One result was modern economic growth. The Two Nicks. Main theme: right thru neoclassicals it is viewed as small, coming from specialization and trade. Smith, Mill, Marshall, even Keynes: little-growth backdrop, being falsified as they wrote. Locke sank into a swoon; / The Garden died; / God took the spinning-jenny / Out of his side. (more…)

The word “thrift” in English is still used as late as John Bunyan to mean simply “wealth” or “profit,” deriving from the verb “thrive” as “gift” from “give” and “drift” from “drive.” But its sense 3 in the Oxford English Dictionary is our modern one, dating significantly from the 16th century: “food is never found (more…)

Or the state. The second sphere in Klamer’s framework is the state, the sphere of compulsion. Liah Greenwald has argued in an impressive recent book, The Spirit of Capitalism (2001), that “the factor responsible for the reorientation of economic activity towards growth is nationalism.” She summarizes her case towards the end of a long chapter (more…)

[One can go through a long list of the Nots of causes for modern growth-not for example trade as an engine of growth. Add: *Keukentafel economics point about modern development.] We have learned in the past twenty years of research into the era, to put the findings in a nutshell, that reallocation was not the (more…)

The other Klamerian sphere is the market. Not . . . . What we’ve learned from economic history. Not demand. Not saving. Not original accumulation, as I have said, and not slavery, not piracy, not poverty, not enclosures [my calculations], as the anti-bourgeois theorists alleged; and especially not what bourgeois economists call “neoclassical reallocations.” Here (more…)

Fernand Braudel’s astonishing product of his old age, full title, and especially volume 2, The Wheels of Commerce. Throughout Wheels Braudel admires markets and disdains what he calls “capitalists.” [give numerous examples of both to prove]. It gradually becomes clear [arrange the quotes so it does so] that what he means by a “market” is (more…)

Virtues caused commerce. Endogenization of ethical change. A new humanistic economics. The outcome was the greatest change in the human condition since the invention of agriculture, the freeing of billions of people from poverty. Another way to put the point is to think of three strands in economic thinking since the mercantilists: The first two (more…)

Under the heading of: The Consequences of Bourgeois Virtues: B. The Spiritual Good of the Bourgeoisie And the other direction of causation is equally important: that commerce sweetened people. Cooperation, not alienation, is the usual result of commerce. Not diminishing social contact but increase. Speech dominates bourgeois society. Show the historical/sociological evidence of this. Coffee (more…)