This episode is a conversation with Art Carden from Samford University. Art is an excellent scholar and a great popularizer of economic ideas. The occasion for our conversation is a new book that he has just published with the great economic historian Deidre McCloskey. The title is Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World. This book grows out of McCloskey’s 3-volume series on the Bourgeois Era but is aimed at a more popular audience.
The book makes an entertaining and broad defense of liberalism writ large, both on material and spiritual grounds. It is provocative and thought-provoking, particularly if you are in the habit of thinking about economics only in material terms.
Art Carden is a professor of economics at Samford University, senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, the beacon Center of Tennessee, and research fellow at the Independent Institute and at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics. He has written numerous scholarly articles and chapters about economic history, Walmart, economic freedom, and numerous other topics.