Spare 30 mins for a Top Class Professor's Lecture

Thanks to Peter Boettke at the The Coordination Problem Blog (HERE) we can enjoy – and learn from – a videoed talk by Professor Deirdre McCloskey delivered on 9 February 2011 at the Mercatus Centre, George Mason University, Fairfax Virginia:

Deirdre McCloskey on "Bourgeois Dignity" (HERE)

It is one of those really stunning performances that students gain access to at top US Universities.

I recommend it, speaking as a student of Adam Smith’s lectures that covered similar ground in an historical sense.

McCloskey, with the benefit of more recent work on the evolution from Hunter-gathering (Smith’s 1st Age of Man) to commercial societies (Smith’s 4th Age of Man), post-1800, presents an original thesis on what caused the sudden shift upwards in living standards from its long historical low of $3 a day to hundreds of dollars a day, once North Western Europe industrialised.

She sees innovation as the driving force of the modern world and how the unprecedented conditions for the widespread waves of innovation that that followed led to the growth seen now as a worldwide phenomenon.