Tweet [1]
… is from page 105 of Deirdre McCloskey’s insightful 2022 volume, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics [2]:
It is not efficiency as economists think of it that is the best of the good news of the Great Enrichment, but utterly novel betterments causing the marginal product of the labor curve to zoom out, such as zippers, asphalt-paved roads, cheap screws and bolts, cardboard boxes, sewer traps in plumbing, screens on open windows, widespread secondary schools, computers and the internet – the sorts of betterments that can be adopted even by a terribly governed economy, such as Italy’s, with satisfactory results.
DBx: Yes.
Pictured above is reinforced concrete, yet another of the practically uncountable quotidian marvels, produced by the market apparently routinely, contributing to modernity’s astonishing prosperity.