Deirdre N. McCloskey

Highly interesting, erudite, and feisty economic history that is in effect a critical primer on attempts to explain the great fact of why massive sustained growth in productivity began only around 1800 and in Britain. McCloskey argues that the Industrial Revolution was not caused by any of the usual suspects--good institutions, high wages, the location of coal, trade, science--but by a shift in ideology to one that respected and permitted entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creative destruction. The negative criticism is done thoroughly and convincingly here; the positive case is presumably built up more thoroughly in the next volume ("Bourgeois Equality")...… (meer)

This book will convince you there was a Dutch-British ethical and rhetorical "revaluation of the bourgeoisie" and of its practice of "trade-tested improvement". But despite the previous volume's preview in diagram form of the causal linkages between the change in ethos and the stream of mechanical innovations that made the Industrial Revolution, the causal connections are left vague. We are to understand that society became more willing to allow creative destruction and innovations that harmed vested interests, but this is not actually demonstrated by facts on the ground, only by literary and cultural analysis. Was a spirit of laissez-faire all it took? There are no case-studies of inventions, business projects, or government policies to show how the new ethos contributed concretely to economic growth, no serious comparative studies of times and places with differing attitudes or policies. This means the trilogy has been left off with the great burden of its positive and novel argument seemingly still to be made.… (meer)