This comment is not to be taken very seriously, but I saw something interesting:
In the description of the Bourgeois Trilogy, it identifies a new “dignity and liberty for ordinary people” as being the idea which drove the general increase in wealth.
I have on my list of books to read a different subject entirely which touches on this same subject. It is Eye for an Eye by William Ian Miller, about the logic of the lex talionis. One of the claims made in the book is that life among biblical civilizations or the vikings at the time of the sagas was more valued than the life of a modern man, and that justice was therefore much more expensive for people. The review I read contains the following quote from the book about the consequences:
Honor societies tended to be small and poor, and the cost of the tough virtue I so admire was in part their poverty; they seldom generated enough surplus to support lordship, let alone expensive governmental institutions. And they made sure that no one did too well for too long because that way lay serious inequality. Remember: they clipped the wings of those who were getting too big for their breeches. And prudent people might keep their talents and ambitions within limits that would prevent eliciting murderous envy from their jealous neighbors. This tough policing of the conditions of rough equality comes at enormous social cost – to innovation, to experimentation, to certain forms of productive ambition.
Taken at face value this produces an interesting trade-off between people’s lives being too valuable to allow for the accumulation of much wealth or capital, and at the other end being to cheap to allow the growth of much wealth or capital.
Another claim that I see advanced which feels relevant to this question is that chattel slavery in the American South actively harmed economic growth there (and I’d be shocked if the impact wasn’t more severe on the welfare scales).
This comment is not to be taken very seriously, but I saw something interesting:
In the description of the Bourgeois Trilogy, it identifies a new “dignity and liberty for ordinary people” as being the idea which drove the general increase in wealth.
I have on my list of books to read a different subject entirely which touches on this same subject. It is Eye for an Eye by William Ian Miller, about the logic of the lex talionis. One of the claims made in the book is that life among biblical civilizations or the vikings at the time of the sagas was more valued than the life of a modern man, and that justice was therefore much more expensive for people. The review I read contains the following quote from the book about the consequences:
Taken at face value this produces an interesting trade-off between people’s lives being too valuable to allow for the accumulation of much wealth or capital, and at the other end being to cheap to allow the growth of much wealth or capital.
Another claim that I see advanced which feels relevant to this question is that chattel slavery in the American South actively harmed economic growth there (and I’d be shocked if the impact wasn’t more severe on the welfare scales).