Crack open those books...

The next session of our book club launches in a little over 2 weeks.

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We’re reading Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden. It’s a distillation of McCloskey’s massive Bourgeois Era trilogy (The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality).

“In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments,” notes the book’s publisher (The University of Chicago Press):

The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent.  The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle.  It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and  Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth.  The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies.  McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones.  Not matter but ideas.  Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.

Intrigued? Join the Feminists for Liberty Book Club on Bookclubs to get information about our Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make Your Rich club and future book club sessions.

You can buy a copy of the book on Amazon, via Bookshop.org, from Barnes and Noble, or directly from The University of Chicago Press.