Real national income per head in Britain rose by a factor of about 16 from the 18th century to the present. Other cases, such as that of the U.S. or Korea, have been even more startling, historically speaking. Like the realization in astronomy during the 1920s that most of the “nebulae” detected by telescopes are in fact other galaxies unspeakably far from ours, the Great Fact of economic growth, discovered by historians and economists in the 1950s and elaborated since then, changes everything. [continues; click title bar above]

Britain was first, though the classical (and many of the neoclassical) economists did not recognize that its course was beginning the factor of 16. The slow British growth in the 18th century proposed by Crafts and Harley is unbelievable, but however one assigns growth within the period 1700-1900 it is now plain that something unprecedented was happening. Only non-economists recognized it at the time. The central puzzle is why innovation did not fizzle out, as Mokyr has put it—as it had at other times and places. Productivity in cotton textiles, for example, grew at computer-industry rates, … [continues; click title bar above]

“Bourgeois Virtues” at the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) and the Academy of Management’s Social Issues in Management Division (SIM) in Chicago (at a hotel to be arranged) on Saturday, at 6:30 p.m.

Mont Pelerin Society, Stockholm, on “Bourgeois Virtues”

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift durinhttp://www.deirdremccloskey.com/weblog/2009/08/28/saving-investment-greed-and-original-accumulation-do-not-explain-growth/g the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather below the European average. And for still another, savings is elastically supplied, by credit expansion for example (as Schumpeter observed). [continues; click title bar above]