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Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, draft (July 2009).
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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | Bourgeois Dignity, July 2009 version
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL | University of Chicago Press, 2010
Background Conditions, Good or Bad, of All Eurasian Civilizations before 1500, Which Merely Intensified Later
Literary, artistic, and scientific flowering
Respect for learning; universities
Education of elite
Printing and paper
Compass
Clocks [but especially in Europe]
Monotheism [especially in Europe including Orthodoxy, and in Muslim world]
Peace and bourgeois prosperity [less in Europe]
Urbanization [less so in northern Europe]
(-? or +?) High death rates in cities
Competent bureaucracy [especially in China]
High seed/yield ratios [not in Europe, which did not have much rice, or any maize]
Investment capability [less so in Europe: see yield/seed ratio]
Wide long-distance trade [less so in Europe]
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Slavery and its trade [especially in Middle East]
Wide and deep internal trade and markets
Good internal transportation, especially unimproved rivers, canals, and coastal ships
Temperate climate
(-) Onset of Little Ice Age (1300-1850) after climatic maximum before 1300
(-) Malaria
(-? or +?) The Plague
Desire for profit
Rule of law
Property rights
Money [in China even paper money]
Reasonably sophisticated financial institutions
High incomes in a few favored places
Coal widely used [China, India, Europe]
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Incidental Events 1500 to the Present, Not Contributing Much to the Great Fact
Protestant ethic
Thrift
Rise of rationality
Rise of greed
Spanish and Portuguese imperialism
The Price Revolution
Dutch, British, French trade (except as contributing to bourgeois dignity)
Dutch, British, French imperialism
Slave trade
Rises in the rate of saving
Original accumulation of capital
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Surplus value, reinvestment
Routine investment
Exploitation of the working class
Science (until around 1900)
(-) Sustained high prestige of aristocracy and gentry
Routine transportation improvement (canals, harbors)
English genetics
English social inheritance
Stuart missteps and taxation
The Glorious Revolution
Institutional change
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