McCloskey

The Great Fact

The rise of the Western economy in the period following the Enlightenment has been dissected and parsed to pieces without a real coherent answer. And this period has spawned some hideous responses that has caused the murder of tens of millions.
McCloskey's opinion, as follows, deserves attention. She attributes the explosion of wealth in the West  to middle class liberty and dignity, not materialism or exploitation.

"It is so big, so unprecedented, the Great Fact, that it's impossible to see it as coming out of routine causes such as trade or exploitation or investment or imperialism. That's what economists are good at explaining: routine. Yet all the routines had occurred on a big scale in China and the Ottoman Empire, in Rome and South Asia. Slavery was common in the Middle East, trade was large in India, investment in Chinese canals and Roman roads was immense. Yet no Great Fact happened.

 

Something must be deeply wrong with explanations of the usual economic sort. In other words, depending exclusively on economic materialism to explain the modern world, whether left-wing historical materialism or right-wing economics, is mistaken. Ideas of human dignity and liberty did the trick. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, "economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe." The gigantic material changes were the outcome, not the cause. It was ideas, or "rhetoric," that caused our enrichment, and with it our modern liberties."