chapter 42

1. LaVaque-Manty 2006, pp. 715–716.

2. Compare the only slightly less sweeping language of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, art. 1: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”

3. Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 30.

4. North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, p. 26. I disagree, that is, with their claim that “the first societies to reach the doorstep conditions were Britain, France, the Dutch, and the United States” (p. 166; my italics). None of their evidence comes from societies such as China or Japan or the Ottoman Empire that might test their claim. Nor for that matter do they study the Dutch case.

5. Reckendrees 2014a. He does not use the word “ethics,” but that is what was the cause in the breakdown of civility in German politics in the late 1920s.

6. Neal and Williamson, eds. 2014, vol. 1, p. 2.

7. Arendt 1951 (1985), pp. 56, 62.

8. Aristotle, Bk. 1, 1254a.

9. Moynahan 2002, p. 541.

10. David Friedman made the point in a blog reacting to Bourgeois July 15, 2013,

11. Charles’s speech is given at Project Canterbury (“Printed by Peter at the sign of the Printing-Press in Cornhil, near the Royal Exchange”), In the document the year is given as 1648, because in the Julian calendar the year did not begin until March. So it is a Julian date in a New Style year.

12. MacCulloch 2004, p. 174.

13. Quoted in Taylor 2007, p. 178.

14. Senato.it has the Italian and the English translation.

15. Blainey 2009, p. 272.

16. Mencken 1916, p. 000.

17. Mencken 1949, p. 622.

18. As, among others, Sheri Berman (2006) has argued, as I’ve noted.

19. Reprinted and translated in Horst 1996, p. 142. The poem was called or “Love-Declaration.”

20. Personal correspondence, 2014.

21. Yeats 1928 (1992), p. 260.

Chapter 43

1. Mueller 2011, pt. 1.

2. Lal 1998; summarized in Lal 2006, pp. 5, 155.

3. Needham, 1954–2008; Pomeranz 2000; and others.

4. Taylor 1989, p. 23; Taylor 2007, p. 179.

5. Parks 2005, p. 180.

6. Danford 2006, p. 319. The quotation from Lord Kames (1774) is Danford’s.

7. Danford 2006, p. 324.

8. Danford 2006, p. 331.

9. Hume, 1741–1742 (1987), “Of Commerce.”

10. Danford 2006, p. 332.

11. Danford 2006, p. 330.

12. See Palmer 2014.

13. Ringmar 2007, p. 31.

14. Ringmar 2007, p. 32.

15. Ringmar 2007, p. 24. Ringmar’s remarkable literacy in an English not his native tongue, by the way, shows in his accurate use of the phrase “begs the question,” which is widely used to mean “suggests the question.”

16. Jones 2010, pp. 102–103.

17. Ringmar 2007, pp. 250, 254, 274, 279, 280, 281–282.

18. Ogilvie 2007, p. 662–663.

19. Ringmar 2007, pp. 72, 178, 286.

20. Ringmar 2007, p. 37.

21. Le Bris 2013.

Chapter 44

1. Keynes 1936, chap. 24, pp. 383–384.

2. Mises 1951, p. 566–567.

3. Almond and Verba 1963, p. 8.

4. I owe the fact to Terence Kealey of the University of Buckingham.

5. Jacob 2014, p. 124.

6. Hirschman 1977, pp. 9, 12.

7. The Chinese figure is from Fairbank et al. 1989, p. 228. The much less definite European reckoning comes from W. Clark 2003, pp. 214–215, and in more detail Simone 2003. The European figures do not include seminaries and merchant academies, which were not small. On the other hand, the examinees in China were older.

8. Daly 2013, p. xii.

9. I want to say plainly, in case it is not already plain, how much my thinking has depended on Goldstone’s, summarized in Goldstone 2009.

10. Quoted in Porter 2000, p. 3. Jacob (2001, p. 13) quotes it as “a new light.” The “affairs of Europe” that Shaftesbury mentions, though, concerned war (of the Spanish Succession), not the economy. Shaftesbury was an earl, not a merchant.

11. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 116.

12. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 110.

13. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 118.

14. Mandeville 1733, 2, pp. 117, 119.

15. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 117.

16. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 111.

17. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 106.

18. Mandeville 1733, 2, p. 26.

19. Mandeville 1733, 1, p. 24.

20. Mokyr 2002.

21. Porter 2000, p. 22.

22. Porter 2000, p. 15.

23. Fielding 1749 (1915), bk. 3, chap. 3.

24. Diderot 1772 (1796), quoted in Jacob 2001, p. 166; cf. p. 169: “Is there anything so senseless as a precept that forbids us to heed the changing impulses that are inherent in our being?”

25. Quoted in Campbell 1999, p. 99, from vol. 2 of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (January 1, 1735–December 31, 1744; ed. L. W. Labaree, 1960]). Against my general practice, I have kept some of Franklin’s Capitalization, in order to point to the master Conflict in the eighteenth century between principles of Revelation and principles of Nature.

26. Taylor 1989, p. 11.

27. As Maine said at the end of chapter 5 of Ancient Law (1861 [1905]). My usage here is anachronistic, because Maine was arguing about the transition from patriarchal law, such as Roman law, to English law circa 1861, in which more people than the paterfamilias (though not yet married women) were able to make “free agreements of individuals.”

28. Johnson 1775 (1984), p. 115.

29. Bayly 1989, p. 34.

Chapter 45

1.

2. Gerschenkron 1970; Raskov and Kufenko 2014; personal conversation with Raskov.

3. Or so I infer from reading in Ferguson 2000 and Wormell n.d.

4. Mokyr 2011, abstract.

5. Kian 2013, p. 8.

6. Quoted in Menand 2002, p. 45; the next, more famous, quotation is given on p. 51.

7. John D. Mueller 2010, p. 358. Mueller claims (Mueller 2010, p. 392n33) that in The Bourgeois Virtues I ignore love as a gift, which suggests that in looking over the book he omitted chapter

8. D. Klemm 2004. On Boulding’s framework of gifts, see McCloskey 2013a.

9. Tanner 2005.

10. Boulding 1973, p. I; my italics.

11. Boulding 1958, p. 186.

12. Haidt 2006, p. 29. The argument about house buying would be testable with brain scans, I suppose.

13. Amos 8:4–5.

14. Graeber 2011, p. 8.

15. Joseph Jacobs version, 1860, at D. L. Ashliman’s website,

16. Coetzee 1999, p. 117.

17. Smiley 1998, p. 128.

18. John D. Mueller 2010, pp. 34–35.

19. Mokyr 2009, p. 23.

20. In F. Klemm, A History of Western Technology (1964), quoted in Leinhard 2006, p. 43.

21. Jacob 2014, pp. 147–150. Compare Mokyr 2008, p. 111.

22. Jacob 2014, pp. 140, 141.

23. Jacob 2014, pp. 142, 150.

24. Mead 2007, p. 114.

25. La guerre franco-française was first coined in 1950 in a book about Vichy France, but has been taken up to describe left versus right from 1789 to the present (Williams 2014, p. 2).

26. See Grafe (2012), the book of the economic historian of Spain I keep mentioning, which argues that Spain’s problem was the power of regions—not the sort of centralism that France has practiced from the sixteenth century to the present.

27. Abu-Lughod 1989 (1991), p. 354.

28. Falangas 2006 p. 250.

29. Allen 2009.

30. Jones 2010, p. 119.

Chapter 46

1. Bhagavad Gita 9.32.

2. For more evidence on the point, see McCloskey 2006b, pp. 442–446.

3. Hourani 1991 (2005), pp. 72–73.

4. Braudel 1979 (1982), p. 555.

5. Simmel 1907 (2004), p. 245.

6. Le Roy Ladurie 1978 (1980), p. 332.

7. Le Roy Ladurie 1978 (1980), p. 336.

8. McCormick 2001, p. 13.

9. Gilmour 2011, pp. 57, 70.

10. Smollett 1766, p. 753.

11. Boccaccio 1349–1351 (2000), Tenth Day, Tale 9, p. 213; “he was a private citizen...,” p. 217.

12. Boccaccio 1349–1351 (2000), p. 219.

13. McCormick 2001, p. 13.

14. Neville 1990, p. 22.

15. I thank my colleague in Hispanic Studies at the University of California at Riverside, James Parr, for conversations on this point.

16. Tacitus, sect. 21, p. 119; sect. 12, p. 111.

17. Sawyer 1962 (1971).

18. Chaucer 1387 (1958), Prologue, lines 43, 478, 529.

19. Chaucer 1387 (1958), lines 361–373.

20. Chaucer 1387 (1958), lines 309–316.

21. Chaucer 1387 (1958), lines 231–232, 245–248.

22. Chaucer 1387 (1958), lines 173–174, 200.

23. The editions have differing line numbers, depending on the manuscript sources used; here I refer to Lindsay 1542–1544 (2000), lines 2892–2893, 2852–2863, 2941–2949, 3047–3061, and 3753–3756, as against merely 2810–2849 recommending a predictable tax system, and 2542–2549 of puzzling blather. In the 1879 edition available electronically the lines are roughly 4045–4073, pages 197–198 in the online text. I again thank Professor Margaret Raftery of the University of the Free State, South Africa, for leading me into the text.

24. Todeschini 2008, p. 23.

25. Davis 2012, p. 134.

26. ca. 1480, lines 134, 333; subsequent quotations are lines 501–502, 232, 882, 428–430, 442.

27. Gardiner, personal correspondence, 2013. From prospectus for “‘What Price God’s People?’ The Cathedral and the Bazaar in Late Antiquity.”

28. Strietman 1996, p. 107.

29. Dijk 1996, p. 113. The italics in the Strietman quotation that follows are mine.

30. Viner 1959, p. 43.

31. Kuran 2003, p. 310.

Chapter 47

1. Hirschman 1977, p. 58.

2. Tacitus, sect. 14, p. 114.

3. Mayer 2012, p. 5.

4. Commentary on the Summa Theologica of the Divine Doctor Thomas Aquinas (1507–1522), quoted in Barbieri 1940 (2013), p. 2n3.

5. Stackhouse and Stratton 2002, p. 37.

6. Todeschini 2008, p. 19.

7. Origo 1957 (1986).

8. Todeschini 2008, p. 18.

9. Todeschini 2008, p. 18.

10. Todeschini 2008, p. 24.

11. Todeschini 2008 p. 26.

12. Thompson 2005, “Introduction.”

13. Todeschini 2008, p. 26.

14. Todeschini 2008, p. 27, in Latin.

15. ca. 1480, lines 76–79.

16. Todeschini 2008, p. 34.

17. Todeschini 2008, p. 33.

18. Todeschini 2008, p. 18 and throughout.

19. Todeschini 2008, p. 29.

20. Todeschini 2008, pp. 31–32.

21. Parks 2013, pp. 119, 134.

22. Pipes 1999 (2000), p. 27.

23. Smith 1776, 1.2.2.

24. Le Roy Ladurie 1978 (1980), p. 337.

25. Winter’s Tale 4.4.702.

26. Troilus and Cressida 2.1.352–353.

27. Kadane 2008, p. 257.

28. Kadane 2008, p. 258.

29. Kadane 2008, p. 260; well, not so gifted a hymn writer.

30. Muldrew 1998; Marx 1867 (1887), chap. 24, sect. 3, p. 651.

31. Kadane 2008, p. 262.

32. Kadane 2008, p. 263.

33. Boettke and Storr 2002, p. 165.

34. Wierzbicka 2010, p. 36.

35. Report of Baron van Imhoff, governor-general of the East Indies, to the Dutch Indian Company, quoted in Feinstein 2005, p. 50. (Also quoted in Gilomee and Mbenga 2007, p. 67: the quotation is well known.) The quotation is the English translation, that of the van Riebeeck Society, 1918, the original Dutch of which I have not consulted. Therefore I am not certain that meneer was in fact the word used.

36. Giliomee and Mbenga, eds. 2007.

Chapter 48

1. Gilmour 2011, pp. 79, 82.

2. Puga and Trefler 2013.

3. Gilmour 2011, p. 79.

4. Ackroyd 2009, pp. 139–140.

5. Ackroyd 2009, p. 32.

6. Smith 1776, 1.10, pt. 2, p.152.

7. Easterly 2010.

8. McNeill 1974, p. 147.

9. Rosenthal and Wong 2011, p. 99.

10. Rosenthal and Wong, 2011, p. 93; compare pp. 79, 82, 90, 94, 97, 99.

11. Härtel 2006, pp. 13, 18.

12. Wakefield 2009, p. 142.

13. Wakefield 2009, p. 139.

14. Wakefield 2009, p. 144.

15. Chamberlain 1959 (1976), p. 29.

16. Carrièrre and Eco 2011, p. 58; my italics.

17. Du Plessis 2008.

18. Quoted in Wrightson 2000, p. 191.

19. On South Africa’s sad licensing system, see the Zapiro cartoon for April 30, 2013, in the Mail and Guardian newspaper, quoting the famous Escher picture of stairs ever climbing.

20. David Landes 1969, 1965. This is a good place to acknowledge that I spent the first half of my historical career disagreeing with David on the role of the entrepreneur. I seem to be doomed to spend the second half agreeing with him. En partie seulement.

21. North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, p. 25.

22. Olson 1993.

23. Boldrin and Levine 2008, p. 264.

24. Jacob 2014, p. 151.

25. Vargas Llosa 2013, p. 302.

26. I owe this insight to Dr. Stefan Gorißen of the University of Bielefeld.

27. Per Kristian Sebak, personal communication, 2012.

Chapter 49

1. Earle 1989, p. 5.

2. Jacob 2014, p. 78.

3. Mokyr 1990, p. 241.

4. Schoeck 1958 (1977), p. 156.

5. Nunziata and Rocco 2014, p. 19.

6. Kelly, Ó Gráda, and Mokyr 2013.

7. Gladwell 2009, p. 55.

8. Gladwell 2009, p. 67; my italics.

9. Gladwell 2009, p. 63n.

Chapter 50

1. Wang Fuzhi 1691 (2000), pp. 33–34.

2. Braudel 1967 (1973), p. 555.

3. Cannan 1926 (1927), p. 424. I am indebted to Donald Bourdeaux for the reference.

4. Wallerstein 1974, p. 51.

5. Elbl 2001.

6. Costa, Palma, and Reis 2013, abstract.

7. Parker 1985, p. 244.

8. Landes 1965, 1969; Coleman 1973; Wiener 1981.

9. Higgs 1987.

10. I mean G. Clark 2007b.

11. Mote 1999, p. 362, on the Southern Song—but, he notes, only beginning then.

12. Mote 1999, pp.373, 775.

13. McKay 2013, p. 556.

14. Barrington Moore 1998, pp. 148, 151. For an instance in China, see Mote 1999, p. 335, on the career of the philosopher Chen Liang (1143–1194) in the Southern Song.

15. Moore 1998, p. 156.

16. Sng and Moriguchi 2014.

17. Goldstone 1998, p. 276.

18. Mote 1999, p. 765.

19. McCloskey 2006b, p. 122, on Najita 1987.

20.

21. Bookbinder 2010, p. 496.

22. Watson 1983.

23. Kuran 2003, p. 309.

24. Rubin 2008, p. 7, and subsequent quotation.

25. Kuran 2005, 2010.

26. Kuran 2003, p. 312.

27. Shilts 1999, 2004, 2007.

28. Rubin 2008, p. 3.

29. Rubin 2008, p. 11.

30. Prak 2011, p. 19.

Chapter 51

1. Smith 1762–1766, (A) 6.57.

2. An economist at Brown University, Herschel Grossman, used to claim that no one who was right-handed could be an economist.

3. A little video making the point is McCloskey 2013b.

4. Lodge 1988/1990, p. 219.

5. Äuslander, “Am Anfang war das Wort” (1981),

6. For advertising and for nominal income, see

7. Statistical Abstract of the United States

8. McCloskey and Klamer 1995.

9. Antioch 2013, table 3.

10. Wallis and North 1986, table 3.13.

11. Statistical Abstract of the United State table 650, p. 430; Louis D. Johnston, “History Lessons: Understanding the Decline in Manufacturing,”

12. Pink 2012, p. 21.

13. Pink 2012, p. 6.

14. Ridley 2011, p. 217.

Chapter 52

1. Jones and Harris 1967.

2. For example, the study of children’s literature in support of the “need for achievement” in McClelland 1961.

3. Chaudhuri 1959, p. 178; see also his chap. 5, “Money and the Englishman.” Chaudhuri was a professor English literature who made his first trip to England after the Second World War.

4. Das 2009, p. xxxiv. See also Das 2000, which he regards as his sympathetic treatment of the “householder” stage.

5. Das 2009, p. xxxviii.

6. Quoted in Lal 2006, p. 166. One is reminded of the old and vulgar joke in which the farmer says, “When I hear the word ‘service,’ I wonder who is getting screwed.”

7. Adhia 2010, 2013.

8. Castiglione 1528 (1901), bk. 1, sect. 40, p. 54; 1.43, p. 57; and 2.65, p. 138.

9. Hirschman 1991, p. x; my italics.

10. McKeon 1987 (2002), p. 201; and p. 202: “Self-orienting activity,... the very fount of modern honor... creates values, and this is the criterion of virtue.... [It is also] in some real sense value-creating... that is, of exchange value.”

11. Alan Macfarlane (1978, pp. 202–203) disagrees, and puts it much earlier in English history: “When Jefferson wrote,... ‘all men are created equal and independent,’... he was putting into words a view of the individual and society which had its roots in thirteenth-century England or earlier. It is not... a view that emerged by chance in Tudor or Stuart England.”

12. Keynes 1936, p. 383.

Chapter 53

1. Gerschenkron 1957 (1962).

2. Beckett 1965 (2008), p. 157.

3. Davidoff and Hall 1987, p. 162.

4. Sewell 1994, p. 198.

5. Tocqueville 1856 (1955), p. 146–147. I owe this citation to Clifford Deaton.

6. Wills 1992.

7. Delacroix 1995, p. 126.

8. Compare Goldstone 2009, p. 45.

9. Virgil Storr 2006 makes this point in the context of the economy of Barbados.

10. Lakoff 1996 (2002), 2008.

11. Higgs 1987, 2012.

12. Whitney v. 274 U.S. 357 (1927).

13. Ardagh 1991, p. 297.

14. McCloskey 2001.

15. Landes 1998, p. 516.

16. For example in Roland 2010.

17. Baumol, Litan, and Schramm 2007, p. 122.

18. Manin 1985 (1987), p. 364.

Chapter 54

1. Allen 1983; Nuvolari 2004. For a historical survey, see Bessen and Nuvolari 2012.

2. Mokyr 2010, p. 1, the opening sentence of the book.

3. Mokyr 2010, chap. 2.

4. On Freemasonry and the associated “radical enlightenment” (a concept that Margaret Jacob, not Jonathan Israel, devised), see Jacob 1981 (2006). Bakunin declared that during the eighteenth century “the bourgeoisie too had created an international association, a universal and formidable one, Freemasonry. It was the International of the bourgeoisie” (Bakunin 1869, First Letter).

5. These are Pius, Quadragesimo John, Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Paul, Populorum Progressio and Octogesima and John Paul, Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Michael Novak is my guide here; Novak 1984, chaps. 6–8.

6. Bauer 2004, p. 107.

7. Reinert 2011, pp. 202, 269.

8. Suprinyak 2011.

9. Higgs 2008.

10. Schumpeter 1949, p. 349.

11. Schumpeter 1949. p. 351.

12. Tolstoy 1868–1869 (1933), p. 548.

13. Tolstoy 1868–1869 (1933), Second Epilogue, p. 499.

14. Tolstoy 1868–1869 1933), Second Epilogue, p. 491.

15. Sellar and Yeatman 1931 (1932), chap. 44, pp. 92–93.

16. Goldstone 2009, p. 36.

17. Childe 1943, p.14–15.

18. I am indebted to Jack Goldstone for reminding me of the fact and providing this way of saying it.

19. De Vries 1976, 2009; Kelly and Ó Gráda 2014.

20. Goldstone 1991.

21. McNeill 1976; Diamond 1997, chap. 3.

22. Easterlin 1995 (2004).

23. Johansson 2010, p. 6.

24. Mill 1845 (1967), p. 370.

25. North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, pp. 192–193.

26. North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, p. 194.

27. Cheung 1982.

28. Acemoglu and Robinson 2006. Ning Wang has suggested to me that Cheung allows for ideas.

29. Coase and Wang 2013b, pp. 32–35.

30. Smith 1759 (1790), first page; Coase and Wang 2013b, p. 205.

31. Coase and Wang 2013a, p. 10. And yet at one point in their book, they praise Cheung and his eager American students North, Weingast, and Wallis (Coase and Wang 2013b, pp. 163–164).

Chapter 55

1. Sylla and Toniolo 1992.

2. Hirschman 1958 (1988), p. 4; his italics.

3. North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, pp. 295–308. Art Carden charitably suggests that they were expecting others to take up their hypothesis for other times and places. My point, though, is that if one is not sufficiently comparative from the outset, the hypotheses are wrong at the outset.

4. Runciman 2009.

5. Dodgson and Gann 2010, pp. 1, 3.

6. Sten Jönsson of the University of Gothenburg reminds me that heritability is the third element, and that too much of it can be bad, breeding too true.

7. Waterman 1991; Rothschild 2001; Nye 2007.

8. Mokyr 2009, p. 2.

9. McCloskey 1994 is a philosophical treatment, with cases in McCloskey 1990 and McCloskey 1985a.

10. Stigler 1982, pp. 10, 60.

11. Gramsci entry for 1932, in Forgacs, ed. 2000, p. 301.

12. Berman 2006, p. 11, referring to Mark Blyth, James Kloppenberg, Judith Goldstein, G. John Inenberry, Robert Keohane, and William Sewell Jr. The phrase “the vital few” is from the economic historian Jonathan Hughes, writing in praise of American economic entrepreneurs (1966).

13. Lakoff 2008. The sociologist Erving Goffman had devised the concept in 1974.

14. Davidoff and Hall 1987.

Chapter 56

1. Jacobs 1992. Ronald Mawby of Kentucky State University led me to the book.

2. I owe the image to the legal economist and economic historian David Haddock.

3. North and Thomas 1973, p. 157.

4. Bolt and Van Zanden 2013, p. 12; my italics. A lucid review of the estimates, especially in the matter of calorie consumption, and an attempt at an “ecumenical” overall judgment is Kelly and Ó Gráda 2013.

5. Rosenthal and Wong 2011, p. 232; compare p. 47, where they speak of “economic growth in Europe” as though its striking aspect was not technological betterment after 1800 but an increase in capital per worker 1348–1800.

6. Clark 2009; Clark, Cummins, and Smith 2010.

7. Jones 1988, p. 35.

8. Malanima 2013, p. 64.

9. Jones 2010, pp. 27–29.

10. Jones 2010, p. 29.

11. Ogilvie 2014, p. 471.

12. John Nye has made this point to me.

13. Wrigley 1988, p. 46.

14. Jones 2010, p. 245.

15. Willsher 2014. Anyone who has owned a French automobile, such as a Peugeot 504 station wagon, vintage 1975, feels it on her pulse.

16. Ogilvie 2011, pp. 413, 433; see also Ogilvie and Carus 2014

17. De Soto 2000; Shorto 2013, p. 94.

18. Wylie 1957 (1964). I am unable to find the page.

19. My sister Laura McCloskey, a professor of public health, set me straight on Mother Teresa.

20. Ignatieff 1994.

21. Quoted in Sinyavsky 1959 (1960), p. 176.

22. Kołakowski 2004, pp. 64–65.

23. Macaulay 1829; Bartleby

24. Jönsson 2012, pp. 17, 19, 20.

Chapter 57

1. Berman 2006, p. 2.

2. Pfister, Riedel, and Uebele 2012.

3. Berman 2006, p. 3.

4. Berman 2006, p. 10.

5. Berman 2006, p. 9.

6. McDougall 2004, p. 22, 18, 516n1.

7. Plato, 91d–e.

8. Appleby 2010, p. 26; italics supplied.

9. Appleby 2010, p. 13; for the 300 pamphlets p. 109. Her “long ago” book is Appleby 1978.

10. McCloskey 1975 1976.

11. Appleby 2010, p. 5.

12. Polanyi 1977, p. 40.

13. Polanyi 1944, pp. 54–55.

14. Diamond 1997, pp. 280, 287.

15. For a contrary, pro-Polanyi view see Renger 2003.

16. McCormick 2001, p. 783.

17. Adams 1966, p. 81.

18. Renger 1979, p, 250.

19. Snell 1997, p. 149.

20. Gelb 1969; Veenhof 1972.

21. J. N. Postgate 1992, p. 109.

22. Silver 1983a, 1983b, 1994.

23. Dahl 2003, p. 14n25.

24. Harvard University Press catalogue, Spring 2014.

Chapter 58

1. Klamer 2011; Klamer and Zuidhof 1998; Staveren 2001.

2. Klamer 2011, p. 154.

3. Gaus 2013, p. 25.

4. Issenberg 2007.

5. Fiske 1991 (1993), pp. 47, 45. I am indebted to Dr. Rick Wicks of the University of Gothenburg for putting me onto Fiske’s astonishing work.

6. Fiske 1991 (1993), pp. 48–49.

7. Davis 2012, p. 60.

8. Compare Bell 2008.

9. Boettke and Storr 2002.

10. Mann 1901 (1952), p. 210.

11. Hourani 1991 (2005), p. 96.

12. du Gay 2000.

Chapter 59

1. Tolstoy 1868–1869, bk. 1, p. 5.

2. Neville 1990, p. 106.

3. Compare Mises 1951, “Preface to Second German Edition (1932),” p. 21.

4. Walzer 1983, p. 21.

5. Becker and Pessin 2005.

6. I am indebted to my brother John McCloskey for drawing my attention to this point.

7. Schmidtz and Brennan 2010, p. 2.

8. In Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994), I make the case at length for an open society of science, even economic science.

9. Walmart’s margin is higher than the grocery industry average of 1.9 percent, because the soft goods have higher margins.

10. Interview with Warren Buffett, American Association of Retired Persons (magazine), August–September 2013, p. 60.

11. Smith 1759 (1790), 1.3.

12. Koehn 2014.

13. Greenough 1980; Coase 1974.

14. Smith 1776, 1.1.11, pp. 22–23.

15. Quoted in Danford 2006.

16. Sowell 2015, p. 114. Donald Boudreaux drew my attention to the passage.

Chapter 60

1. Steinfeld 1991, for example p. 106.

2. Raftis 1964.

3. Higgs 2012, chap. 2.

4. The historical exceptions, such as starving Russians selling themselves into slavery in early modern times, are rare, about as rare as people signing a social contract with Leviathan.

5. By the Penn Tables; Heston, Summers, and Aten 2012. By the other measures (the World Bank, for example), Hong Kong is also ahead of the United States.

6. Michaels 1987, p. 111.

7. Tomasi 2012, pp. 254, 257.

8. Oxford 1999, p. 1610.

9. Wilde 1891 (1930), pp. 257, 270. The next quotation is from p. 259. The editor, Hesketh Pearson, remarks that Wilde had been inspired by Shaw’s lecture, “without bothering himself much about economics” (p. xii). The astoundingly scholarly Wikipedia entry for “wage slavery,” by the way, gives arguments from people like Noam Chomsky against my views, and those by people like Robert Nozick in favor of them.

10. Scruton 1994, p. 468.

Chapter 61

1. The discussion here benefited from reading on three successive days three illuminating papers, Demsetz 2010, Khalil 2010, and Ogilvie 2007.

2. McCloskey 2006b, pp. 156–159.

3. Macaulay 1848, end of chap. 3.

4. I explain the idea of psychiatric “insight,” with illustrations from personal experience, in McCloskey 1999, pp. 96–131.

5. Lemert 2012, p. 21.

6. Colander 2013, p. xi.

7. On 1978, see Coase and Wang 2013b, p. 37.

8. Piketty 2014, chap. 14.

9. Brecht 1937–1939/1943, scene 8.

10. Diamond 2012, chap. 2.

11. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 240.

12. “Nearly a quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape: Survey shows extent of sexual violence in region where 70% of men report facing no legal consequences.” Manchester 9 September 2013.

13. Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation, reported in the Chicago October 9, 2012.

Chapter 62

1. Shields 2002, p. 264.

2. Shaw 1912.

3. Ruskin 1866, p. 41.

4. Clough 1862 (posthumous), at

5. Moretti 2013, p. 113.

6. Peterson 2014.

7. Personal communication, November 2014.

8. Lawrence 1929.

9. Auden 1936(1976), pt. 3, p. 185.

10. Gallagher 1985, p. xv.

11. Rapport 2008, pp. 406–407.

Chapter 63

1. Crunden 1982, p. 17; Himmelfarb 1991.

2. Graña 1964, p. 186.

3. Graña 1964, p. 172.

4. Buruma and Margalit 2004, p. 5.

5. Potts 2014.

6. The contrast is highlighted in Levy 2001, Levy and Peart 2001, Peart and Levy 2005, Peart and Levy, eds. 2008, and Sowell 1987 (2007)

7. Macaulay 1830, p. 183.

8. Tomasi 2012.

9. Kołakowski 2004, p. 14.

10. Kołakowski 2004, pp. 25–26.

11. Quoted in Kealey 2001, p, 240. There is a joke from the time of the Brezhnev-Reagan negotiations in Iceland in 1986 that imagines the famous economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh—academic Labourites both and naturalized Britons, Hungarian by birth (though nothing like antidemocratic, it should be understood, and certainly not communists)—packed in a wooden box and used by Brezhnev as a bargaining tool for extracting concessions: “If you don’t concede, I will let out Hungarian economists to destroy your economy!”

12. Levy and Peart 2011.

13. Kołakowski 2004, p. 28.

14. Berlin 1955–1956 (2013), pp. 125–126.

15. Rapport 2008, p. 400.

16. Kealey 2001, p. 238.

17. Green 1993, p. 26.

18. Leonard 2005, pp. 212–213.

19. Toscani 2013.

20. Quoted in Taylor 1955 (1967), p. 162.

21. Dawson 1894, p. 347, in chap. 46, “Prince Bismarck’s Home Life.”

22. Quoted in Palmer 2012, p. 35.

23. Taylor 1955 (1967), pp. 203, 206.

Chapter 64

1. Gay 1998, Vol. 5, chap. 1.

2. Horowitz 1985, p. 166f.

3. Horowitz 1985, p. 168. I have taken this paragraph from The Bourgeois The point bears repetition.

4. Marquis 1916–1935 (1943), p. 70.

5. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 29. The translation is sometimes odd. I have corrected it to be more literal.

6. Berlin 1966 (2001), p. 203.

7. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 13.

8. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 14.

9. The classicist John T. Kirby of the University of Miami suggested this to me.

10. Rimbaud 1874 (1914, 1962), p. 111.

11. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 13.

12. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 24.

13. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 32.

14. Kerman 1952, pp. 258, 262, 264.

15. Puccini, Illica, and Giacosa 1896 (1954), p. 9.

16. Arnold 1880.

17. Kerman 1952, pp. 260 (valentine), 254 (little shocker, depraved), 20 (Joyce Kilmer).

Chapter 65

1. UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), State of World Population

2. Williamson 1993, p. 14.

3. Blainey 2009, p. 95.

4. Sejersted 2011, p. 29.

5. Sachdev 2013, sect. 2, pp. 1, 4.

6. Rashid 2005, p. 11.

7. Hume 1738, 1740 (1893), bk. 3, p. 125.

8. Rashid 2005, p. 11.

9. Friedman 1989. I thank Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute for this citation.

10. Heilbroner 1989. Vladimir Popov (2014) offers hope for socialism, though admitting at length what Heilbroner concluded.

11. Bakunin 1869, Second Letter.

12. Shils 1957, p. 490: the ex-Marxists “criticize the aesthetic qualities of a society which has realized so much of what socialists once claimed was of central importance, which has, in other words, overcome poverty and long arduous labor.”

13. Ehrlich 1968 (1975), p. xi.

14. If you disbelieve it, you need to listen to Hans Rosling’s astonishing video for the BBC, I say again: “Don’t Panic—The Facts about Population,”

15. Amazon.com reviews of Simon, The Ultimate Resource accessed July 2013.

16. Eldridge 1995, p. 9. Such mistaken science comes from the English-language notion that the only “sciences” are physical and biological. Eldridge believed a geologist but did not consult an economist or a historian, because they are not (English-definition, OED sense 5b) “scientists.” And so he got the scientific facts wrong.

Chapter 66

1. McCloskey 2012a.

2. Tomasi 2012.

3. Berlin 1999, p. 59.

4. Clark 1901 (1949).

5. Boudreaux 2014.

6. Kevin Murphy and Robert Topol reckon that rising life expectancy in the United States from 1970 to 2000 added a national health-capital value: people value their lives. In 2000 the gain of $61 trillion in 2004 prices (net of the additional cost of health care for the older folk) was valued, Murphy and Topol reckon, at fully 10 to 50 percent of annual national income, varying with the year chosen. The benefits were fairly equally spread by individual income: rich and poor benefited. Murphy and Topol 2006, p. 902.

7. Fogel 1999.

8. Das 2009, p. 294.

9. Judt 2010, p. 169.

10. Smith 1776, 5.2.k.5, pp. 869–870.

11. Quoted in Coase and Wang 2013b, p. 206.

12. Armstrong 2009 (2010), p. 296.

13. Bouckaert et al. 2012.

14. Gaus is depending on Boehm 2001.

15. Boehm 2012, p. 161.

16. For Boehm’s evidence from Spanish cave art, see Boehm 2012, p. 158; second italics mine.

17. Gaus 2013, throughout, for example, p. 18.

18. Clark forthcoming.

19. Judt 2010, p. 170.

Chapter 67

1. Lucas 2002, p. 109.

2. Tedin 2012; my italics.

3. Goldsmith 1773.

4. O’Brien 1982.

5. Lazonick 1981, 1991; Marglin 1974.

6. Carlyle 1843 (1899), bk. 3, chap. 2, p. 147.

7. Sellers 1996. He used similar formulations in many writings.

8. Rorty 1983 (1990). Admittedly the word “liberal” didn’t mean to him quite what it means to me.

9. Montesquieu 1748, bk. 20, para. 1; my italics. Smith said much the same in Theory of the Moral

10. Walzer 2008.

11. Walzer 2008.

12. Sellers 1991, p. 6.

13. Paton 1948, p. 34.

14. Shackle 1972 (1992), pp. 3, 26. The sentence is hard to read, which is one reason Shackle has had little influence. That, and his non-Samuelsonian method.

15. Smith 1762–1766, p. 352.

16. Booth 1974, pp. xiii, xiv, 59.

17. Manin 1985 (1987), p. 363. Booth and Manin both acknowledged the influence of the Belgian law professor and rhetorician Chaim Perelman (1912–1984), and Booth that of the American literary critic Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) and of the American professor of philosophy I mentioned, Richard McKeon.

18. As, for example, Alejandro Chafuen 2003, p. 24, as cited in Casey 2006, p. 72n7. The assertion has been widely touted since Hume.

19. Taylor 2004, p. 115.

20. Graff and Birkenstein 2005; Bohm 1996 (2004).

21. Hayek 1960, pp. 25, 27.

22. Whitehead 1911, preface.

23. Mill 1848, 1871 (1970), bk. 4, chap. 6, para. 1.

24. McCloskey 2010a, chap. 38.

25. If you still doubt it, consult chapter 38 in Bourgeois

26. Edgerton 2007, p. 41.

27. You may find persuasion about persuasion in the books of McCloskey 1985 (1998), 1990, 1994. If you are truly eager you can adjourn to deirdremccloskey.org and call up numerous persuasive articles arguing in much more detail for the views on rhetoric sketched here.