©Deirdre Nansen McCloskey | COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL


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

Professor of Economic History, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Deirdre 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 »


"My whole life is nothing but a desperate struggle to overcome the division of labor and think about everything myself, so that it comes together in a head and thus becomes one again. I do not want to know everything. I merely want to unify splintered things."
Elias Canetti (1905-1994), The Human Province (in German 1973; trans. J. Neugroschel, 1978; republished London: Andre Deutsch, 1985), p. 34.

Deirdre McCloskey to receive Julian L. Simon Memorial Award

Competitive Enterprise Institute, 13 June 2013.

McCloskey will be honored on June 20 at the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual dinner and reception in Washington. Also: Ryan Young and Fred Smith of CEI discuss McCloskey's work in a new podcast.


Table of contents for planned third volume of The Bourgeois Era

outline for The Treasured Bourgeoisie (2014?)

A chapter-by-chapter outline of Deirdre McCloskey's in-progress book The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect, a third volume in her series on The Bourgeois Era.


Free download of McCloskey's memoir Crossing

University of Chicago Press, 1999.

An e-book version of Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir is free to download this month from its publisher, the University of Chicago Press.


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..."


McCloskey comments on Douglas Allen's Institutional Revolution

Review of Austrian Economics, forthcoming.

"A Neo-Institutionalism of Measurement, Without Measurement: A Comment on Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution" is Deirdre McCloskey's contribution to a symposium that will appear in a future issue of the Review of Austrian Economics.

“Allen does yeoman work in explaining some of the peculiarities of British public administration, such as the reliance on aristocratic honor and on the prize system in naval warfare. But he attributes to public administration an implausible effect on private incomes. The merging of power and plenty is mistaken.”


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

from Bourgeois Dignity (2010)

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



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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