{"id":35991,"date":"2018-07-16T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T05:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35991"},"modified":"2018-06-26T09:16:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T13:16:10","slug":"qotd-the-great-enrichment-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/16\/qotd-the-great-enrichment-2\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Great Enrichment"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow \u2014 if slowly \u2014 in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s \u2014 when many American children went to bed hungry.<\/p>\n<p>What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?<\/p>\n<p>Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called \u201cthe liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.\u201d In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.<\/p>\n<p>The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789 \u2014 namely, the four R\u2019s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R\u2019s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I\u2019ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.<\/p>\n<p>And they did.<\/p>\n<p>Dierdre N. McCloskey, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/09\/04\/upshot\/the-formula-for-a-richer-world-equality-liberty-justice.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice&#8221;, <em>New York Times<\/em><\/a>, 2016-09-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow \u2014 if slowly \u2014 in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"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":[25,7,41],"tags":[198,174,267,315],"class_list":["post-35991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-quotations","tag-equalrights","tag-innovation","tag-justice","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9mv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991","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=35991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35992,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991\/revisions\/35992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}