But What Does It Mean?

The great question of the modern era is: what did it? How did human society transform itself so remarkably from the agricultural society that obtained for the last ten thousand years into the modern industrial and post-industrial world of today? There are, of course, many answers on offer. Here are just a few.

The answer from the American economist Deirdre McCloskey is “trade-tested betterment.” She means by this the process of middle-class people offering onto the market ideas, products, and services for improvement in physical and social living standards, and then abiding by the verdict of the market. McCloskey develops this idea in her “Bourgeois Era” books.

Another answer is “capital accumulation,” most recently argued in Capital in the Twenty First Century by the French Thomas Piketty. This represents modern prosperity as the result of people saving their income and thus accumulating capital.

Many people believe that it was the Enlightenment, a new birth of reason that flowered in the 17th century and replaced in human minds the superstitions of the Medieval Era.

In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously argued that the Protestant ethic that emerged out of the Reformation encouraged people to engage in work in the secular world and accumulate wealth for investment.

In the narrative established by Marxism, the welfare of the working class depends on revolution to break the natural tendency of capitalism to lead to the immiseration and exploitation of the workers and the petit-bourgeoisie as market competition squeezes capitalist profits and thus the wages of the workers.

In the narrative of social democracy the welfare of the workers depends upon the rise of a political party to enact beneficial social legislation to protect workers from the laisser faire of individualism, so that, in the words of Fabian Essays in Socialism, “anything whatever in the nature of laisser faire goes by the board.”

In the environmentalist narrative our modern prosperity rides on the back of a reckless use of non-renewable fossil fuels that has despoiled the Earth and risks a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming from a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In a technological narrative the Great Enrichment is the result of several technological revolutions, starting with steam power in the 19th century, the development of electric energy in the early 20th century, the internal combustion engine throughout the 20th century, and the electronics and information revolutions of the late 20th century.

Needless to say, there are many competing theories out there that attempt to explain our extraordinary age. It would probably be a good idea if we can come to some kind of loose agreement about What Did It.