The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

xviiiacknowledgmentsintellectual and personal engagement at a crux in the spring of 2000. TheEarhart Foundation has supported my strange vision of an ethical capitalismearly and late, financing students at Iowa during the early 1990s and myresearch in the Netherlands at the end.You see that I have gotten a great deal of help over a long period of time.The extent of the help shows how hard it was for an economist and calculatorto get the point. It is still another measure of the gap in our culturebetween the Sacred and the Profane.And I thank four unusual people who have sustained me for decades inthis and all my work: Arjo Klamer of Erasmus University of Rotterdam,John Nelson of the University of Iowa, Stephen Ziliak of Roosevelt University,and above all my mother, an aristocratic poet of bourgeois origin,Helen McCloskey—reading voraciously, taking new residences yearly, publishingin her eighties amazing poetry. I have dedicated the book to her. Sheand the others have done me the favor, all these years, of disagreeing withme about the bourgeois virtues.