The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

16 apologydrought-pushed, language-enabled march of a little group of Homo sapienssapiens out of the African homeland around 50,000 BC. 35 Think of it: sixtimes more souls.The second, and still more amazing, fact uncovered by the economic historiansin the past fifty years is that despite the rise in population since 1800the goods and services consumed by the average person has not fallen. Theforecasters of doom from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich have been mistaken.“We cannot absolutely prove, wrote Macaulay in 1830, “that those are inerror who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seenour best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as muchapparent reason.” Amazingly, the optimistic, Whiggish Macaulay wasexactly right. The amount of goods and services produced and consumedby the average person on the planet has risen since 1800 by a factor of abouteight and a half. I say “about.” If the factor were four or five, or ten or twelve,the conclusion would be the same: liberal capitalism has succeeded. And likeliberal democracy, its success continues. In these latter days the fact shoulddelight and amaze us.Never had such a thing happened. Count it in your head: eight and a halftimes more actual food and clothing and housing and education and traveland books for the average human being—even though there were six timesmore of them. Of course not every sort of person on the planet got exactly8.5000000 times more. Averages are averages. But the figure’s rough magnitude,I repeat, is not in doubt, and the success of capitalism has left no classof people on the planet entirely behind. Even unhappy Africa’s income perhead has in real terms—that is, allowing for mere monetary inflation ofprices, as do all these figures—more than tripled since the early nineteenthcentury, despite an alarming collapse in some parts after the 1970s.In places like Hong Kong or Taiwan or France or the United States thathave had the luck or the skill to let the bourgeois virtues flourish, nationalincome per head has risen by a factor of as much as, for example, nineteen. 36Goodness. Nineteen. Understand, that’s not a mere 100 percent or 200 percentmore to eat and read and wear than two centuries ago. It is eighteenhundred percent more.“Ah, but at the cost of a worse quality of life.” Briefly for now, no. Considerthat you may be mistaken. The quality of life you personally lead, dearreader, is better than the lives of your thirty-two great-great-great-great