Quotes from Deirdre N. McCloskey

The way to help the poor, in short, is to let the Great Enrichment proceed by commercially tested betterment, as it has widely since 1800 and especially in the past forty years.

Commerce works better than theft.

The Harvard philosopher John Rawls articulated what he called the Difference Principle: if the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the rich entrepreneur was justified.7 It makes a good deal of ethical sense. Equality does not.

People are motivated in varying proportions by prudence, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, and love, together with the corresponding vices.

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. Now it's over. The big story is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 began to adopt liberal ideas in their economies, and came to welcome creative destruction.

Ideas of human dignity and liberty did the trick, making the inventions and then investments profitable for entrepreneurs and the nation. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, "economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.

But it didn't have the Great Enrichment because it didn't have the ideas flowing from a free people. Ideas, not savings, did it. Liberalism, not empire.

Modern liberals do not sit anywhere along the conventional one-dimensional right-left spectrum of governmental coercion.

The left in its worrying routinely forgets this most important secular event since the invention of agriculture—the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries—and goes on worrying and worrying, like the little dog worrying about his bone in the Travelers Insurance advertisement on TV, in a new version every half generation or so.

A recognition of the impossibility of exact perfection lay behind the work of a few economists, such as Herbert Simon's satisficing, Ronald Coase's transaction costs, George Shackle's and Israel Kirzner's reaffirmation of the old Yogi Berra jest: it's hard to predict, especially about the future.

happiness is not a six-pack and a sport utility vehicle but what he calls "flow." It occurs "when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable" (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, 30).

As Raymond Aron, that rarest of things, a modern French liberal, noted, in Clive James's translation, "the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection; he resigns himself to a régime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the result of conscious choice."10 You could call it the invisible hand, noting that it is true also of other systems, such as language.