Cómo es Internet: Deirdre McCloskey

A través Barcepundit, llego a la página de Arcadi Espada que dedica unas frases a recordar a Dutton, que ha muerto hace poco y que era el editor de una página llamada Arts & Letters Daily donde leo una frase de D. McCloskey. Fantástica:

“si los chinos quieren seguir enviándonos televisores a cambio de unos papeles verdes con héroes americanos pintados en ellos, estupendo”.

El Arts & Letters Daily me lleva a una entrevista en National Review en la que esta economista habla de sus dos últimos libros y el que está escribiendo. La entrevista no tiene desperdicio.

Retórica

We have scores of words in English for bad speech. We need one for persuasive speech, the sweet talk for which one-quarter of us in a modern economy are paid.

It’s a fairy tale of scientism that only prices and quantities can be measured.

La Etica del Protestantismo

It’s an anti-Catholic prejudice, unsurprisingly common in northern Europe, to suppose that Catholics didn’t worry about their businesses, or indeed their place in heaven or hell. We have gigantic evidence that they did so worry, and in just the way Weber, on the basis of misreadings of Calvinist texts and Benjamin Franklin, thought was special to followers of John Calvin.

    As I say in the book, what people like about the Weber hypothesis is that it combines a spiritual change inside the souls of businesspeople (Geist was the German word) with a focus on routine investment (savings rates were supposed to be higher among Calvinists). It combined idealism with Marxism. No wonder everybody likes it. But alas, it’s wrong.

What changed was the sociology. That is, what changed was the attit-ude of the rest of the society toward businesspeople, and with that new attitude came a change in government policy. It was suddenly all right — most clearly in the most bourgeois country on earth, the U.S.A. — to get rich and to innovate.

Capitalismo y democracia (libertad y dignidad)

Many point to China, Singapore, etc., as examples of places where ec-onomic advance has not produced other kinds of liberalism. They are correct. The problem is the fallacy of Right Now. In 1969 one would have said the same thing about South Korea and Taiwan, or for that matter about Spain and Portugal. Outside the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s, with preparations in the 1920s, it has always gone one way, since the cats of liberty and dignity were let out of the bag in the late 17th century. Do all the statistical analysis you want, but we “liberals” (19th-century European definition) have history on our side.

De ahí, naturalmente, a su página web . ¡Espectacular!. Hacemos un poco de recogida (me he bajado para leer otro día algunos artículos de divulgación, uno de ellos lo ponen en los exámenes de acceso a las facultades de Derecho) y de ahí a Amazon (esperemos que ponga ya Amazon.es una vez que ha comprado BuyVip) donde me he comprado su dos libros últimos (demasiado largos y repetitivos):

"The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce" Deirdre N. McCloskey; Taschenbuch; EUR 17,48   Verkauf durch: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.

"Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World" Deirdre N. McCloskey; Gebundene Ausgabe; EUR 27,21   Verkauf durch: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.