Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World

A giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the “great enrichment” of humanity over the past 300 years. It is a legitimate contender for the great book of our age.

For what it's worth, the answer to Ridley's question in the fourth and fifth paragraphs is very simple: it was in Holland and Britain that Reformed Christianity took root. I will expound on that another time, but it is the one variable missed and the one collection of ideas that most differed from those of the rest of the Continent. -- RDM

by Matt Ridley
May 10, 2016

It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, sofas and beds.

If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not. I wanted to savor every sentence of this remarkable feast of prose.

The subtitle is: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the “great enrichment” of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great book of our age.

There…