A Place at the Table: Low Wage Workers and the Bourgeois Deal

Though it comes with its own burdens, a philosopher's task is lighter than that the economic historian sets before herself. Philosophers, after all, seek out the argument for 'markets' (plucking it out of any which source we please, shining it, propping it up with qualification after qualification, assessing it by just the light available). Deirdre McCloskey, in her magisterial trilogy, does much more than this. She develops arguments, too, of course (making the case for the bourgeois virtues, connecting material advances with equality), but this is done while she chronicles the views that have been maintained about markets for centuries. She also takes it upon herself to convince readers of (even) the fact of the Great Enrichment (work easily done in her hands, but still work). She is still just getting going. In Bourgeois equality: how ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world (2016), McCloskey not only holds up the Great Enrichment and deems it good, she argues that there is just one explanation of how it came about. Dimming the relevance of alternative explanations for the rise of capitalism (from Tocqueville to Weber to the multi-causal account of the modern day) is very heavy work. And yet? She does it, too, handily.And how? She does not just wave at 'gains' from capitalism. You will not find her lingering at length on some description of a toaster or an iPhone (as if consumers are not already sold). She knows exactly what to emphasize so that her own thesis is put in the foreground: the preposterous magnitude of the Great Enrichment. It is not some mere "doubling or tripling of the material scope of human life" (p. 7). The world became (at least) 1500% richer, and in a very short time, in places that had not been so different prior (p. 7). Other explanations only promise to account for how there came to be, say, a thirty-percent increase in entrepreneurs. Nothing like this is going to be able to account for change "by a factor of thirty" (p. 472). This is the bar which any causal explanation must reach. It is a brilliant set up: contending accounts can line up to be dismissed at a glance. Authors who fail to express astonishment over the humanitarian boon the Great Enrichment has been ("feel it on your pulse" [p. 7]) have simply not yet grasped the fact of it yet. The right explanation of the Great Enrichment, the "core model", must reckon with it being like a whole forest having suddenly gone up in flames (p. 473).1And what would work as a global accelerant? It cannot be culture. Or technology. Or institutional change. Still less biology (p. 410). plausibility requires that the Great Enrichment comes about through a mechanism that is quick, simple and certain. A nod of the head. A yes to a try. It is what she calls the "Bourgeois Deal" and it will be my focus in this response to her most recent book (p. 410).To me, as a philosopher, it's a promising type of justification of a political system (I've called similar versions 'first-person justification' and I think the approach began with the Stoics). But I will not treat it as a (mere) philosophical device. She is, again, doing so much more. If the Bourgeois Deal (the "Deal") could not have happened (as she conceptualizes it), then the origins of our current system are going to be a murky matter and, perhaps, impossible to get past. Hers is the account that lets us look, instead, to what markets have brought us: according to the Bourgeois Deal, elites were given the chance to consider (as skeptically as they might, she of course chooses the word 'deal' to suggest all that it does) allowing the bourgeois their projects, on the understanding that the elites will be enriched by them. McCloskey puts the Deal in the mouths of the bourgeoisie: let us try out betterments in the market, we'll allow for "low-quality competitors" to rush in, driving down prices. Yes, we too might be enriched, in time. We know you don't like this, but don't worry, we've got very different habits than elites like you. …