An extreme materialist hypothesis explaining the Industrial Revolution would be simply genetic. Gregory Clark asserts such a theory of sociobiological inheritance in his Farewell to Alms (2007). Rich people proliferated in England, Clark argues, and by a social Darwinian struggle the poor and incompetent died out, leaving a master race of Englishmen with the bourgeois values to conquer the world. Clark will have no truck with ideas as causes, adopting a materialist (and as he believes is implied by materialism a quantitative) theory of truth. His method, that is, follows Marx in historical materialism, … [continues; click title bar above]

North, with many other Samuelsonian economists, thinks of “institutions” as budget constraints in a maximization problem. But as Clifford Geertz put it, an institution such as a toll for safe passage is “rather more than a mere payment,” that is, a mere monetary constraint. “It was part of a whole complex of moral rituals, customs with the force of law and the weight of sanctity.” [continues; click title bar above]

Chapters 30-31 from: Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World Abstract What happened to make for the factor of 16 were new ideas, what Mokyr calls “Industrial Enlightenment.” But the Scientific Revolution did not suffice. Non-Europeans like the Chinese outstripped the West in science until quite late. Britain did not lead (more…)

Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand—the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. [continues; click title bar above]

We need to explain the astonishing enrichment in bourgeois countries from 1800 to the present, such as Norway’s move from $3 a day in 1800 to $137 in 2006. But the explanation cannot be economic. If it were so — trade, investment, incentives — it would have happened earlier, or in other places. Economics determines how the tide of growth expressed itself down this inlet or beside that quay. Good. But the tide itself had “rhetorical” causes. [continues; click title bar above]

Background Conditions, Good or Bad, of All Eurasian Civilizations before 1500, Which Merely Intensified Later

A list of all works cited in McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World