booktv visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they're reading this summer. >> i got a pile of books but i just chose one but is links my passions. the folks out there may recall, i taught economics at the college level for 20 years and went to seminary before that. so now the politics up here is

pretty toxic, and so everybody is talking about civility and ethics and virtue and everything we do around here is economics and politics. so i just wanted to highlight a book that i've been -- i got a couple of them with me but one is called "bourgeois dignity" by a chicago-trained economist, ph.d. her the sis -- she goes through 20 nobel prize papers by folks who have written on economic growth, and so economic growth, course started 1800. all the human history was a hockey stick. flat as could be. everybody in the whole world made a thousand dollars a 'er, and then 1750, 1800, get explosive economic growth and now we're at $50,000 per capita. the chinese are growing, used to be a thousand. the last 20 years they're up to

eight or nine thousand dollars. why did that indian so the standard economic account is capital accumulation, or human capital, otherwise known as education, r & d, the industrial revolution, private property rights, trade. marxist exploitation accounts, there's natural resource accounts, and they go on and on, natural endowments in land and metals, et cetera. so there's all sorts of conditions. the cause of modern economic growth. but mccloskey challenges 20 nobel papers, right? highest caliber folks and she has been vetted by nobel folks and her hypothesis is that the cause of long-run economic growth is when the moral language changed such that we started to call the businessman and woman morally good. and so let me just say that again because that's a whopper. modern economic growth -- everyone think is it's just

economics and rough greed and self-interest. no. when did economic growth take off? win we started to view i as being morally good, and if you look back at the western cannon, you can go thank you st. augustine or equine news, jesus, moses, confucius, and you think -- and aristotle, plato. what is wealth? it's helpful, it's neutral, it helps you pay for nice paintings, through the medieval timed but work itself is not intrinsically good and capitalism was not on the hobs. the reason i bring this up is because the thesis is probably reversible. were we start saying that business i molely bad again and there's a temptation to do it. wall street corruption, this couldn't of thing. the average person, the supply side of the economy is just everybody out there watching. it's everybody that guess to work in the morning. and if you don't wake up in the morning and say, what i'm going

to do today matters morally, right in the judeo-christian tradition, you say god has me here for a purpose, and work is eight or nine or ten hours every day for us up here it's 15 hours a day -- and if you don't view that as a moral pursuit, it's the most depressing thought you can think. you'll train a kid -- you'll go into business and it's morally bad. it's just crushing psychologically. and so you can see that if you view your work 0 in a positive way morally, you're doing something emotionally good to help other people, you wake up in the morning and feel good, i'm going to do my part. but now the moral language is getting a little negative. not a little. on the politics up here, and on business, and everybody is kind of self-interested again, and so i just wanted to highlight this book as a way of linking a bunch of influential dish was a liberal arts professor but this connects spheres, the economic

sphere, the lit cal spear, and the moral sphere and she is fun to read. connects every great thinker and i think it's very important, especially for the next generation, the young kid, the college students starting to think about business, take a look at this book and she'll have bibliography and all sort offered other links to readers you can pursuit it is very important to get the young generation motivated to go to work. i taught college intro econ for 19-year-old freshman and the kids out of k through 12 don't know what a business is, what a price is or a cost or a profit, and that's just the language you have to know, and so i want to enter twine and get back back te classical education, people should be taught -- if you're teaching an english class, teach a kid how to write a business memo. everything we do -- especially if your kids are on the college

path, you just kind of -- everyone takes for grant but half the country won't go for college. so the end of k through 12 i hope we have kids prepared to good into the work world, but in high school, because we're paying 14 grand a year for 13 years, and so people see we need all these extra programs. we should be doing that in k to 12 and also in the k to 12 it's interesting well-don't teach any system of ethics, and so that's one of the reasons i'm highlighting the book. we don't teach the judeo-christian tradition. religion is a hot topic we try to be secular. i taught the secular philosophers, and aristotle, virtual ethics but no one livers out those systems. most people are religious. judeo-christian tradition, confucius, hindu and people don't learn the moral theirfully k through 12, and in higher ed,

not much eacher which is shocking. applaud c-span to give us the opportunity to share ideas. this is one book. i wanted to connect a few dot and share a few ideas and thank you for doing this. >> book tv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter or instagram, or posteriors it to our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> good afternoon, earn. it's a great pleasure for me and my cst