How the west won

By Deirdre McCloskey. Letter to Prospect Magazine.

"Anatol Lieven’s rant against capitalism and freedom (“How the west lost,” October) reminds us that gloom sells. So does economic ignorance packaged as deep strategic thinking, and musty academic Marxism that has learned nothing at all from the 3,000 per cent increase since 1848 of real income per head for the formerly wretched of the earth.

After the fall in 1989 of the socialist plan of economic coercion, and contrary to Lieven’s rage against sensible liberals like Fukuyama, prosperity exploded. A mythical “Chinese model” didn’t do it. China in fact liberalised, though the country is backsliding now. It was the “deeply flawed” western model, in Lieven’s phrase, that raised up the poor of China and then India, as had happened long before in Britain.

The cause of the startling enrichments after the upheavals of 1776 or 1848 or 1989 has been, as Marx wisely said, “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.” Lieven is right that “minimal moral values” are the ticket to the good society—those values which liberate adults from subordination to aristocrat, husband or planner."