Is What You “Know” About Growth Wrong?

A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 9, “The Great International Divergence Can Be Overcome”

Photo by Benjamin Wong on Unsplash

McCloskey wraps up part 1 with this chapter asking a great question that has surely popped in your head if you’ve been reading these chapter reviews.

But what about the poor right now in the rest of the world? Have you no pity? (p. 73)

She has addressed in a previous chapter how many people have climbed out of a subsistence living in the past couple of hundred years.

When Would You Rather be Poor?

And she has explained why income inequality is not the problem to address, but instead the goal should be helping those who are in relative and absolute poverty.

Could It Be Income Inequality Is Not a Problem?

Now she is addressing this chapter to those still in poverty. Why are they still suffering if the Great Enrichment is all that?

We must find effective ways to help them lift themselves up. In our desire to help the poor, we bleeding-heart libertarians stand in solidarity with our social-democratic friends — if not usually agreeing with them on exactly which policies have actually helped the poor. (p. 73)

That is the key — helping those who are currently poor without putting in policies that will undermine the process of the Great Enrichment, because that ultimately would hurt us all. She acknowledges though,

A bottom billion out of seven (billion) is a scandal. Let’s fix it. But let’s actually help the billion, not merely indulge our indignation and our conviction of ethical superiority by supporting policies that in fact make them worse off. (p. 74)

Paul Collier wrote a book, now more than 10 years old, called The Bottom Billion that I used to used…