Deirdre N. McCloskey has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 1 narrator, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Bourgeois Dignity.
Bourgeois Equality
Summary
There's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. Why? Most economists - from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty - say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees - fiercely. "Our riches," she argues, "were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea." Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove "trade-tested betterment". Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of "add institutions and stir" doesn't work and didn't. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas - ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in Northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners and upending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched. Few economists or historians write like McCloskey - her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don't come any more ambitious or captivating than Bourgeois Equality.
©2016 The University of Chicago (P)2017 Gildan Media LLC
Bourgeois Dignity
Summary
The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to 17th- and 18th-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn't grow so dramatically because of economic factors: It grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity. An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians - a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives.
©2010 The University of Chicago (P)2017 Gildan Media LLC