It was ideas and ideologies, not interests or institutions, which changed in Northwestern Europe, 1600-1848

摘要

The economic history on which recent economics has been based is erroneous, based on the Marx and Engels of 1848. What actually happened, 1517-1789, in northwestern Europe was the coming, as Schumpeter put it, of a busiess-0respecting civilization. Ideas mattered as much as, and often more than, material or institutional circumstances, such as property law or coal deposits or exploitation. The interest-only theories of Steven Cheung and Douglass North don't work. We need a "humanomics," whose killer app is a new and verified theory of how we became rich.