The Bourgeois Deal: Leave Me Alone, and I'll Make You Rich

Abstract

For almost all of history, people were extremely poor. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European countries (and their overseas extensions) began to grow extremely wealthy. Since World War II, enrichment has spread around the world with the “Asian Tigers” of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea becoming wealthy and with Chinese and Indian per capita income growing rapidly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Extensive research has emphasized the material and later the institutional underpinnings of economic growth, but McCloskey (2006, 2010, 2016) argues that changes in how we think, speak, and write about entrepreneurs and innovators explains what she calls the Great Enrichment. In this essay, we explore some of the “materialist” hypotheses for economic growth and explain how changing ideas about entrepreneurship led to modern prosperity.