The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

20 apologyGather together the figures on the quantity and quality of life since 1800.In “adult years of goods-supplied life” the resulting factor of increase sincegreat-great-great-great grandma’s day is therefore 17 (= 2 times 8.5) or 42.5(= 5 times 8.5), depending on one’s point of view. Note that larger figure: fortytwo and a half times. Listen to that phrase “adult years of goods-supplied life.”The number is reasonably solid and pretty much knowable and exhibits agrowth of 17 or 42.5 times since liberal capitalism began its work.You can go one better. The longer, richer average now applies to those6 billion rather than to the former 1 billion people. 42 So multiply each by afactor of six to get the increase in “world adult materially supplied years.”These nurture the flowers of world culture, low and high, politics andmusic. Beethoven, for example, in a world sized about 1.0 in such terms wasamong the first highbrow musicians to support himself by selling his compositionsto the public rather than to a noble patron. A market of bourgeoisminipatrons was just emerging. 43 Haydn had shown what could be done formusical art on the frontier of capitalism, moving in 1791 from the livery ofPrince Miklós Esterházy of Hungary to popular acclaim and commercialsuccess as a bourgeois composer in London.In the two centuries since the young Beethoven’s time the market formusic has increased if you look at it from the point of view of the 16-yearoldsetting out on adult life by a factor of 2 times 8.5 times 6—a factor of102 in total. That’s not 102 percent, class. That’s a factor of 102, which is to sayabout 9,000 percent. Do you see? One hundred times, or 9,000 percent,more music, painting, literature, philosophy, cuisine, cocktails, medicine,sports.Or one better again. From the proud parent’s point of view the marketincreased 5 times 8.5 times 6—or by a factor of 255. That’s 255 times moremusic, painting, and the rest, good and bad, glorious and corrupting. GoodLord. As a couple of acute observers, Marx and Engels, put it when all thiswas getting under way, “What earlier century had even a presentiment thatsuch productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”“Modern economic growth,” as the economists boringly call the fact ofreal income per person growing at a “mere” 1.5 percent per year for two hundredyears, to achieve that rise by a factor of nineteen in the countries whichmost enthusiastically embraced capitalism, is certainly the largest change inthe human condition since the ninth millennium BC. It ranks with the firstdomestications of plants and animals and the building of the first towns.