What do you think?
Rate this book
Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World
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 readers 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. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.
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. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
For readers 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. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.
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. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2020
53 people are currently reading
401 people want to read
About the author
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
60 books316 followersDeirdre Nansen McCloskey has been distinguished professor of economics and history and professor of English and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of numerous books, including Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 20, 2022
McClosky writes well because she writes like a professor talking to us. Listen up. I totally enjoy this book. So what caused the 3000% improvement in the living standard of the West? And not China, India, Middle East?
It’s not Jared Diamond’s Georgraphy.
It’s not Niall Ferguson’s Killer apps of the West: competition, science, property, medicine, consumption and work.
All countries have competition, property rights, consumption and work. China and India had traditional medicine. Science often follows the improvements, as in the law of thermodynamics were developed to explain the working of the steam engine. These, she claims, are necessary but not insufficient. Like water is essential but not sufficient for the growth.
The magic ingredient: liberty of the individuals to experiment, tinker and improve. Without disturbance from any authorities. So then West has grown open to the Bourgeoisie, or at least the authorities had stopped killing people who actually made discoveries. Because in fragmented Europe, new ideas were hard to squash, and persecuted people can always escape to some other countries. Not so in imperial China: if the Ming emperor asked you to burn your ships, you burn them.
So the title is also the conclusion of this book.
McClosky attributed all the improvements of our lives to liberalism. However, I must note that it is often the government that makes markets possible. Governments forced companies to come up with cleaner and cleaner fuels, and not to dump toxic waste into rivers anyhow (most of the time). Governments make sure that the unfortunate and poor are (somewhat) taken care of.
However McClosky made a convincing case that liberalism really helps the poor. Giving money just does not work.
She also touches on inequality. She thinks it is just, because if someone comes up with a better tool/platform/app why must we compensate the losers? She is anti-Warren/Saunders/Piketty. She thinks that as long as the absolute welfare of the poorest has improved, that is good enough. To demand total equality is just letting envy get the better of us, and communism does not work.
On to her other books!
It’s not Jared Diamond’s Georgraphy.
It’s not Niall Ferguson’s Killer apps of the West: competition, science, property, medicine, consumption and work.
All countries have competition, property rights, consumption and work. China and India had traditional medicine. Science often follows the improvements, as in the law of thermodynamics were developed to explain the working of the steam engine. These, she claims, are necessary but not insufficient. Like water is essential but not sufficient for the growth.
The magic ingredient: liberty of the individuals to experiment, tinker and improve. Without disturbance from any authorities. So then West has grown open to the Bourgeoisie, or at least the authorities had stopped killing people who actually made discoveries. Because in fragmented Europe, new ideas were hard to squash, and persecuted people can always escape to some other countries. Not so in imperial China: if the Ming emperor asked you to burn your ships, you burn them.
So the title is also the conclusion of this book.
McClosky attributed all the improvements of our lives to liberalism. However, I must note that it is often the government that makes markets possible. Governments forced companies to come up with cleaner and cleaner fuels, and not to dump toxic waste into rivers anyhow (most of the time). Governments make sure that the unfortunate and poor are (somewhat) taken care of.
However McClosky made a convincing case that liberalism really helps the poor. Giving money just does not work.
She also touches on inequality. She thinks it is just, because if someone comes up with a better tool/platform/app why must we compensate the losers? She is anti-Warren/Saunders/Piketty. She thinks that as long as the absolute welfare of the poorest has improved, that is good enough. To demand total equality is just letting envy get the better of us, and communism does not work.
On to her other books!
January 7, 2022
Full disclosure: I started McCloskey's bourgeois trilogy but could not even finish the first 600-page book. I was bewildered when I found out she had written a book called Economical Writing, a book on how to write brief and concise academic papers lol. I found Marxism/Socialism convincing enough thanks to Graeber, Eagleton, Pinketty, McCaraher (though I was too lazy to read Marx himself), and honestly, I was about to give up on capitalism before Alan Jacobs told me in a dream (his blog) that he found McCloskey 's bourgeois trilogy to be the most sensible defense of capitalism.
It would be intellectually dishonest of me to give up on capitalism without reading McCloskey, but who the hell can commit to reading 1,800+ pages on economics these days when they have two kids?
You can imagine my delight when I found out about this 200-page summary of the entire trilogy; finally, someone who actually practices economical writing(!)
McCloskey's defense of virtuous capitalism is noteworthy here, and I tend to agree with her that the problem lies not necessarily in the "system" of capitalism itself (if we can call it that) but in the decline of shared morality. Her defense of Smith and her insistence that Smith actually published a book on capitalist ethics which is often overlooked by everyone are helpful correctives of the caricature of capitalism as an amoral system. While slavery and exploitation existed virtually everywhere, this did not mean that countries with the most slaves became the richest and vice versa. Rather, it was through human ingenuity that capitalism enriched the world.
McCloskey is also really good at guilt-tripping you for enjoying the fruits of capitalism: Do you like having toilets? Refrigerators? Electricity? Then why are you whining about capitalism? etc. Though empirical evidence of capitalism's greatness abounds in this short book, I'm more likely to agree with Eagleton when he says yes, we can all agree that capitalism has been good, but with externalities now reaching apocalyptic proportions, can we build off of capitalism (instead of dismantling and starting from scratch) and create a more equitable society? Can we leave all this scarcity nonsense behind? Let's credit capitalism for its greatness, yes, but let's shift our attention from the market to the people that populate it.
But McCloskey seems convinced that things aren't actually that bad. She's a firm believer in human ingenuity, that through humanity's creative potential, the climate apocalypse will sort itself out if we enrich the world with capitalism: the poor can begin to worry about preventing climate change only once they can stop worrying about their next meal.
If this sounds overly optimistic to you, I would agree. There's almost an underlying metaphysic of determinism underneath McCloskey's optimism, one which affirms beyond a shadow of doubt that we are moving inevitably towards an eschatology of progress and innovation, akin to something like (blind) faith. Will she be right? I hope so, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
It would be intellectually dishonest of me to give up on capitalism without reading McCloskey, but who the hell can commit to reading 1,800+ pages on economics these days when they have two kids?
You can imagine my delight when I found out about this 200-page summary of the entire trilogy; finally, someone who actually practices economical writing(!)
McCloskey's defense of virtuous capitalism is noteworthy here, and I tend to agree with her that the problem lies not necessarily in the "system" of capitalism itself (if we can call it that) but in the decline of shared morality. Her defense of Smith and her insistence that Smith actually published a book on capitalist ethics which is often overlooked by everyone are helpful correctives of the caricature of capitalism as an amoral system. While slavery and exploitation existed virtually everywhere, this did not mean that countries with the most slaves became the richest and vice versa. Rather, it was through human ingenuity that capitalism enriched the world.
McCloskey is also really good at guilt-tripping you for enjoying the fruits of capitalism: Do you like having toilets? Refrigerators? Electricity? Then why are you whining about capitalism? etc. Though empirical evidence of capitalism's greatness abounds in this short book, I'm more likely to agree with Eagleton when he says yes, we can all agree that capitalism has been good, but with externalities now reaching apocalyptic proportions, can we build off of capitalism (instead of dismantling and starting from scratch) and create a more equitable society? Can we leave all this scarcity nonsense behind? Let's credit capitalism for its greatness, yes, but let's shift our attention from the market to the people that populate it.
But McCloskey seems convinced that things aren't actually that bad. She's a firm believer in human ingenuity, that through humanity's creative potential, the climate apocalypse will sort itself out if we enrich the world with capitalism: the poor can begin to worry about preventing climate change only once they can stop worrying about their next meal.
If this sounds overly optimistic to you, I would agree. There's almost an underlying metaphysic of determinism underneath McCloskey's optimism, one which affirms beyond a shadow of doubt that we are moving inevitably towards an eschatology of progress and innovation, akin to something like (blind) faith. Will she be right? I hope so, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.
April 2, 2022
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich : How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deidre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden is an erudite quick description of why the authors think that the ‘Great Enrichment’ happened. The Great Enrichment is the massive increase in per capita wealth that started in England around 1750 and that has now spread globally.
McCloskey has been been exploring these ideas for years and in very long volumes has written The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality. These are all much longer more academic books that Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich and are hard to read. I’ve started one and given up. Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make Your Rich condenses these thoughts and is a good, if not entirely easy read.
McCloskey’s thesis that is was the idea that people free to choose where to work and how to work and that had property rights are the key to understanding the great enrichment. Historically it’s clearly true. Merchants and other members of the middle class made many small improvements in their trading and manufacturing and with the addition of coal power people rapidly became much more wealthy.
Societies that disrespected merchants didn’t make this jump. The big change in Europe to respecting people in business is clearly key. But perhaps there were other things that mattered as much. Europe from around 1400 was clearly changing substantially. The printing press and then the fact that Europeans first explored and exploited the world shows something. The other factor the really matters that is downplayed by Mcloskey and Carden is fossil fuels and the fact that suddenly the amount of energy that could be used exploded. This powered the industrial revolution.
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is very strong when it goes through what didn’t cause the great enrichment, namely imperialism and slavery. As the authors point out these were the default state around the world but it was only in Europe that the enrichment happened. They note that more African slaves went East to the Middle East and Asia than West. Also that Empires drained the populace for the pride of the rulers.
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is a good book that’s definitely worth reading for anyone who is interested in McCloskey but wants to read something digestible.
McCloskey has been been exploring these ideas for years and in very long volumes has written The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality. These are all much longer more academic books that Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich and are hard to read. I’ve started one and given up. Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make Your Rich condenses these thoughts and is a good, if not entirely easy read.
McCloskey’s thesis that is was the idea that people free to choose where to work and how to work and that had property rights are the key to understanding the great enrichment. Historically it’s clearly true. Merchants and other members of the middle class made many small improvements in their trading and manufacturing and with the addition of coal power people rapidly became much more wealthy.
Societies that disrespected merchants didn’t make this jump. The big change in Europe to respecting people in business is clearly key. But perhaps there were other things that mattered as much. Europe from around 1400 was clearly changing substantially. The printing press and then the fact that Europeans first explored and exploited the world shows something. The other factor the really matters that is downplayed by Mcloskey and Carden is fossil fuels and the fact that suddenly the amount of energy that could be used exploded. This powered the industrial revolution.
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is very strong when it goes through what didn’t cause the great enrichment, namely imperialism and slavery. As the authors point out these were the default state around the world but it was only in Europe that the enrichment happened. They note that more African slaves went East to the Middle East and Asia than West. Also that Empires drained the populace for the pride of the rulers.
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is a good book that’s definitely worth reading for anyone who is interested in McCloskey but wants to read something digestible.
November 23, 2020
This is a great book, and a fantastic one-book summary of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Trilogy, if you're looking for something much shorter to get an idea of her argument for why the Great Enrichment happened. It's probably not why you think. It is summed up well from her address to a chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners in 2020: "Leave me, a bourgeois businessperson, pretty much alone, subject to sober ethics learned at my mother’s knee, and a few good and restrained laws, with an effective social safety net. In a word, give me and my fellow citizens liberty. Do not envy the rewards I get for selling innovations. They are tested by your willingness to buy them. If you don’t like them, and I fail, I won’t ask the government to coerce you into buying. The happy result will be that the innovations will make everyone enormously better off, by 3,000 percent, especially the formerly poor—your ancestors and mine." A compelling argument that has absolutely changed my world-view of how and why wealth started to be created where and when it did.
April 8, 2023
A truly patronising idiots guide to the power of free markets to cure all of our material, spiritual and social ills. A smug book written uncritically by and for rich people. No mention of rising inequality and the nastiness of monopoly capitalism. Apparently it’s governments that lead us to Hobbesian squalor. Kind of forgets that it’s governments that underwrite the freedoms and equalities the authors hold so dear. Terrible book. Almost nasty in its wrongheadedness.
August 14, 2025
According to the authors, we owe our relative prosperity compared to that of our ancestors wholly to capitalism. They depict it as the solution to all that ails the society, though at the same time, they argue that the problem is that we got our capitalism wrong, understood it wrongly, and we should go back to the Father of Free Market, Adam Smith, if we want to know the real capitalism.
To be fair, the authors got it right that most people who criticise Smith never even read either of his two books, let alone both. They argue that the man, the myth, the legend had never promoted selfishness, greed, and amorality. Case in point: read Smith's other book, the one less known than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In the end, however, the capitalism as envisioned by the authors is an extremely sanitised, and overly optimistic and idealistic version of what we end up suffering.
I don't think that capitalism is necessarily evil or corrupt. It has its good points. And I side with the authors that the spirit of innovism is extremely important. But we part ways where we cannot agree on the role of government, and how much freedom is too much freedom. And I find it hard to buy the whole package of capitalism as sold by the authors when the reality of daily life just isn't as shiny as the wrapping that the said capitalism comes in. What do people care that we're better off than our ancestors when some of us don't have enough to feed our children, in this present day and age?
To the authors' great credit however, this book is highly accessible and immensely enjoyable to read. I may not be buying whatever they're selling, but at least I don't mind listening to their pitch.
To be fair, the authors got it right that most people who criticise Smith never even read either of his two books, let alone both. They argue that the man, the myth, the legend had never promoted selfishness, greed, and amorality. Case in point: read Smith's other book, the one less known than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In the end, however, the capitalism as envisioned by the authors is an extremely sanitised, and overly optimistic and idealistic version of what we end up suffering.
I don't think that capitalism is necessarily evil or corrupt. It has its good points. And I side with the authors that the spirit of innovism is extremely important. But we part ways where we cannot agree on the role of government, and how much freedom is too much freedom. And I find it hard to buy the whole package of capitalism as sold by the authors when the reality of daily life just isn't as shiny as the wrapping that the said capitalism comes in. What do people care that we're better off than our ancestors when some of us don't have enough to feed our children, in this present day and age?
To the authors' great credit however, this book is highly accessible and immensely enjoyable to read. I may not be buying whatever they're selling, but at least I don't mind listening to their pitch.
December 29, 2023
I went into the book as someone who favors social democracy because of its social benefits -without being able to truly understand the economics and accounting behind it- and my intention was to dip into liberalism's narrative that it's the only way to make people thrive. I do agree with the basic premise: we must live in a free-market society that fosters the growth of the middle class, increases job opportunities and therefore results in the reduction of poverty. However, many other conditions have to be met for that to happen. The people must be educated and there must be infrastructure, access to health, etc. How TF is that going to happen if the State has been shrunken? I still don't get these liberals. Do they think economic growth magically happens without social and cultural minimums?
January 1, 2025
The book attempts to sum up McCloskey’s trilogy of huge books on the “Bourgeois Virtues” in one short, relatively easy to read book. I haven’t read the full trilogy, so I can’t say how good the new book is as a distillation, but I found that it was easy to read and at least makes me think I understand McCloskey’s basic thesis for why the world got rich.
Part 1 of the book aims to establish that the world did in fact get richer over recent centuries, plus give a basic explanation of liberal political thought. If you already know this you could skip this part and cut down an easy 189 page read to a very easy 106 page read. Part 2 gets to what I at least came for- digging into the history to solve the puzzle of why the Industrial Revolution / Great Enrichment took off when and where it did.
Part 1 of the book aims to establish that the world did in fact get richer over recent centuries, plus give a basic explanation of liberal political thought. If you already know this you could skip this part and cut down an easy 189 page read to a very easy 106 page read. Part 2 gets to what I at least came for- digging into the history to solve the puzzle of why the Industrial Revolution / Great Enrichment took off when and where it did.
March 25, 2021
Not sure I can make the time to read McCloskey's Bourgeois Trilogy, so I was super-happy that she co-wrote this summary. In a nutshell, liberalism is what led to everything getting better for everyone, starting around 1800 in northwestern Europe. More of the book seems to be spent debunking and de-mythologizing erroneous explanations, but I found it a very thought-provoking read and I look forward to learning more about McCloskey's thoughts on liberalism. Also, Adam Smith is the hero of this book!
July 8, 2025
Książkę można podzielić na cztery części. Pierwsza fatalna - nieznośna propaganda libertarianizmu, gdzie część osiągnięć przypisywanych liberalizmowi jest tak naprawde osiągnięciami państwa socjalnego. Druga troszke lepsza - dlaczego powinniśmy być optymistami patrząc na historię nieprawdopodobnego rozwoju ostatnich dekad. Trzecia najlepsza - dlaczego eksplozja rozwoju nastąpiła akurat w Europie Płn-Zach akurat w XVIII-XIX w. Czwarta część to próba wyjaśnienia filozofii Adama Smitha, nie do końca wiem czy potrzebna.
March 11, 2022
Very well done, artfully written in a homespun style. Innovism is indeed the Bourgeois Deal. Ayn Rand would phrase the title: get the hell out of my way! Trump left us alone; what more could u ask of any president?
November 20, 2024
An interesting read. Sometimes childish prose that detracted from the information in the book.
March 25, 2025
I found the big ideas to be interesting, but this was WORDY , with a lot of name dropping that I just didn’t need.
Read
May 2, 2024please give me an A on the final (this is why i am not an economist)
October 1, 2023
This is a qualitative thesis on libertarianism.
The philosophy discussed is arguably more representative of what intellectuals want from a political system than what is offered by the contemporary left and right in most countries as of the early 2020s.
You are likely to find the discussion thought provoking irrespective of your position on the political spectrum. The writing style is intentionally unacademic and lucid.
The philosophy discussed is arguably more representative of what intellectuals want from a political system than what is offered by the contemporary left and right in most countries as of the early 2020s.
You are likely to find the discussion thought provoking irrespective of your position on the political spectrum. The writing style is intentionally unacademic and lucid.
January 2, 2022
Maybe one day I'll read McCloskey's bourgeois trilogy but not today. This condensed version of the trilogy will give me plenty to chew on for a while.
I don't know if McCloskey tries to do this or not, but here, as elsewhere, reading her work opens new doors. There is so much here, but she writes in a way that makes me want to broaden my reading and my understanding.
I don't know if McCloskey tries to do this or not, but here, as elsewhere, reading her work opens new doors. There is so much here, but she writes in a way that makes me want to broaden my reading and my understanding.
October 29, 2022
Propaganda neoliberista ben scritta, accattivante ed erudita.
Zero stelle.
Zero stelle.
November 27, 2024
I’m ngl…couldn’t tell you what it was ab but I’m counting it bc I have to write a 7 page paper on it and I tortured myself by reading it so. It’s gonna count towards my reading goal sorry not sorry
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews