I can’t recall a 2016 essay I’ve enjoyed more than Deirdre McCloskey’s “How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich,” which appeared in the most recent weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal.
At the heart of the piece, Dr. McCloskey, the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, uncovers the primary source of the global wealth boom experienced over the past 200 years. It’s a period commonly known as the Great Enrichment, and during this era “average world income per person has soared from about $3 a day to a stunning $33 a day.”
Columnist David MartinThat’s an amazing number, especially when considering it includes modern national tragedies like North Korea and numerous war-torn countries across Africa and the Middle East.
The evidence of the Great Enrichment is everywhere. Yes, in the form of increased earnings but also in the manifestation of tangible goods. Just look around you now. You’re likely surrounded by products that are the result of a key driver of the Great Enrichment: as journalist and science writer Matt Ridley once put it, “ideas having sex.”
McCloskey explains, “the idea of a railroad was a coupling of high-pressure steam engines with cars running on coal-mining rails. The idea for a lawn mower coupled a miniature gasoline engine with a miniature mechanical reaper. And so on,” perhaps even to the device you’re reading this column on right now.
So what made this good mojo happen? What allowed for ideas to start colliding and procreating? Liberty, she says.
“Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not.” Free people having the freedom to think up and pursue new ideas is the real catalyst for widespread and sustained wealth.
When writing her essay, McCloskey was probably unaware the Journal would simultaneously be running a front-page story perfectly demonstrating her point from the complete opposite end of the freedom spectrum. The headline was “Can Cuba Make Enough Cigars?”
We’ve all heard about how wonderful Cuban cigars are, but on the chance that the United States’ Cuban embargo is ever dropped, the worry on the island is that they have no way to produce enough of their most well-known (and lucrative) export to meet higher demand. Of course, the reason for this is the fact the country’s government is involved in every step of cigar manufacturing.
Farmers don’t own their own harvest or land, they have no freedom to test new production methods, and the government dictates who gets to grow how much of the crop. It comes as no surprise that many “have decided it isn’t worth planting tobacco” anymore. And that’s just the agricultural side of the equation. The Castro regime mucks the system up even more in the cigar-rolling and distribution phases. The result? At a time when Cubans need to be ramping up cigar output, production dropped 58 percent between 2006 and 2014. Sure, Cuba is a severe example of the negative consequences of governmental overbearance. But it doesn’t take such extremes to create pained experiences in our daily lives. Just ask the 10,000 newly out-of-work former Uber and Lyft drivers, who were more or less voted out of Austin, Texas.
In many ways, Tennessee is demonstrating hallmarks of its own Great Enrichment. Limited government has created an environment where ideas can freely flourish. Correspondingly, jobs and investment dollars are flowing in at a healthy pace.
These are, indeed, good times. However, circumstances contributing to these successes must be jealously safeguarded while we keep our eyes open for new opportunities to unchain additional liberties.
David Allen Martin is a syndicated columnist who writes from Chattanooga. You can email him at davidallenmartin423@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @DMart423.