Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Summary

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith's puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.

For listeners looking for a distillation of McCloskey's magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich is what you've been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy's key ideas and its most provocative arguments.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to The Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich.