Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 336-337 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2016 review of Joel Mokyr’s 2016 book, A Culture of Growth, as this review is reprinted in Historical Impromptus, a 2020 collection of some of Deirdre’s work on economic history:

Adam Smith in 1776 spoke warmly of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” Liberalism, letting ordinary people have a go, made people bold. The only way we get great enrichments is if the mass of people are bold, because that’s where the engineering elite comes from. An earlier and primitive liberalism of ideas encouraged the republic of letters, too. So did the printing press and the fragmentation of political authority in Europe, which are also roots of liberalism itself. So the causes are tangled. But the scientific revolution is Europe-wide. The industrial revolution was English, prepared by the Dutch, followed by the Scots and the Yankees. And they are just the places where a liberal plan, however imperfectly, was first tried.