Part V. Saving, Investment, Greed, and Original Accumulation Do Not Explain Growth

Nor does modern innovation have anything unusually “greedy” about it. In characterizing capitalism in 1867 as “solely the restless stirring for gain” Marx said he was quoting the bourgeois economist J. R. McCulloch’s Principles of Political Economy (edition of 1830): “This inextinguishable passion for gain, the auri sacra fames [‘for gold the infamous hunger’], will always lead capitalists.” ²⁶ But it leads everyone else, too. Auri sacra fames is from The Aeneid (19 B.C.E.), Book III, line 57, not from Benjamin Franklin or Advertising Age. In 1905 Max Weber, writing when the German Romantic notion that medieval society was more sweet and egalitarian than the Age of Innovation was just starting to crumble in the face of historical research, thundered against such an idea that greed is “in the least identical with capitalism, and still less with its spirit.” ”It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all.” In his posthumous General Economic History (1923) he wrote, “the notion that our rationalistic and capitalistic age is characterized by a stronger economic interest than other periods is childish.” ²⁷ The lust for gold, “the impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with innovation. This [greedy] impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that is has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given.” ²⁸

People have indulged in the sin of greed, for food or money or fame or power, since Eve saw that the tree was to be desired, and took the fruit thereof. Soviet Communism massively encouraged the sin of greed, as its survivors testify. Medieval peasants accumulated no less “greedily” than do American corporate executives, if on a rather smaller scale. Hume declared in 1742 that “Nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier, who purchases champagne and ortolans [little song birds rated a delicacy]. Riches are valuable at all times, and to all men.” ²⁹ Of course.

Many readers of the magnificent historical Chapters 25-31 of Capital will find all this hard to believe. Marx’s eloquence persuades them that someone writing in 1867, very early in the professionalization of history, nonetheless got the essence of the history right. Another of his great riffs, Chapter 15 on “Machinery and Modern Industry” (150 pages in the Modern Library edition of the English translation), trumpeted the truth that he was witnessing an Age of Innovation. But he subordinated the tune to his historical harmonizing, the growth of surplus value. The history that Marx thought he perceived went with his erroneous logic that capitalism—drawing on an anti-commercial theme as old as commerce—just is the same thing as greed. Greed is the engine that powers his sequence of M ? C ? M’. It says: Money starting through some original theft or thriftiness as an amount M gets invested in Capital (commodities used for profit), which is intrinsically exploitative (and so amplifies the original theft or thrift), generating surplus value appropriated by the capitalist to arrive at a new, higher amount of money, M^‘. “We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital [a] surplus-value is made, and from surplus value more capital.” And then again and again and again, in the inaccurate English translation of Marx’s German, “endlessly.”³⁰

The classical and Marxist idea that capital begets capital, “endlessly,” is hard to shake. Thus Immanuel Wallerstein in 1983 spoke of “the endless accumulation of capital, a level of waste that may begin to border on the irreparable.” ³¹ It has recently revived a little among economists, in the form of so-called “new growth theory,” which amounts to giving M ? C ? M’ a mathematically spiffed-up form. The “endless”/”never-ending” word, by the way—which was echoed during the Dark Ages in rural and monkish economic theory and still resonates in all our notions of “capitalism”—originated twenty-four centuries before Marx in the Greek aristocratic disdain for commerce. People of business (declared aristocratic Plato and aristocrat-loving Aristotle) are motivated by apeiros, unlimited, greed. Thus Aristotle in the Politics. The “no limit” in Aristotle is about buying low and selling high. ³² In the thirteenth century Aquinas, referring to Aristotle with a little less than his customary enthusiasm for The Philosopher, retails the usual complaint against retailing, which depends on “the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.” ³³ As the political scientist John Danford observes, “the belief that there is something objectionable about [arbitrage] has persisted for more than two thousand years. . . . The enduring legacy . . . was. . . the view that . . . commerce or the acquisition of wealth is not merely low; it is unnatural, a perversion of nature, and unworthy of a decent human being.” ³⁴

For all Marx’s brilliance—anyone who does not think he was the greatest social scientist of the nineteenth century has not read enough Marx, or is blinded by ideology or by the unhappy effects of Marxian writings on the politics of the twentieth century—he got the history wrong. Whatever the value of his theories as a way of asking historical questions, you cannot rely on Marx for any important historical fact: not on enclosures, not on the fate of the workers, not on the results of machine production, not on the false consciousness of the working class. The great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, a proud member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until its dissolution in 1991, admits that the historical knowledge of Marx and Engels was on many points “thin.” No serious Marxist historian writing in English, such as Hobsbawm or Christopher Hill or E. P. Thompson, has taken historical facts from Marx. ³⁵

It is not some special Marxian fault. The same is true of the other practitioners of merely philosophical history before the facts started at last arriving in bulk after the full professionalization of history, during the twentieth century. Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Hegel, Macaulay, Tönnies, Durkheim, and even, a late instance, Max Weber on many points, and still later Karl Polanyi (and less excusably the many recent followers of Polanyi), got the historical facts more or less wrong, and tended to get them wrong in the same way. ³⁶ You would be foolish to depend mainly on Polanyi or Weber or even my beloved and liberal Macaulay, or even my worshipped and liberal Adam Smith, for your understanding of the past. The theory of capitalism that educated people to this day carry around in their heads springs from the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of Marx, St. Benedict, and Aristotle. It is economically mistaken. And the point here is that it is historically mistaken as well.

The myth of Kapitalismus says that thrift among the bourgeoisie consisted precisely in the absence of a purpose other than accumulation for its own sake, solely the restless stirring for gain. Declared the man himself in 1867, capitalism entails “accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake.” “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the prophets!” ³⁷ Thus the left-wing economist, my misled but princely acquaintance the late Robert Heilbroner: “capitalism has been an expansive system from its earliest days, a system whose driving force has been the effort to accumulate ever larger amounts of capital itself.” ³⁸ Thus Weber, too, in 1905: “the summum bonum of this ethic [is] the earning of more and more money. . . . Acquisition . . . [is] the ultimate purpose of life.” ³⁹ Weber here, contrary to his thundering quoted above, retails Marx, money-to-capital-to-money. True, skill at acquisition is an “expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling.” But innovation was in historical fact not skill at accumulation. Imagination was not restless stirring for gain. Socially profitable originality was not duty in a calling. What made us rich was a new rhetoric favorable to innovation, imagination, originality—not accumulation restlessly stirring, or mere duty to a calling, which are ancient and routine and uncreative, though often Good Things.

At the level of individuals there has never been any evidence for the historical change that is supposed to characterize modern forms of greedy thrift. People were greedy and thrifty, I repeat, long before. The chief evidence for a change in thriftiness that Weber himself gives in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a humorless reading of Benjamin Franklin’s two-page Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748). He misses for example the deflating sting in the last lines: “He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets . . . will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest endeavors, doth not, in His wise providence, otherwise determine.” So nothing is “certainly,” young tradesman, even if you bizarrely save all you get (as Franklin assuredly did not). And he missed in “He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds” the parodic echo of the previous year’s “Speech of Miss Polly Baker.” Avid Franklin readers, of which there were many, would have noted the echo. Prosecuted for giving birth to her fifth illegitimate child, Polly as ventriloquised by Franklin chides “the great and growing number of bachelors in the country, many of whom, . . . have never sincerely and honorably courted a woman in their lives; and by their manner of living leave unproduced (which I think is little better than murder) hundreds of their posterity to the thousandth generation. Is not theirs a greater offence against the public good, than mine?” The Yale historian and editor of the massive Franklin Papers, Claude-Anne Lopez, once remarked that Franklin will lack an adequate biography until someone with a sense of humor attempts it.

Weber read Franklin’s Autobiography, and like many others he took as the man’s essence the famous printed account book of virtues that a young printer in Philadelphia used to discipline himself. Declared Weber, “the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic. . . in all his works without exception” is that expression of proficiency in a calling. No it isn’t. Like many other readers of Franklin, especially non-American readers—most famously D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)—Weber missed the joke. Lawrence called Franklin “the sharp little man. . . . The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat,” and other Europeans have viewed him with similarly humorless and uncomprehending scorn.⁴⁰ Weber’s nephew wrote a book in 1936 explaining why Uncle Max got Franklin so wrong: “Nations are curiously incapable of understanding each other’s sense of humor. . . . [Weber] carefully constructed an elaborate theory of Franklin’s ascetic economic ethos as one of the essential foundations of modern capitalism, . . . which is repeated uncritically from all kinds of pulpits. . . with learned mien and a pronounced shyness to consult the sources.” ⁴¹

The frontiersman, wigless, “ascetic” image that Franklin projected for political purposes in France was contradicted even there by his actual behavior in humorous (and innocent) dalliances with the wives of French aristocrats. And he was nothing like singlemindedly devoted to his calling as a printer and businessman, even when before age 42 he was practicing it. Young and old, Franklin was multiminded. Weber failed to note Franklin’s actual behavior as a loving and passionate friend and patriot, a deeply curious man very willing to wander from his calling to measure the temperature of the Gulf Stream, though getting the current job done on time; or his amused self-ironies about his young self. Amused self-ironies were a franklinische, and later an American, specialty. The most well-known of the amused self-ironies in Franklin’s Autobiography is his comment about a late addition to his checklist of virtues, Humility: “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.” It is hard miss the nudge in the ribs. But some people have nonetheless missed it, in their eagerness to pillory the bourgeoisie.

Franklin’s writing, when not dead serious (after all, he helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris), is jammed with such clowning around. In 1741 Poor Richard’s Almanac predicted only sunshine, every day of the year. “To oblige thee more,” Poor Richard explained to his dear reader, “I have omitted all the bad weather.” The parody shouts itself. Yet many readers of Franklin don’t get it—most influentially in his self-parodying compilation of Poor Richard’s proverbs, “The Way to Wealth.” It was published in 1758, when Franklin was precisely not pursuing wealth as a printer, or anything else of proficient and profitable calling, but representing the Pennsylvania Assembly in London, at his own considerable expense, having entirely given up the “duty of the individual to increase his capital” that Weber sees in him. Jill Lapore notes that “The Way to Wealth” is “among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood.” Its thrifty recommendation of “no gains without pains” and other supposedly bourgeois formulas “has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s—and even America’s—creed.” ⁴²

Yet only a humorless reading would find in it a sharp little capitalist, a pattern American, declaring for Prudence Only. Mark Van Doren tried in 1938 to get people to read Franklin rightly, complaining for example that the “dry, prim people” “praise [Franklin’s] thrift. But he himself admitted that he could never learn frugality, and he practiced it no longer than his poverty forced him to.” Quoting Van Doren, Lapore lists Franklin’s massive purchases in 1758 sent back to his wife in Philadelphia. Franklin attached a proud spender’s notation that “there is something from all the china works in England.” ⁴³ The misreaders, Van Doren had continued, “praise his prudence. But at seventy he became a leader of a revolution.”

Lapore points out that most of Poor Richard’s proverbs in the almanacs themselves were not in fact about Prudence Only. Franklin selected the money-making ones for “The Way to Wealth” because his mission in London was to try to persuade the British government to remove some small taxes on their fellow countrymen in the colonies. To his fellow colonists, in line with his optimism that with temperance on both sides the Empire could hold together, he was noting in the voice of Father Abraham that “the taxes are indeed very heavy. . . but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by idleness, three times as much by pride, and four times as much by folly. ” The figure of argument was ancient, and nothing like American or utilitarian. Seneca wrote: “Show me a man who isn’t a slave. One is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition. . . . There’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than one that’s self-imposed.” ⁴⁴ And “Franklin might have chosen to collect,” Lepore notes, “the dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs advising against the accumulation of wealth. The poor have little, beggars none;/ The rich too much, enough not one.” ⁴⁵

Lepore agrees with all careful students of Franklin that, as the man himself put it, he “would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.” Greedy thrift in the Marxian tale, by contrast, has the sole telos of dying rich. Charles Dickens, brought up in the law in London, who himself was an entrepreneur in theatre and publishing but could not understand other profitable trades, gave us Scrooge, and his Disney descendant Scrooge McDuck—accumulate, accumulate. Max Weber modified the pointlessness of the impulse to accumulate, accumulate by claiming that “this philosophy of avarice” (allegedly Franklin’s, remember) depends on a transcendent “duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital,” yielding a “worldly asceticism.” ⁴⁶ But Franklin, who after all had lost most other traces of his ancestors’ Calvinism, whether spiritual or worldly (by contrast with his abstemious young friend and enemy John Adams, for example). He abandoned at age 42 “endless” accumulation and devoted the other half of his long life to science and public purposes, and world-relishing consumption. ⁴⁷ If, as Weber argued, the religious element drops out and accumulation takes over, one would like to know why accumulation did not take over, in Franklin or in Carnegie or in Gates. The same could be said, and has been by Joel Mokyr, for the rigorous Calvinists of seventeenth century Holland—the same ones who spent their incomes on merchant palaces along the Singel, and on luscious oil paintings officially warning of the vanity of mere matter by showing a polished silver tray with a half peeled lemon and a beaker full of the warm south. So much for “worldly asceticism” or “ever larger amounts of capital itself” or a “duty toward the increase of capital” or “accumulate, accumulate.”

Many fine scholars have taken in with their mother’s milk a belief that modern life is unusually devoted to gain, and that thrift is therefore something recent, dirty, and bourgeois, though lamentably profitable—because of exploitation in M ? C ? M’. “The unlimited hope for gain in the market,” writes the otherwise admirable political theorist Joan Tronto, “would teach people an unworkable premise for moral conduct, since the very nature of morality seems to dictate that desires must be limited by the need to coexist with others.” ⁴⁸ But running a business, unlike professing at a university, would teach anyone that gain is limited. Dealing in a market, unlike sitting in the Reading Room of the British Museum during the 1850s and 1860s writing burning phrases against the market, would teach that desires must be limited by the need to coexist with others. The tuition of a market society in scarcity, other-regarding, and liberal values works as an ethical school. As the historian Thomas Haskell put it in 1985, “contrary to romantic folklore, the marketplace is not a Hobbesian war of all against all. Many holds are barred. Success ordinarily requires not only pugnacity and shrewdness but also restraint,” that is, the virtue of temperance. ⁴⁹

Even so fine an historian as Alan Macfarlane believes the Aristotelian /Marxist/ Weberian lore: “the ethic of endless accumulation,” he writes, “as an end and not a means, is the central peculiarity of capitalism.” ⁵⁰ If it were, the miser would be a strictly modern figure, and not proverbial in every literature in the world. Around 1665 the poet Abraham Cowley (a royalist version of Milton) wrote of avarice that “there is no vice that has been so pelted with good sentences, and especially by the poets, who have . . . moved, as we say, every stone to fling at it,” and gave an example from his own pen:

What would content you? who can tell?
Ye fear so much to lose what ye have got
As if ye lik’d it well,
Ye strive for more as if lik’d it not.

He translates Horace to the same effect, and quotes a line he attributes to Ovid: Desunt luxuriae multa avaritiae omnia (Many things are wanting to Luxury, [but] everything to Avarice). ⁵¹ As Cowley implies, however, go anywhere in literature or preaching or law from Mesopotamia to the moderns and you will find similar sentiments about the avaricious miser—who is supposed in modernist theorizing to arise suddenly around 1750 out of Calvinist ancestry in the form of the sharp little man, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat. In China the poet Tang Bo Ju-yi (772-846 C.E.) complains of the salt-tax monopolist that “The salt merchant’s wife/ has silk and gold aplenty,/ but she does not work at farming [the only honored source of things],/. . . . Her gleaming wrists have gotten plump,/ Her silver bracelets tight.” Or Liu Zong-yuan (773-819 C.E.), in a parable comparing the miser to a pack beetle: “Those in our own times who lust to lay hold of things will never back away when they chance on possessions by which to enrich their household [just like the beetle carrying whatever useful he encounters twice his weight on his back]. They don’t understand that it encumbers them, and fear only that they won’t accumulate enough.” ⁵²

“In this consists the difference between the character of a miser,” wrote Adam Smith in 1759, “and that of a [thrifty] person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down for himself.” ⁵³ He might as well have been describing Ben Franklin before he was wealthy, or his friend Mr. William Crauford, a merchant of Glasgow, whom he did describe in 1758: “Who to that exact frugality, that downright probity and plainness of manners so suitable to his profession, joined a love of learning, . . an openness of hand and a generosity of heart. . . . candid and penetrating, circumspect and sincere.” ⁵⁴ Accumulate, accumulate, or plumping ones wrists, or laying hold of everything like a pack beetle, is not a “scheme of life” in the ethical sense that Smith had in mind.

At the level of the society as a whole there is “unlimited” accumulation, at any rate if rats and fire and war do not intervene. Corporations are streams of such accumulation, having legally infinite lives—though in truth many little corporations die every year, and a few big ones (thus Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, WorldCom, and General Motors). ⁵⁵ The individual economic molecules who make up the river of innovation may not always want to accumulate, accumulate beyond age 42, but the river as a whole, it is said, keeps rolling along. It is true, and to our good. The books and machines and improved acreage and splendid buildings and so forth inherited from an accumulating past are good for us now. Thanks be to the ancestors.

But there is no historical case for “accumulate, accumulate” being peculiar to modern times. Crassus and Seneca accumulated. The presence of old buildings is not historically recent, suddenly accumulated in the Age of Innovation. Very long-lived institutions like families or churches or royal lineages existed before 1700, and were themselves, too, sites of accumulation. Thus the long-lived improved acreage could spread up the hillsides under the pressure of population before the Black Death. Thus the long-lived medieval cathedrals were raised over centuries. Thus the long-lived Oxford colleges were built, and endowed with long-lived real estate, itself the accumulated investment in long-lived drains and stone fences and brick barns. Thus the canals of China and the roads of Peru.

The classical economists from Adam Smith to Marx were writing before the upsurge in real wages of British and French and American working people in the last half of the nineteenth century, and long before the explosion of world income in the twentieth century. They imagined a moderate rise of income per person, perhaps at the most by a factor of two or three, such as might conceivably be achieved by Scotland’s Highlands becoming similar to capital-rich Holland (Smith’s view) or by manufacturers in Manchester stealing savings for reinvestment from their poor workers (Marx’s view) or by the savings generated from globalization being invested in European factories (John Stuart Mill’s view). (To speak again to my economist colleagues, they contemplated moving down the marginal product of capital—not its shocking lurch to the right.) But the classical economists, to repeat, were mistaken.

The prehistory of thrift was revolutionized around 1960 when economists and economic historians realized with a jolt that thriftiness and savings could not explain the Industrial Revolution. The economists such as Abramowitz, Kendrick, and Solow discovered that only a smallish fraction even of recent economic growth can be explained by routine thrift and miserly accumulation. At the same time the economic historians were bringing the news that in Britain the rise in savings was too modest to explain much at all. Simon Kuznets and later many other economists such as Charles Feinstein provided the rigorous accounting of the fact—though as students of capital accumulation they could never quite overcome their initial hypothesis that Capital Did The Trick. The aggregate statistical news was anticipated in the 1950s and 1960s by numerous economic historians of Britain such as François Crouzet and Philip Cottrell and Sidney Pollard, in detailed studies of the financing of industry. Peter Mathias summarized the case in 1973: “considerable revaluation has recently occurred in assessing the role of capital.” ⁵⁶ That is no overstatement.

The trouble is that savings and urbanization and state power to expropriate and the other physical-capital accumulations that are supposed to explain modern economic growth have existed on a large scale since the Sumerians. Yet modern economic growth—that wholly unprecedented factor in the high teens (or low hundreds if quality of goods is measured properly)—is a phenomenon of the past two centuries alone. Something happened in the eighteenth century that prepared for a temporary but shocking “great divergence” of the European economies from those of the rest of the world.

The classical and flawed view, overturned by the economic historians of the 1950s and 1960s, is that thrift implies saving which implies capital accumulation which implies modern economic growth. It lingered in a few works such as Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), and most unhappily in what Easterly called the capital fundamentalism of foreign aid, 1950 to the present. The belief was that if we give Ghana over several decades large amounts of savings, leading to massive capital investments in artificial lakes and Swiss bank accounts, and give Communist China not a cent, Ghana will prosper and Communist China will languish. ⁵⁷ Inevitably. The mathematics on the blackboard says so.

---

26. [back] Quoted in Marx 1867 (Capital, Vol. I, p. 171n2). I can't find the phrase in any of the on-line editions of McCulloch's Principles. Note by the way the use of the word "capitalist," which occurs in McCulloch over 100 times (and "capitalism" never). The Oxford English Dictionary gives Arthur Young's Travels in France of 1792 as the first quotation for "capitalist." Ricardo used the word little. The first quotation in the OED for "capital" in the economic sense is 1709.
27. [back] Weber 1923, p. 355.
28. [back] Weber 1905, p. 17.
29. [back] Hume , "Of Refinement in the Arts" ***[1742: "Of Luxury"] in Haakonssen, ed., p. 111.
30. [back] For example, Marx 1867, Chp. 24, Sec. 1, p. 641; and Chp. 26, p. 784.
31. [back] Wallerstein 1983 (1995), p. 100. "Waste" such as decent housing for the Chinese.
32. [back] Aristotle, Politics 1257a20, kai apeiros dê houtos ho ploutos.
33. [back] Aquinas 1251-1273, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 77, Art. 4, "I answer that."
34. [back] Danford 2006, pp. 328-329.
35. [back] Hobsbawm 1964, "Introduction" to Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, cited by Pipes 1999, p. 52n.
36. [back] Santhi Hejeebu and I have laid out the case in favor of Polanyi's understanding of second best against Polanyi's economic history in Hejeebu and McCloskey 2000 and 2003.
37. [back] Marx 1867, Chp. 24, p. 652.
38. [back] Heilbroner 1953, p. 201. Compare p. 156, "an owner-entrepreneur engaged in an endless [apeiros] race," and so forth.
39. [back] Weber 1905, p. 53.
40. [back] Lawrence 1923, p. 23; compare for example Robert Louis Stevenson's sneer at the teachers of our average men, who "from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin . . . have inculcated the same ideals of manners, caution, and respectability" (Stevenson 1881, p. 876). Even Alasdair MacIntyre, that perceptive Scot resident in America, mistakes Franklin.
41. [back] Baumgarten, "Benjamin Franklin: Der Lehrmeister der amerikanischen Revolution," 1936, quoted in Roth 1987, p. 19. Lujo Brentano, the German economist, whose English (as Roth explains) was much better than Weber's, made the same point.
42. [back] Lepore 2008, p. 78.
43. [back] Lepore 2008, pp. 82, 81.
44. [back] Seneca, Letter XLVII, 17, p. 95, ending nulla servitus turpior est quam voluntaria.
45. [back] Lepore 2008, p. 82.
46. [back] Weber 1905, p. 51, italics supplied.
47. [back] See the section "Retirement," pp.126-128 in Isaacson 2003.
48. [back] Tronto 1993, p. 29.
49. [back] Haskell's remark is quoted in Innis 1988, p. 39n61.
50. [back] Macfarlane 1987, p. 226.
51. [back] Cowley c. 1665, pp. 198, 197. The Horace is the First Satire (beginning "How comes it to pass, Maecenas, that no one lives content with his condition?"), but the Ovid is actually Publilius Syrus, maxim 121, with inopiae, "to poverty," substituted for luxuriae, (www.thelatinlibrary.com/syrus.html), and was quoted in Seneca.
52. [back] From Owen 1996, pp. 501, 617-618.
53. [back] Smith 1759 (1790), III.6.6, p. 173.
54. [back] Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 262.
55. [back] Lex Donaldson (1995, p. 75), following Alfred Chandler, argues that of the largest American corporations only 2 percent vanish every year, and few of these from closing down-they get merged instead. But those are the big boys, too big to fail. Siegel (2002, p. 638, Fig. 14-1) reckons that all U.S. enterprises with any sort of payroll, not merely the big ones, have death rates of about 17 percent in each of their first couple of years, decreasing to 7 percent per year if they survive to age 14.
56. [back] Mathias 1973 (1979), p. 88.
57. [back] Rostow 1960; Easterly 2001.

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