October, 2010

Coal Sustained the Industrial Revolution

by Matt Ridley
The Conversation
October 28th, 2010

I concede Greg’s point, namely that cheap energy played a small role in the starting of the British Industrial Revolution, which like the Dutch, Italian, Chinese, ancient Greek and Phoenician booms was about technological innovation spurred by trade. Absolutely true. But what was unique about the British Industrial Revolution — and Deirdre and Greg have [...]

Read: Coal Sustained the Industrial Revolution

Coal Is the Wrong Materialism

by Gregory Clark
The Conversation
October 27th, 2010

Matt Ridley calls for a materialist account of the Industrial Revolution. Coal — and thus geography — he thinks is the crucial factor. I agree with him against Deirdre McCloskey that we need a materialist account. But coal is the wrong material. Coal has long exercised a powerful magnetism as the key to the Industrial [...]

Read: Coal Is the Wrong Materialism

Bringing Values In

by Jonathan Feinstein
The Conversation
October 20th, 2010

Although most economists — and most people — would agree that creativity and innovation are central to the workings of a free society and the modern economy, the fact remains that creativity and innovation have not been central to the development and dogma of the field of economics. We can trace many reasons for this, [...]

Read: Bringing Values In

The Same Anti-Economic Project of Creativity: Reply to Jonathan Feinstein

by Deirdre McCloskey
The Conversation
October 19th, 2010

Jonathan Feinstein I think somewhat misunderstands what I am about, and my relation to the more usual history and the more usual economics. He has read, I know, all 500 pages of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), for which he deserves some sort of reading medal. But he has not [...]

Read: The Same Anti-Economic Project of Creativity: Reply to Jonathan Feinstein

Reply to Greg Clark on China’s Dishonesty

by Deirdre McCloskey
The Conversation
October 18th, 2010

Greg Clark says that cheating in China means that the “bourgeois virtues” I touted in the book of the same name (2006) aren’t the ticket. But cheating was rampant in England in the early seventeenth century, as it is in most poor countries. Look at the Bard’s obsession with dishonesty, in honest, honest Iago, say, [...]

Read: Reply to Greg Clark on China’s Dishonesty

I Too Was Once a Materialist

by Deirdre McCloskey
The Conversation
October 13th, 2010

The test of an intelligent critic is that he gets one’s arguments straight, putting them in ways that one wishes one had been clever enough to devise. My old friend Greg Clark passes the test at three A’s in A-levels. He’s exactly right, for example, about our shared dismay at the boyish charms of incentives [...]

Read: I Too Was Once a Materialist

Neophobia vs. Innovation

by Matt Ridley
The Conversation
October 13th, 2010

Deirdre is delightfully right about many things, including the fact that the Accumulators are wrong. I should have taken more time to acknowledge what a struggle still lies ahead to persuade most of the academic world, let alone the rest of humanity, that the great economic expansion of the past 200 years did not come [...]

Read: Neophobia vs. Innovation

China and Bourgeois Virtue

by Gregory Clark
The Conversation
October 12th, 2010

A recent New York Times article titled “Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent” provides an interesting counter to Deirdre McCloskey’s assertion that modern growth required bourgeois virtue, not just old fashioned greed. A fundament of bourgeois virtue is honesty in dealing with others: a horror of prevarication, mendacity, and lying. China, as we know, [...]

Read: China and Bourgeois Virtue