What made most of us, not just in the West but in China and Brazil too, unprecedentedly rich, so the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey says, was ‘innovationism’: the habit of applying new ideas to raising living standards. No other explanation of the great enrichment of recent centuries makes any sense. Trade had been expanding for centuries, and colonial exploitation with it, and these alone were unable to give anything like the order of magnitude of improvement in incomes that happened.
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