I have been looking forward for a long time to the last in Dierdre McCloskey’s trilogy about capitalism (a term she dislikes) that began with Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, and Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. The third volume, coming out next year from the University of Chicago Press, is Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

These are dense but well-written and easy-to-read books, rich with insight. Above all they attempt to explain the phenomenon of this chart:

McCloskey’s summa is directed in part against the economic pessimism of both left and right that thinks robust future economic growth is unlikely. But understanding how this explosion of prosperity happened is surprisingly elusive, and McCloskey rejects a lot of the monistic explanations. McCloskey explains her summa thus:

Read the article “Economic History in One Chart: The Achievement of Capitalism” on powerlineblog.com.