Mark Thornton reviews 'A Tale of Four Cities'

Book reviews typically don't fit nicely into the mission of this podcast, which is to bring current issues under the microscope of Austrian economics.  We also bring attention to issues that are not in the mainstream media or academia that Austrian economists consider important.  However, today I'm going to review a new book.  It's a book that's almost entirely about history.  However, the book's purpose and message, as I see it, is about addressing an unraveling the burning issues of today.  And moreover, it addresses them with powerful insights based in part on Austrian economics.  I am sure that my audience will appreciate reading the commentary quoted from various Austrian economists, Old Right writers and the sage advice of history concerning important issues, instead of just various minions of the state.

The book is titled, A Tale of Four Cities: From Invisible Hand to Cancel Culture.  The author is Philip Duffy.  I'm going to avoid telling the author's story, but just for your curiosity, the four cities from the title are Paris, London, Rome and Munich, in that historical order, and that provides some clues.

~ Mark Thornton, "Minor Issues: A Tale of Four Cities," Mises.org, August 3, 2024

Kevin Duffy on Phil Duffy's new book 'A Tale of Four Cities'

To economic historians, the “hockey stick of human prosperity” is that irresistible bright shiny object. Up until 1800, the human population and living standards grew at a snail’s pace, but then a strange thing happened: both took off.

[...] 

In A Tale of Four Cities, Phil Duffy asks an intriguing question: “What if the real inflection point took place 100 years or so earlier?”  Have economic archeologists been unearthing evidence in all the wrong places?  Have they drawn false conclusions?

Challenging simple narratives often leads to valuable, contrarian insights.  By shifting the timeline of the starting gun on human progress back a century, Duffy unlocks a treasure trove.  First, he asserts that the actual dawning was the Agricultural Revolution, which laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.  Second, he discovers Richard Cantillon, the first economist to recognize the critical role of the entrepreneur in creating wealth.  Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General was written in 1730, long before Adam Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations.  Third, he makes a compelling case that Smith suppressed Cantillon’s work and removed the role of the entrepreneur, paving the way for misguided theories which treated entrepreneurship as vulgar and exploitative.

This would largely explain why many people in America, far from appreciating their good fortune, are openly hostile towards ultra-rich entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.  It also explains why those same billionaires give openly to anti-capitalistic charities.  It explains why so many countries have destroyed themselves by ingesting toxic theories on wealth creation, from sub-Saharan Africa, to the former Soviet Union, to Cuba and Venezuela.  It explains why governments in the West have grown to oppressive levels, threatening to strangle their productive hosts. 

If Duffy is correct, much of the world today enjoys a level of wealth unimagined by our ancestors despite worshipping false idols like Adam Smith, paper money and democracy.  Future economic progress is not a guarantee.  In fact, the human experiment appears to be at a crossroads.  Choosing the right path may just require getting the timeline right on that bright shiny object.

~ Kevin Duffy, Forward to A Tale of Four Cities, April 8, 2023