Video: McCloskey's Lecture on the Origin of Modern Economic Growth

Gary North - December 05, 2015

Deidre McCloskey has written two profound and unsettling books on the origin of the modern economy: Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity. I have read both twice. Soon Bourgeois Equality will arrive.

If McCloskey is correct, then it was one main idea, not investment capital, that created modern economic growth and therefore the modern world. The idea was this: entrepreneurial wealth is morally legitimate. The rich man was finally acknowledged to have dignity. All men are equal before the law. "All men have a go at great wealth." The transformation began in early seventeenth-century Netherlands. It was the preaching of Calvinist ministers that began this change.

I have waited over 50 years for this third volume.

McCloskey is both an historian and an economist.

This is a 30-minute lecture. There is an hour's Q&A session. McCloskey has a stutter. So did the man who first taught economic history to me, Hugh Aitken. Oddly, both Aitken and McCloskey subsequently served as editors of The Journal of Economic History.

Start viewing it at 6 minutes in.