The bourgeois virtues

What Hacker News says

1. barry-cotterSep 2023
   Your understanding of the practical and philosophical backing for capitalism is limited and reads more like an Econ 101 description of perfectly competitive markets than anything else. If you would like to learn more you could read Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy[1] or Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues[2]

   [1] http://libgen.is/book/index.phpmd5=21EE8F203D5C3F9530D55985B...

   [2] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo375063...

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2. ghufran_syedMay 2018
   Wouldn't the corollary of Friedman's position be that if businesses take actions that people in society find offensive (such as preying on vulnerable individuals), that those people should therefore work to change the law?

   I think Friedman's point was more that 'businesses' don't make decisions, people make decisions, and there are two classes of people involved - the people who own the business(principals), and the people who run the business on their behalf (agents). His article argues that the agents should carry out the principal's wishes (which does can include ethical concerns), not their own.

   "Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he rec­ognizes or assumes voluntarily–to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He may feel impelled by these responsibilities to de­vote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corpo­rations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country's armed forces. If we wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as "social responsibilities." But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are "social responsibili­ties," they are the social responsibilities of in­dividuals, not of business.

   Much of the best writing I have seen regarding the relationship between individual 'virtues' and economic growth is Deirdre McCloskey's "Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce"

   http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/academics/

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3. 0815testApr 2019
   Or maybe, "culture" theorists don't understand IR-- or economic development, for that matter. Culture, taken in a broad sense, explains almost everything about which societies become economically successful and which don't! As Deirdre McCloskey's work on the 'bourgeois virtues' makes quite clear, this is true over a huge range of scales, from the fairly small and local to the very large.
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4. SymmetryDec 2013
   I've been meaning to read The Bourgeois Virtues, a book entirely about the importance of morality in functioning market economies. But while morality is very important in a market economy, planned and traditional economies destroy themselves even more quickly in the face of moral breakdown.
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