English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Deirdre McCloskey has now completed the third (and final?) volume of her trilogy on how the West (from 1800 to 1950) and most of the rest of the world (from 1900 to 2015) grew rich. The message of all three volumes is spelled out in the subtitle: "How ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world".The latest volume has much that is right, and a few things that are wrong; all are important. The book is also a tribute to the view that history's finest accomplishments are made late in careers, when one has not only absorbed but mastered a wide variety of materials. In this volume we are treated to McCloskey's finest displays of erudition to date. Her arguments range from in-depth analysis of English literature (notably tracing the marked differences in attitudes toward the bourgeoisie from Shakespeare to Jane Austen but also including Swift, Addison, Steele, Defoe, Fielding, Trollope, Pepys, Johnson) to philosophy (Adam Smith, David Hume, J.L. Austin, Wittgenstein) to hundreds of modern historians, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. We learn details ranging from the frequency of rape in Papua New Guinea to the controversy over temple distribution as the economic basis of Mesopotamian civilization. It is fascinating, eloquent, and richly entertaining.Throughout, a simple argument is honed. We are rich, rich, rich, beyond the imaginings of any utopian or scholar, banker or king who lived before 1700. If every peasant in England enjoyed the comforts of a castle comparable to that of Henry VIII, they still would not have had the comfort and light that well-insulated homes with central heat and electric light provide to the modern average North American or European; they would not have had the variety of food and clothing available to twenty-first century urban Chinese and Indians; they would not have enjoyed the average life-span of today's Nigerians or Ethiopians.In the last two-hundred years we have created a world in which peasants can use smartphones to learn the market prices and weather affecting their crops, in which craftsmen and shop-owners can fly to tropical vacations on other continents, and in which almost any urbanite in India or China as well as the West can watch television and communicate with friends thousands of miles away. This seems so familiar now that it is easy to imagine this progress as ordinary, slow but steady, and almost inevitable.Yet McCloskey insists that we recognize how amazing, fabulous, and contrary to all odds this was. It was certainly not inevitable, or a matter of the slow and steady growth of commerce and invention. If it was, those highly commercial Mesopotamians, Romans, and Venetians and highly inventive Chinese and Muslims would have gotten rich hundreds or thousands of years earlier. They did not; so why, in the historical blink of an eye, did the West?Here McCloskey continues her argument that ideas-or to be more precise, the spread of a specific highly radical set of ideas-was the cause. Not that other factors were not necessary. Private property, limits on the ability of guilds and states to throttle change, reformation in religion, printing, literacy, and even the occasional political revolution all played a role. But none of these were sufficient conditions to create the "Great Enrichment" of the last two hundred years. McCloskey compares all of these conditions, which can be found in many civilizations across history, to the accumulation of dry wood and brush in a forest. To set them alight, not only an initial spark is needed. It is also the case that elites must be unable to keep dousing the fires. What can prevent the elite from preventing change, when the status quo so strongly favors their interests? An insistence that ordinary people should be encouraged to act independently, be respected for originality and innovation, and be allowed to retain (most of) the profits of any activities they offer in free and fair markets. …

Either / Or—why ideas, science, imperialism, and institutions all matter in the "rise of the west"