©Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL


Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication
University of Illinois at Chicago

Professor of Economic History, Gothenburg University, Sweden

McCloskey is an economist, historian, and rhetorician who has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and ethics. She is known as a "conservative" economist, University-of-Chicago style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests that "I'm a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian libertarian." Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, argues that an ideological change, rather than saving or exploitation, is what made us rich... more »

What is crucial, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty wrote in 1983, is Our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends' questions and objections.
A.O. Rorty, "Experiments in Philosophical Genre: Descartes' Meditations," pp. 545-565 in Critical Inquiry 9: 562

Why Neo-Institutionalism Can’t Explain the Modern World: A Pamphlet

from Bourgeois Dignity (2010)

A five-chapter excerpt from Deirdre McCloskey's book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World that contends particularly with the work of economist Douglass North.

Watch: McCloskey talks capitalism on Dutch TV

NTR HoeZo Internationaal, 7 March 2013.

"We have weaker ties—weaker connections with each other—but we have more of them… We still have community in the modern world."

Also: McCloskey is interviewed, both singly and with Arjo Klamer, by Dutch journalist Frank Mulder.

Deirdre McCloskey reviews Francesco Boldizzoni's The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History

Investigaciones de Historia Económica - Economic History Research 9(1), February 2013.

"Boldizzoni's attack on cliometrics is unpersuasive, in part because he does not grasp economics and its uses, in part because he admires uncritically the German Historical School and their modern descendants, the French Annalistes..."



Sandel
"The Moral Limits of Communitarianism: What Michael Sandel Can’t Buy"

Claremont Review of Books XII(4), Fall 2012.

McCloskey's full review of Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets is here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org; a shorter version appears in the Claremont Review of Books.

"We Agree That Statistical Significance Proves Essentially Nothing"

Econ Journal Watch 10(1), January 2013.

Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey have the last word in an Econ Journal Watch exchange with Thomas Mayer over Ziliak and McCloskey's The Cult of Statistical Significance.

"Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the bourgeois"

Delia O'Hara, AAAS MemberCentral, 11 March 2013.

McCloskey is profiled in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's "Member Spotlight."

“Science is ethical all the way down... How we know things is a deeply ethical procedure.”


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