A Conversation between Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux on 'Bourgeois Equality'

Is our modern world the product of changing institutions or the result of shifting opinions about them? At a recent event hosted by the Hayek Program, Don Boudreaux and Deidre McCloskey explored this question in a fascinating discussion on the latest installment of Professor McCloskey’s Bourgeois Era Trilogy, 'Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World' (University of Chicago Press, 2016). This new volume challenges conventional wisdom about the causes of the wealth of nations and builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas – the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk – in creating the Great Enrichment from 1800 to today.

Om Podcasten

The Hayek Program Podcast includes audio from lectures, interviews, and discussions of scholars and visitors from the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The F. A. Hayek Program is devoted to the promotion of teaching and research on the institutional arrangements that are suitable for the support of free and prosperous societies. Implicit in this statement is the presumption that those arrangements are to some extent open to conscious selection, as well as the appreciation that the type of arrangements that are selected within a society can influence significantly the economic, political, and moral character of that society.