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When the Soviet authorities during the 1940s exhibited the 1940 movie The Grapes of Wrath [2] as evidence of how miserable the poor were in capitalist America, it backfired. What amazed the Soviet audiences was that the Joad family fled starvation by car.
This passage – with original emphasis – is from page 54 of Deirdre McCloskey’s monumental and path-breaking 2010 book Bourgeois Dignity [3]. Read it. Twice. Even thrice.