Why Liberalism Works Quotes

“The economy, like science or art, is more like an organism growing uncertainly toward the light than a steel machine repeating exactly today and tomorrow what it did yesterday.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“the much-maligned “capitalism” has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Therefore, having a lot is not immoral. It is the good luck to be born in America or Japan or Denmark. The “luck” consists chiefly of a modern liberal ideology of innovism combined with reasonably honest courts and reasonably secure property rights and reasonably non-extractive governments and reasonably effective educational systems, and a reasonably long time for the reasonably good ideas, and especially the innovations, to do their work. By all means let’s spread the good luck around—by persuading people to a modern liberalism leading to the Great Enrichment, and a full life.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“revolutionary socialist or the revolutionary theocrat wants to overturn liberalism and establish a heaven on earth, now, by first cowing or jailing or murdering those who demure, putting the selected men of the Party or the Revolutionary Guard in charge.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All