Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 327 of Deirdre McCloskey’s May 20th, 2016, essay – “How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich” – in the Wall Street Journal, as this essay is reprinted in Historical Impromptus, a 2020 collection of some of McCloskey’s work on economic history:

While all this deep thinking was roiling the intelligentsia of [19th-century] Europe, the commercial bourgeoisie – despised by the right and the left, and by many in the middle, too – created the Great Enrichment and the modern world. The Enrichment gigantically improved our lives. In doing so, it proved that both social Darwinism and economic Marxism were mistaken. The supposedly inferior races and classes and ethnicities proved not to be so. The exploited proletariat was not driven into misery; it was enriched. It turned out that ordinary men and women didn’t need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone, became immensely creative.

DBx: Please join me in wishing Deirdre a very happy 83rd birthday. May she have, for her sake and ours, many more birthday celebrations.