The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

notes to pages 17–27 51738. Kahn-Leavitt and others (1997), transcript of the video, spelling and punctuation modernized.http://www.dohistory.org/diary/1785/01/17850101_txt. html.39. John Donnelly, Boston Globe, “Over Half World’s Homes Have Running Water, WHOReport Finds. But Progress Stalls on Sanitation Goal.” August 26, 2004.40. Maddison, World Economy, 2001,p.30, table 1-5a; Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A GlobalHistory, 2001, reckons it at 30 years in 1800 and 67 years now; compare Oeppen and Vaupel,“Broken Limits,” 2002. The notion that AIDS is itself somehow connected to capitalism, as youwill sometimes hear, is strange. Why would capitalists kill their workers and customers?41. In Sweden and England/Wales, in which the statistics are good (Human Mortality DataBase at http://www.demog.berkeley.edu, Dec. 2003), life tables back to the mid-nineteenth centuryimply additional years of life expected at ages 15–19 of 43 years (England/Wales for menand women born 1841–1849) rising to 62.5 years for people born 1990–1999; and 46.4 years(Sweden, 1861–1899) to 64.1. The rise is about a factor of 1.5, not the 2 used here, but the rise hassurely been larger in places like China and South Asia.42. I’m assuming that everyone in the population has survived to adulthood, which is ofcourse contrary to fact. Allowing for the fact would result in an even higher ratio of increasethan 6 to 1, because the assumption is less true in 1800 than in 2000.43. Scherer,Quarter Notes, 2003,pp.31–33.44. Mueller, Capitalism, Democracy, 1999, pp.198–199, 201, 252; Sen,Development as Freedom,2000,pp.149–151.45. Schumpeter, Capitalism Socialism, 1942, part 2, chap. 5,p.67.46. Stiglitz, Globalization, 2002, pp.248–249. Note Stiglitz’s quantitative estimate, relativeto a world population of 6 billion.47. Calomiris, Globalist Manifesto, 2002,p.69.48. Muller,Mind and Market, 2002,p.17.49. Arguments such as that “the poor are fitted for such a life”; “poverty frees one fromconcern for earthly things.” Fleischacker, Distributive Justice, 2004,pp.9–10.50. Coleridge in Jackson, ed., p. 13.51. Fogel,Escape from Hunger, 2004,p.74.52. McCracken,Plenitude, 1997,p.23.53. Jones, Culture and the Price of Information, forthcoming, Princeton University Press.54. Vargas Llosa, “Culture of Liberty,” 2001.55. Here’s some good news. In the manner of interest rates the growth gathered force, and sothe factor of increase in adult materially supplied years was much less in 1913, at the second peakof bourgeois self-confidence, than it is by now, at the third peak—the first was in 1832, when allthis got going in earnest. In 1913 it was, as an economist had characterized it a little before, merelythe “rude first steps in material civilization.” To get from 1 to a factor of 2, 4, 8,...102 takes 6.5 doublings.Try it on your calculator. The low estimate of adult materially supplied years, therefore,would take, in a total of 200 years, about 30.8 years for each doubling. Each doubling takes thesame amount of time. By the Rule of 72 (that something growing at 1 percent per year doubles in72 years) the required growth per year is an apparently moderate (72/30.8) × 1% = 2% per year.But the rate is only apparently “moderate,” since a doubling on a doubling on a doubling everycentury or so yields in two centuries an immoderate amount of change, that factor of 102.Check