The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

518 notes to pages 27–34it out, I say: you will be amazed. You can see without calculation the reasonableness of theimmoderate force of interest. Something growing at a mere 1 percent gets to be of course at least72 percent larger in 72 years: that much you can see without any mysterious Rule, since of course72 times 1 percent is 72 percent. The rest of the doubling (to 100 percent = a doubling in 72 years,that is) comes from the compounding. And if something doubles during 72 years growing at1 percent per year, it will of course double in half that time if it grows twice as fast, 2 percent peryear. The encouragements to art or science or liberation feeding on themselves in a nonlinear waywere therefore in 1913 less strong—at this 2 percent rate of growth per year 1800 to 1913 rising tomerely 13.3 or so on the scale from 1 to 100. Then in the politics-disturbed spurts of the twentiethcentury it went the rest of the way to 100 percent of the change, 100 percent of that factor of102, or from the other point of view 100 percent of that factor of 255.56. Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974,pp.328–329.57. Sen,Development as Freedom, 2000,pp.6, 112.58. Sen,Development as Freedom, 2000,pp.115, 201.59. National Public Radio in Chicago, around 11:00 a.m., October 3, 2005.60. Quoted in Sen, Development as Freedom, 2000,p.114.61. Granovetter, “Economic Action,” 1985. Novak, Catholic Social Thought, 1984 (1989), p. 24.62. Sacks, Dignity of Difference, 2002,pp.32, 16, 22, 14.63. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Women, 1792,p.149.64. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840 [1954], vol. 2,p.131.65. Hunt, Character and Culture, 1997,p.211.66. For example, Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848,p.66, “Pauperism developsmore rapidly than population and wealth.”67. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848,p.69,“Private property ...for the few issolely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”68. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848, p.70, “Culture . . . is, for the enormousmajority, a mere training to act as a machine.”69. Schweiker,Theological Ethics, 2004, p. xiii.70. See again Najita, Visions of Virtue in Togugawa, 1987, for example, p. 5.71. In 1973 David Friedman reckoned the figure was at most about 5 percent (The Machineryof Freedom, pp. xiv, xv, quoted in Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974,p.177n.)72. As Johan Van Overtveldt points out to me.73. Margo, “Labor Force,” 2000, p.213, table 5.3; McCloskey, “Industrial Revolution,” 1981,p. 127.74. Rousseau, Origin of Inequality, 1755,p.60.75. Schmidtz 1994, quoted in Feser, On Nozick, 2004,p.84.76. Compare Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity, 1978. Some Georgist friends tell me that I amwrong, and that you can get the share of all rents up to 10 percent if you include income fromthings like the (God-given and unaugmentable) electronic spectrum. But as I say, they wouldagree that a determinism of “resources” as noneconomists understand the word is unjustified.And some of my Austrian economics friends retort that taxing such resources would result indistortions of the economy. All agree with the main present point, however: that human capitalhas become much larger.