THERE IS A growing chorus of academics, politicians, and activists around the world today espousing the belief that, while capitalism and individual liberty have made the world richer, wealth has come at the expense of equality, compassion, civility, and morality.
In short, the argument goes that capitalism has made our bank accounts bigger, but our souls emptier.
But Professor Deirdre McCloskey, who studies the link between societies’ economies and their cultures, disputes this dark conclusion. Armed with history and economic data, she argues that capitalism and its resulting bourgeois culture have not only made us financially richer, but also better people. People today, she argues, are healthier, smarter, more artistic, more generous, and more charitable than earlier generations. Members of today’s bourgeois culture (and if you live on more than $2 a day, that includes you) are creating a better world, McCloskey says.
“Capitalists ended slavery and emancipated women and founded universities and rebuilt churches, none of these for material profit and none by damaging the rest of the world,” McCloskey writes in her 2007 book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics For an Age of Commerce. “Bourgeois virtues led us from terrified hunter bands and violent agricultural villages to peaceful suburbs and lively cities.”
The following is an excerpt, edited and republished with permission, from The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey.
The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people, one person averaged with another, I claim, have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their impoverished ancestors of the pastoral. They have more, not fewer, real friends than their great-great-great-great grandparents in “closed-corporate” villages. They have broader, not narrower, choices of identity than the one imposed on them by the country, custom, language, and religion of their birth. They have deeper, not shallower, contacts with the transcendent of art or science or God, and sometimes even of nature, than the superstitious peasants and haunted hunters-gatherers from whom we all descend.
They are better humans—because they in their billions have acquired the scope to become so and because market societies encourage art and science and religion to flourish and because any way a life in careers and deal making and companies and marketplaces is not the worst life for a full human being. As the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen puts it, “The freedom to exchange words, or goods, or gifts does not need defensive justification in terms of their favorable but distant effects; they are part of the way human beings in society live…. We have good reasons to buy and sell, to exchange, and to seek lives that can flourish on the basis of transactions.” He instances the liberation of women worldwide through access to markets.
You need to be careful here. Not all market behavior is good for the soul, and I am not claiming it is. If you listen to Ted Fishman on NPR describing the horrible behavior of his erstwhile colleagues in the options pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange you are liable to think, “Ah hah! Thus capitalism and the betterment of human beings!” And that’s right. Fishman says that his mentor at the exchange told him to go after every dollar as though his life depended on it. Not good. Spirit-corrupting.
But the bad things in a capitalist world are not all testimony to the badness of capitalism. Much of human good and evil arises from our fallen natures, and has nothing to do with the circumstances in which we are put. Ted, like you and me, is fallen. This is a crucial point. We must not tolerate bad behavior, anywhere. But we must in our moralizing not mistake human failing for specifically capitalist failing. To attribute every badness to the system is like blaming everything on the weather. It’s not smart or useful.
The Capitalist Man in his worst moments is greedy. And so are you and I. And so, I note, is Socialist Man, in more than his worst moments. If capitalism is to be blamed for systemic evils, then it also is to be given credit for systemic goods, compared not with an imaginary ideal but with actually existing alternatives. The economist Michal Kalecki moved from his good academic position in England back to Poland to help with the imposition of communism there. After some years he was asked about whether Poland had succeeded in abolishing capitalism. “Yes,” he replied. “All we have to do now is to abolish feudalism.”
Capitalism has not corrupted the spirit. On the contrary, had capitalism not enriched the world by a cent nonetheless its bourgeois, anti-feudal virtues would have made us better people than in the world we have lost. As a system it has been good for us.
Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and History at The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Republished with permission of University of Chicago Press – Books, from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, 2007; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.