Notable Quote - Deirdre N. McCloskey - Granite Grok

Notable Quote – Deirdre N. McCloskey

The enrichment [of the modern world] came mainly from bourgeois liberty and creativity unbridled, not from piling up constraints on voluntary deals or from redistributing what income we get from the deals. Wages and working conditions, after such shocking enrichment, are in fact determined largely by supply and demand, not by regulations passed by Congress or by struggles on the picket line. All boats do rise. Professors and artists and child-care workers, whose productivity has not increased for millennia, benefit from being substitutes in the long run for farmers and truck drivers and medical doctors, whose productivity during the Great Enrichment has risen enormously. A professor with an antique technology of chalk-and-talk could have instead entered farming or medicine, which means that she must earn, roughly at least, what such utterly transformed jobs earn.

-Deirdre N. McCloskey (Bourgeois Equality)

(H/T: Cafe Hayek)

>