A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 65 “Despite the Clerisy’s Doubts”
Dr. McCloskey continues her discussion of the threats to a continuation of the bourgeois trade tested system of betterment that has given us a 3000% to 10,000% growth in incomes over the past two hundred years.
In this chapter she is focusing on challenges that are coming from both sides of the political spectrum. She previously had criticized each side for misunderstanding the source of our economic growth.
She first notes they are both likely unhappy with the modern world because of a sense of nostalgia. (p. 618)
Creative destruction is a necessary part of the Great Enrichment. As new ideas, inventions, and technology are developed, old products, services, and ways of living have to be given up to free the resources for the new and better way.
However, McCloskey notes it is normal to long for the way things were in the past, sometimes because it is harder to adapt the older you get.
And if the creative destruction producing its irritating novelties is tested commercially we can at least be assured that on balance the mass of the people prefer it, in their vulgar, massy ways. One suspects that the conservatives of left and right don’t like the “mass” and its badly informed preferences. Let us take care of you, they cry. Let tradition celebrated by wise elders, or planning implemented by wise experts, guide you, oh you sadly misled mass. (p. 619)
While the Left and Right offer different solutions, they share a discomfort with the decentralized market system and prefer a system with them in charge.
She uses the analogy of a pointillist painting like Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to say the Left is standing too close to the picture and thus only see the disorder of dots. That is why they call for more and more regulations of the market. (p. 620)
Surprisingly, McCloskey says that that is not a big concern for rich countries; it causes unnecessary inefficiencies but rich countries can afford it. (p. 620) While she says those on the right would be annoyed with such an observation, she notes that inefficiency is not the main problem.
The Great Enrichment comes from the “zooming out of the marginal product curves in trade-tested betterment.” (p. 620)
Translation: when we began to esteem bourgeois virtues and unleashed their creativity, the curve representing how much additional output we get from our inputs began to grow and grow. This is the 3000% to 10,000% growth we have seen in the last couple hundred of years.
While McCloskey is not advocating for the inefficient-causing regulations, she is saying that that makes a relatively small difference in comparison.
However, she does express some concern for a shift in policies in the US that could be damaging.
The Norwegians passed in 1917 a “braking law” that expressed in plain form the conservative-left-and-right worry about “capitalism” that social democrats and political reactionaries had then and still have…It would have been impossible in 1917 in the wild United States. Yet by now environmental objections to development such as the Keystone XL Pipeline have created braking laws even in the second home of laissez faire. The left and right join in opposing the future — the one because it is not a planned future and the other because it is not identical to the past. (p. 621)
The Eight Pessimisms
She lists seven old pessimisms that have been mistakenly held up as true over the years, and now says there is a new one in our current day. All of these have been held up as reasons to think our best days are behind us.
The seven old pessimisms, still dusted off for blog posts and newspaper editorials from both left and right, and built into most alert minds as obvious truths…have proven mistaken. None of them ever had much much evidence for it, 1800 to the present. Their invulnerability to scientific evidence suggests that they arise from a prior, fixed, and emotional conviction that market-tested betterment is significantly imperfect. (p. 626)
- 1848: Malthusian belief that population would grow faster than our food and lead to famine and disease
- 1916: only Europeans were capable of the growth arising from the Great Enrichment
- 1933: capitalism had hit its final crisis so there would be no more growth
- 1945: excess savings would mean growth was replaced with stagnation
- 1968: growth had happened but now consumerism was “corrupting our souls”
- 1980: now the concern about consumerism is it was only possible by exploiting the people of the developing countries
- 1990s: Old Europe and the United States were doomed to collapse
- Today: environmental decay is irreversible
McCloskey notes the environmental pessimism is often paired with the old Malthusian thinking, but the pair will prove to be wrong again.
She notes environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s who said the damage to Lake Erie was so bad it was unable to be saved. Yet today it is still a useable lake with people boating and swimming in it. (p. 628)
Likewise, Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame seems to be held in esteem even though every prediction he ever made has been completely wrong. (p. 628) But he and his supporters would say he was not wrong, he was just early. That is what McCloskey meant by “invulnerability to scientific evidence.”
This pessimism fails to see why the Great Enrichment provided such explosive growth while at the same time the proffered solutions to these “problems” threaten the continuation of the trade tested system of betterment.
These various doom and gloom problems are not major threats to us, but the doomers and gloomers that hold to them certainly are.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “Despite the Clerisy’s Doubts,” Chapter 65 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
