James Pethokoukis’s recent essay “Why No Industrial Revolution in Ancient Rome, Greece, or China?” earns, in my book, a grade of A-. In it, Pethokoukis makes many excellent points, and nicely riffs on the important work of others, including that of Mark Koyama, Joel Mokyr, and Max Tabarrok.
So why not an A+? The reason is that Pethokoukis doesn’t mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the bourgeois deal.
It’s true, as Pethokoukis (and Mokyr) note, that modern science is far more advanced in both its substantive achievements and institutional structure than was the science of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Song-dynasty China. But this reality isn’t as central as is the reality that market-tested innovation was in these places and times frowned upon – and frowned upon not only by state rulers and mandarins, but also by many ordinary people. This cultural hostility to innovations that disrupt familiar patterns of economic production and exchange – innovations that bubble up from below without prior approval of the powers-that-be – innovations that seek and need only the approval of ordinary people spending their own money as they choose – innovations that creatively destroy – is what prevented Rome, Greece, and China from experiencing the world’s first great wealth explosion. (I know that even Deirdre doesn’t like the term “cultural” as I use it here, but I honestly can think of no better term that isn’t excessively long.)
The development of formal scientific institutions that today play a key role in supplying fuel for modern economic growth is itself, I believe, more a result of the economic development sparked by the bourgeois deal than a cause of this development.
Perhaps more so than Deirdre, I believe that the wealth explosion that began in northwestern Europe just over 200 years ago also required accommodating changes in formal governmental and legal institutions. But even these changes were largely sparked and conditioned by the dignity that the bourgeoise gained when ordinary people came to think and talk of bourgeois virtues and pursuits as applause-worthy – or, at least, as not contemptible.
In short, I don’t see how the story of the modern world economy can fully and credibly be told without taking account of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois dignity.
