Bourgeois Dignity‘s line of inquiry — at least as stated — is into the causes of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Fact” — the tenfold or more increase in the average person’s standard of living in a couple centuries’ time. Her thesis that “the Fact” owed its origins to a culture of innovation, of openness…

In the contemporary parlance, it is largely supposed that a capitalist is one who favors a free market economic system, yet this wasn’t always the case. In the nineteenth century, as the descriptor capitalist came into more frequent use, it was virtually always deployed as a term of abuse, in identification of exploiters; it was…