Liberalism and the Great Enrichment - Why Ideas, Not Capital, Made the Modern World

Explore economic historian Deirdre McCloskey's compelling argument that the world's dramatic income increase from $2 to $50 per day resulted from an 18th-century shift toward "equality of permission" rather than capital accumulation. Discover how liberating human creativity through the "bourgeois deal" sparked innovation across Holland, Scotland, and America, while examining why state control stifled economic growth elsewhere. Learn about McCloskey's critique of modern economics for reducing humans to "vending machines" and her advocacy for "humanomics" that incorporates love, ethics, and human complexity alongside mathematical models. Examine her challenge to the field's statist turn, her defense of Adam Smith's complete vision beyond mere self-interest, and her analysis of why India may become the next great creative economy. Understand why McCloskey argues that Europe's trillion-dollar spending plans repeat historical mistakes of top-down investment instead of unleashing individual creativity, and gain insights into how ideas and cultural shifts, rather than capital alone, drive economic transformation and human flourishing.