{"id":24079,"date":"2014-02-01T09:02:44","date_gmt":"2014-02-01T14:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24079"},"modified":"2014-02-01T09:02:44","modified_gmt":"2014-02-01T14:02:44","slug":"economics-cant-explain-everything-the-great-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/02\/01\/economics-cant-explain-everything-the-great-fact\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics can&#8217;t explain everything &#8211; the &#8220;Great Fact&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/blog\/great-fact-economic-growth-three-images\" target=\"_blank\">David Boaz<\/a> rounds up a few human moments to illustrate the &#8220;Great Fact&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In <em>Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can\u2019t Explain the Modern World<\/em>, economic historian Deirdre McCloskey writes about the \u201cGreat Fact\u201d &mdash; the enormous and unprecedented growth in living standards that began in the western world around 1700. She calls it \u201ca factor of sixteen\u201d: we moderns consume at least 16 times the food, clothing, housing, and education that our ancestors did in London in the 18th century. <\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>And finally, I note an older book on my own Scottish ancestors, <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=r9TX6swm_5kC&#038;printsec=frontcover&#038;dq=the+scotch-irish&#038;hl=en&#038;sa=X&#038;ei=DzndUunTKY-wsAS72oGIBg&#038;ved=0CEQQ6AEwAg#v=snippet&#038;q=hovels&#038;f=false\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Scotch-Irish: A Social History<\/em><\/a> by James G. Leyburn:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The squalor and meanness of [lowland Scottish] life around 1600 [or 1700] can hardly be conceived by a person of the twentieth century. A cluster of hovels housed the tenants and their helpers\u2026.A home was likely to be little more than a shanty, constructed of stones, banked with turf, without mortar, and with straw, heather, or moss stuffed in the holes to keep out the blasts\u2026.The fire, usually in the middle of the house floor, often filled the whole hut with malodorous clouds, since the smoke-clotted roof gradually stopped the vent-hole. Cattle were tethered at night at one end of the room, while the family lay at the other end on heather piled upon the floor\u2026.Vermin abounded\u2026skin diseases\u2026Infectious diseases were propagated readily.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>According to scholars such as Angus Maddison and Brad DeLong, GDP per capita hardly rose for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years before the emergence of capitalism. And then after 100,000 years of stagnation (by DeLong\u2019s estimates), around 1750 capitalism and growth began, first in Northern Europe and the American seaboard, and spreading ever since to more parts of the world. That is, the existence of relatively free markets is the reason we don\u2019t live like my Scottish ancestors. This is indeed the Great Fact of the modern world. We should celebrate it, even as we work to extend the benefits of markets to people and nations who don\u2019t yet enjoy as much capitalism as they should.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Boaz rounds up a few human moments to illustrate the &#8220;Great Fact&#8221;: In Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can\u2019t Explain the Modern World, economic historian Deirdre McCloskey writes about the \u201cGreat Fact\u201d &mdash; the enormous and unprecedented growth in living standards that began in the western world around 1700. She calls it \u201ca factor of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7],"tags":[91,236,338],"class_list":["post-24079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","tag-poverty","tag-progress","tag-scotland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6gn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24080,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24079\/revisions\/24080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}