Part I A Great Enrichment Happened, And Will Happen -- 1. The World Is Pretty Rich, but Once Was Poor -- 2. For Malthusian and Other Reasons, Very Poor -- 3. Then Many of Us Shot Up the Blade of a Hockey Stick -- 4. As Your Own Life Shows -- 5. The Poor Were Made Much Better Off -- 6. Inequality Is Not the Problem -- 7. Despite Doubts from the Left -- 8. Or from the Right and Middle -- 9. The Great International Divergence Can Be Overcome -- Part II Explanations From Left And Right Have Proven False -- 10. The Divergence Was Not Caused by Imperialism -- 11. Poverty Cannot Be Overcome from the Left by Overthrowing "Capitalism" -- 12. "Accumulate, Accumulate" Is Not What Happened in History -- 13. But Neither Can Poverty Be Overcome from the Right by Implanting "Institutions" -- 14. Because Ethics Matters, and Changes, More -- 15. And the Oomph of Institutional Change Is Far Too Small -- 16. Most Governmental Institutions Make Us Poorer -- Part III Bourgeois Life Had Been Rhetorically Revalued In Britain At The Onset Of The Industrial Revolution -- 17. It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged That Even Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen Exhibit the Revaluation -- 18. No Woman but a Blockhead Wrote for Anything but Money -- 19. Adam Smith Exhibits Bourgeois Theory at Its Ethical Best -- 20. Smith Was Not a Mr. Max U, but Rather the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists -- 21. That Is, He Was No Reductionist, Economistic or Otherwise -- 22. And He Formulated the Bourgeois Deal -- 23. Ben Franklin Was Bourgeois, and He Embodied Betterment -- 24. By 1848 a Bourgeois Ideology Had Wholly Triumphed -- Part IV A Pro-Bourgeois Rhetoric Was Forming In England Around 1700* -- 25. The Word "Honest" Shows the Changing Attitude toward the Aristocracy and the Bourgeoisie -- 26. And So Does the Word "Eerlijk" -- 27. Defoe, Addison, and Steele Show It, Too -- 28. The Bourgeois Revaluation Becomes a Commonplace, as in The London Merchant -- 29. Bourgeois Europe, for Example, Loved Measurement -- 30. The Change Was in Social Habits of the Lip, Not in Psychology -- 31. And the Change Was Specifically British -- Part V Yet England Had Recently Lagged In Bourgeois Ideology, Compared With The Netherlands -- 32. Bourgeois Shakespeare Disdained Trade and the Bourgeoisie -- 33. As Did Elizabethan England Generally -- 34. Aristocratic England, for Example, Scorned Measurement -- 35. The Dutch Preached Bourgeois Virtue -- 36. And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous -- 37. For Instance, Bourgeois Holland Was Tolerant, and Not for Prudence Only -- Part VI Reformation, Revolt, Revolution, And Reading Increased The Liberty And Dignity Of Ordinary Europeans -- 38. The Causes Were Local, Temporary, and Unpredictable -- 39. "Democratic" Church Governance Emboldened People -- 40. The Theology of Happiness Changed circa 1700 -- 41. Printing and Reading and Fragmentation Sustained the Dignity of Commoners -- 42. Political Ideas Mattered for Equal Liberty and Dignity -- 43. Ideas Made for a Bourgeois Revaluation -- 44. The Rhetorical Change Was Necessary, and Maybe Sufficient -- Part VII Nowhere Before On A Large Scale Had Bourgeois Or Other Commoners Been Honored -- 45. Talk Had Been Hostile to Betterment -- 46. The Hostility Was Ancient -- 47. Yet Some Christians Anticipated a Respected Bourgeoisie -- 48. And Betterment, Though Long Disdained, Developed Its Own Vested Interests -- 49. And Then Turned -- 50. On the Whole, However, the Bourgeoisies and Their Bettering Projects Have Been Precarious -- Part VIII Words And Ideas Caused The Modern World -- 51. Sweet Talk Rules the Economy -- 52. And Its Rhetoric Can Change Quickly -- 53. It Was Not a Deep Cultural Change -- 54. Yes, It Was Ideas, Not Interests or Institutions, That Changed, Suddenly, in Northwestern Europe -- 55. Elsewhere Ideas about the Bourgeoisie Did Not Change -- Part IX The History And Economics Have Been Misunderstood -- 56. The Change in Ideas Contradicts Many Ideas from the Political Middle, 1890-1980 -- 57. And Many Polanyish Ideas from the Left -- 58. Yet Polanyi Was Right about Embeddedness -- 59. Trade-Tested Betterment Is Democratic in Consumption -- 60. And Liberating in Production -- 61. And Therefore Bourgeois Rhetoric Was Better for the Poor -- Part X That Is, Rhetoric Made Us, But Can Readily Unmake US -- 62. After 1848 the Clerisy Converted to Antibetterment -- 63. The Clerisy Betrayed the Bourgeois Deal, and Approved the Bolshevik and Bismarckian Deals -- 64. Anticonsumerism and Pro-Bohemianism Were Fruits of the Antibetterment Reaction -- 65. Despite the Clerisy's Doubts -- 66. What Matters Ethically Is Not Equality of Outcome, but the Condition of the Working Class -- 67. A Change in Rhetoric Made Modernity, and Can Spread It.