The great enrichment: a humanistic and social scientific account

ABSTRACT

The scientific problem in explaining modern economic growth is its astonishing magnitude – anywhere from a 3000% to a 10,000% increase in real income, a ‘Great Enrichment.’ Investment, reallocation, property rights and exploitation cannot explain it. Only the bettering of betterment can, the stunning increase in new ideas, such as the screw propeller on ships or the ball bearing in machines, the modern university for the masses and careers open to talent. Why, then, the new and trade-tested ideas? Because liberty to have a go, as the English say, and a dignity to the wigmakers and telegraph operators having the go made the mass of people bold. Equal liberty and dignity for ordinary people is called ‘liberalism,’ and it was new to Europe in the eighteenth century, against old hierarchies. Why the liberalism? It was not deep European superiorities, but the accidents of the Four R's of (German) Reformation, (Dutch) Revolt, (American and French) Revolution and (Scottish and Scandinavian) Reading. It could have gone the other way, leaving, say, China to have the Great Enrichment, much later. Europe, and then the world, was lucky after 1800. Now China and India have adopted liberalism (in the Chinese case only in the economy) and are catching up.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic growth
• growth theory
• great enrichment
• liberalism
• liberty
• dignity
• humanities

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• N00
• O12
• O31
• O40
• P12

Notes

1 Compare the only slightly less sweeping language in 1789 of the (first) French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, art. 1: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.’

2 I disagree, that is, with their claim that ‘the first societies to reach the doorstep conditions were Britain, France, the Dutch, and the United States’ (p. 166). None of their evidence comes from societies such as China or Japan or the Ottoman Empire that might test their claim. Nor for that matter do they study seriously the Dutch case.

3 Thucydides bk. 1, translated at University of Minnesota Human Rights Library (http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/education/thucydides.html).

4 David Friedman made the point in a blog reacting to Bourgeois Dignity, 15 July 2013, http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com.

5 Charles's speech is given at Project Canterbury (‘Printed by Peter Cole, at the sign of the Printing-Press in Cornhil, near the Royal Exchange’), http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html. In the document the year is given as 1648, because in the Julian calendar the year did not begin until March. So it is a Julian date in a New Style year.

6 As, among others, Berman (2006) has argued.

7 Reprinted and translated in Horst, 1996, p. 142. The poem was called Liefdesverklaring, or ‘Love-Declaration’.

8 The quotation from Lord Kames (1774) is Danford's.

9 Ringmar's remarkable literacy in an English not his native tongue, by the way, shows in his accurate use of the phrase ‘begs the question’, which is widely used to mean ‘suggests the question’.

10 The Swedish historian Erik Thomson has shown that the English were not the only Europeans startled by the economic success of the United Provinces and ready, with some reluctance, to imitate them (Thomson, 2005).