Conceived in Liberty or Conceived in Sin? Exploitation and Modern Prosperity

As Deirdre McCloskey and I argue in our book Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World, it happened because we embraced the Bourgeois Deal: liberty and dignity for innovators and entrepreneurs who want to try new things. We started leaving them alone (sort of) and even started encouraging them (sort of), and they made us rich: as the economist William Nordhaus estimates, 98% of the value of innovation has accrued not to the innovators but to consumers.

In the Beginning, Things Were Awful

As Thomas Hobbes wrote, life in the state of nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, even though our ancient ancestors had more natural resources per capita than we do and didn’t have to deal with pollution, climate change, factory farming, and other problems of our modern industrial society.

Consider this uplifting statement from 1993 Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North’s 2005 book Understanding the Process of Economic Change:

Economic history is a depressing tale of miscalculation leading to famine, starvation, defeat in warfare, economic stagnation and decline, and indeed the disappearance of entire civilizations.

It is a pretty apt description of all history. But something wonderful happened: beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century; our clumsy species embarked on a Great Enrichment that fundamentally changed how we live.

First, there are a lot more of us. The world went from having almost nobody to having a population in the neighborhood of eight billion. Second, we live a lot longer. Third, we have much higher standards of living because we produce a lot more stuff: far, far more finished goods and services than our ancestors did, and it keeps growing yearly. Fourth, improvements on almost every margin mean we have greater human scope for lives well-lived.

Now We Are R.I.C.H.

We are R.I.C.H.: Rich, Interconnected, Civilized, and Healthy. What does this mean?

First, I’m referring to those of us lucky enough to have won the geographical and historical lottery and who find ourselves in European countries or their offshoots like the United States and Canada. If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’re among the richest 5% of people on earth and the richest 1% of people who have ever lived.

We’re also Interconnected. Most of our ancestors went their whole lives without seeing someone who didn’t look, talk, or pray the way they did—and when they did, they were probably trying to kill one another at the behest of a chief, warlord, or noble. In today’s commercial society, we get to enjoy the best that every civilization has ever created, and we can do it with devices that make it possible to maintain running conversations with friends and family members (and adversaries!) around the globe.

We’re Civilized. The surviving records we have suggest that a lot of our ancestors didn’t leave behind much more than a body count. Today, we’re able to guard ourselves against the elements. People today don’t slaughter each other with anything like the frequency their ancestors did. We create and enjoy art, literature, and music. We contemplate our existence, and to borrow from Johannes Kepler, we think God’s thoughts after him in the laboratory or while constructing mathematical models.

We’re also Healthy. Today’s leading killers are diseases of old age and affluence like cancer, not pathogens or warfare. More people die of cancer because more people live long enough to get cancer. With every passing year, the heartbreaking spectacle of parents having to bury their own children becomes progressively less and less a part of the human experience.

What was the major mover? As Deirdre McCloskey and I argue, it happened because we embraced the Bourgeois Deal rather than the Blue Blood Deal, the Bureaucratic Deal, the Bolshevik Deal, or the Bismarckian Deal. It was economic liberty and social dignity for entrepreneurs and innovators, what McCloskey has called “equality of permission.” We left them alone, and they made us rich.

We’re Not R.I.C.H. Because We Did S.I.C.K. Stuff

A steady stream of books and articles perhaps most notably summarized in the New York Times 1619 Project attributes modern economic growth to a S.I.C.K. legacy: Slavery, Imperialism, Colonialism, and Knavery. A growing literature on the “New History of Capitalism” argues specifically that slave-grown cotton fueled and financed the Industrial Revolution. Here’s what Karl Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.

Nineteenth-century data do not support the thesis that slavery was in any way “necessary” for U.S. cotton production, as can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. U.S. Cotton Production, 1790-1900
Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition