Quotes from Deirdre N. McCloskey

If we seized all the assets of the eighty-five wealthiest people in the world to make a fund to give annually to the poorest half, it would raise their spending power by less than 10 cents a day.

book of 2000 by Craig Gay (With Liberty and Justice for Whom?: The Recent Evangelical Debate over Capitalism), which showed that evangelical Christians on the left took wealth as given, manna, and "hence applied their Christian/Biblical principles only to the problem of (static) distribution, whereas the evangelicals on the right emphasized incentives to the ongoing creation of wealth, innovation, etc."8

The implementation of liberty/freedom, as Robert Hayden, the U.S. poet laureate in the 1970s, put it, has been the "way we journeyed from Can't to Can.

Human capital is of course much more equally distributed than ownership of factories or ships. We own ourselves, even if we are poor in stocks and bonds. Focusing on financial wealth is therefore misleading.

The cry for more education, by the way, is often a despairing excuse for not liberalizing the economy directly and quickly.

the monopoly of coercion, such as the public protection of slave capital in the United States before the Civil War—get capitalized into the prices of the assets to which they are attached.

The forces that will drive the whole world to become rich are temperate self-interest and temperate governance. As Adam Smith put it in 1755, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Thus, it is suggested, a deeper understanding of the conditions affecting the speed and ultimate extent of an innovation's diffusion is to be obtained only by explicitly analyzing the specific choice of technique problem which its advent would have presented to objectively dissimilar members of the relevant (historical) population of potential adopters.

In all practically relevant cases, governments—or more accurately the individuals involved in governmental process—do possess the power to coerce.

It's symmetrical, left and right, because both the Dems and the GOP, Labour and the Tories, want the government to be really, really big, without regard to free choice, and to follow majoritarian opinion really, really closely, without regard to minorities. We Modern True Liberals stand against them both, opposing the tyranny of the majority on either side of the usual spectrum. Hip, hip, hurray for Smith, Wollstonecraft, Thoreau, Bastiat, Mill and their descendants.

Yet in fact when the Party adopted economic liberalism, and ceased killing growth by killing businesspeople, real income for the poorest started doubling every seven to ten years. India has the same story, after 1991, following forty-four wretched years of Gandhian socialism and egalitarianism resulting in poor-people-neglecting rates of growth—at which it would take seven decades, not one, to double.

Humanomics doesn't give up on science. On the contrary, it yields the best scientific explanation of how we got rich, 1800 to the present, and how the whole world soon will, and it gives us, too, a reason to be good.

The great (American-definition) liberal Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948 that "we must be aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes," because "when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest [we] go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."18 Every mother knows the dangers. And when she loves the beloved for the beloved's own sake, she resists them.

The bourgeois (which is merely the usual French and for a while the usual English word for the urban men of the middle class) were the innovators willing to subject their ideas to the democratic test of a market, and to supply Paris with grain and iron.

The clerisy imagined in the nineteenth century nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and racism. Such theories resulted during the twentieth century in actually existing socialism and nationalism and national-socialist-racist imperialism, and the butcher bill for them all. In the late twentieth century the clerisy turned its hand to theorizing evil consumerism and environmental decay. Uh-oh. Watch out, dears, for fresh results in the twenty-first century.

People often resent the dealers. But in the end they prefer them to thugs or thieves.

the liberal plan," as old Adam Smith wrote in 1776, "of [social] equality, [economic] liberty and [legal] justice," with a modest, restrained government giving real help to the poor.1 True modern liberalism.

Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.

The economy, like science or art, is more like an organism growing uncertainly toward the light than a steel machine repeating exactly today and tomorrow what it did yesterday.

That businesspeople buy low and sell high in a particularly alert and advantageous way does not make them bad unless all trading is bad, unless when you yourself shop prudently you are bad, unless any tall poppy needs to be cut down, unless we wish to run our ethical lives on the sin of envy.

the much-maligned "capitalism" has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.

By contrast, human action, to use the "Austrian" economic term, is not merely reactive to constraints and utility functions but active and creative, the exercise of the free and creative and (some of us think) God-given will that can say yes, or no.

As an Italian liberal, and anti-fascist, Benedetto Croce, put it in 1928, "Ethical liberalism abhors authoritarian regulation of the economic process [equally from the left as from the right, from socialism as from fascism], because it considers it a humbling of the inventive faculties of man."3 In