Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich. But in the second act, and in massively documented historical fact, other bourgeois rush forward at the smell of profit. Prices fall relative to wages, which is to say that goods and services expand per person-they have again and again and again-and the poor get better off in real terms. Such a crucial, long-term dissipation of profit is not mere logic, or some unsupported neoliberal article of faith. It has happened repeatedly since 18oo, the Bourgeois Deal: “Let me get very rich by buying innovations low and selling them high (and do please refrain from stealing from me, or interfering), and I’ll make you pretty rich, too.” That’s what happened in economic history. That’s why you earn and spend so much more than $3 a day.

Deirdre N. McCloskey. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Kindle Locations 1037-1043). Kindle Edition.

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