The clerisy’s anti-innovation and antimarket and antiliberty rhetoric in the years since 1848, though repeated down to yesterday, misapprehends the scientific history. The clerisy says that every spillover in the environment justifies world-governmental control. Scientific economics suggest that it does not. Some spillovers are best treated at the local level, or by making not less private property, but more. The clerisy says that lack of elite control of human breeding will cause the race to degenerate. Scientific genetics suggests  that it does not. Human abilities flourish from diversity, as they will in a while in Africa. The clerisy says that innovation impoverishes people. Scientific economics suggests that it does not, as it has not in Hong Kong. It enriches most of them. The clerisy says that state planning or nationalist  mobilization is better than voluntary commercial peace. Scientific history  suggests not, as it did not in the USSR. Socialism and nationalism have regularly disrupted the prosperity provided by bourgeois commerce. The clerisy says that the modern urban world is alienated. Scientific sociology replies on the contrary that bourgeois life in France strengthened numerous if weak ties, and freed people from village tyrannies, as it did in modern Spain or Greece. The clerisy says that the market and its economic liberties are politically dangerous. Political science suggests that on the contrary they give ordinary people dignity and make them mild and tolerant, as they have in the Netherlands and Sweden, at any rate by the standards of alternative arrangements.

Deirdre N. McCloskey. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Kindle Locations 650-658). Kindle Edition.

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