Mcclosky, Dierdre

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:{Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (born Donald Nansen McCloskey; September 11, 1942) is an American economist and academic. Since 2023 she has been a Distinguished Scholar and holder of the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. From 2000 to 2015, she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Distinguished Professor of Economics History, and Professor of English and Communication.^[1]

During those years, she (as a visitor) taught economic history at the University of Gothenburg, economics at the University of the Free State, and philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.^[1]}:

McCloskey holds twelve honorary doctorates.^[2] She has served as President of the Social Science History Association, the Midwest Economics Association, and the Economic History Association. Co-founder of the Cliometrics Society, she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research interests include the economic and political origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, British economic history, the rhetoric of economics, and the history and philosophy of liberalism, among others.

Career

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McCloskey speaking in 2015 in Washington, D.C.

Born in Ann Arbor, McCloskey received an AB in economics from Harvard University in 1964, and a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1970, where she studied under Alexander Gerschenkron.^[1][3] Her doctoral dissertation on the British iron and steel industry won the 1973 David A. Wells Prize.^[4]

:{In 1968, McCloskey became an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and then associate professor in 1973; she was tenured in 1975, and appointed simultaneously as associate professor of history in 1979.^[1] Her work at Chicago is marked by her contribution to the cliometric revolution in economic history, and teaching generations of leading economists Chicago Price Theory, a course which culminated in her book The Applied Theory of Price.^[5] In 1979, at the suggestion of Wayne Booth in English at Chicago, she turned to the study of rhetoric in economics.

:{Worried in 1980 when her colleagues in economics would not promote her to full professor, McCloskey left Chicago for the University of Iowa, where she taught until 1999, being appointed the John F. Murray Chair in Economics in 1984.^[1] Soon after joining Iowa, she published The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and co-founded with John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and others an institution and graduate program, the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.^[6]

In 1996 at Iowa she and Stephen Ziliak published a seminal paper of econometrics, "The Standard Error of Regressions" in Journal of Economic Literature, marking the beginning of a decades-long collaboration, led mostly by Ziliak, on the history, philosophy, and practice of statistical significance testing and estimation in economics, medicine, and other sciences.^[7]}:}:

McCloskey has authored or co-authored 25 books and nearly 500 articles.^[8] Her major contributions have been to the economic history of Britain (focusing on 19th-century trade and industry, and medieval agriculture), the quantification of historical inquiry (cliometrics), the rhetoric of economics, the rhetoric of the human sciences, economic methodology, virtue ethics, feminist economics, heterodox economics, the role of mathematics in economic analysis, the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics, her trilogy The Bourgeois Era,^[9] and the origins of modern economic growth.

The Bourgeois Era

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Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce,^[10] published in 2006, argued that the bourgeoisie exhibits all of the seven virtues of the Western Tradition.

A second, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, was published in 2010, and argued that the unprecedented increase in human welfare of the 19th and 20th centuries, from $3 per capita per day to over $100 per day, issued not from capitalist accumulation but from innovation under an unprecedented liberalism in northwest Europe and is offshoots.

The third, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016) explains the origins of the liberalism that made the modern world.^[9] The trilogy gives a new, and old, account of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.

A popular version of the trilogy is Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (co-authored with Art Carden) in 2022.

Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019) and much of her recent work develops a full-scale defense of true liberalism.

Personal life

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McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard University, and Helen McCloskey (née Stueland), an opera singer in her youth and a poet in her maturity. McCloskey was born Donald and lived as a man until age 53. Married for thirty years, and parent of two children, she transitioned in 1995, among the first of academics to do so, and wrote about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press).^[11]

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBTQ community.^[12]

In 2003, McCloskey was a vocal critic of J. Michael Bailey and participated in a deplatforming campaign against him after the release of his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which presented and popularized sexologist Ray Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia as a motivation for sex reassignment surgery.^[13] McCloskey initiated complaints against Bailey at Northwestern University and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, and assisted a few others to do the same; all such complaints were ultimately either dismissed or resolved in Bailey's favor. She also led a successful campaign pressuring the Lambda Literary Foundation to withdraw the book's previous nomination for one of its awards.^[14]

McCloskey has described herself as a "literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian Classical Liberal."^[15]

Publications

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Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics (2022), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226819440
Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (2021), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226765921
Why liberalism works: how true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all (2019), Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300235081
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226333991
The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics (2016), Oxford University Press. (with George F. DeMartino). ISBN 978-0199766635
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226556659
The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), University of Michigan Press (with Stephen T. Ziliak). ISBN 978-0472050079
The Bourgeois Virtues : Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226556635
The Economic Conversation (2008) (with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak) ISBN 978-0230506800
The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0971757530
Crossing: A Memoir (S1999). New edition University of Chicago Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0226556697
Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey (1999) (edited by Stephen Ziliak) ISBN 978-1852788186
The Vices of Economists, the Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (1996) ISBN 978-9053562444
Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521436038
Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of U.S. Economic History (1993) (edited) ISBN 978-0195101188
A Bibliography of Historical Economics to 1980 (1990) ISBN 978-0521153850
If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990) ISBN 978-0226556710
The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (1988) ISBN 978-0521342865
The Writing of Economics (1987) reprinted as Economical Writing (2000) ISBN 978-1577660637
Econometric History (1987) ISBN 978-0333213711
The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (1987) ISBN 978-0299110246
The Rhetoric of Economics (1985 & 1998) ISBN 978-0299158149
The Applied Theory of Price (1982 & 1985) ISBN 978-0023785207
Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981) ISBN 978-0415313056
Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron & Steel, 1870–1913 (1973) ISBN 978-0674428478
Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 (1971) ISBN 978-0691051987

Articles

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McCloskey, Deirdre (1980). "Review of Stratton and Brown's agricultural records in Britain". Journal of Economic History. 40 (March 1980): 189. doi:10.1017/S0022050700104735. S2CID 154867548.
McCloskey, Deirdre (May 1985). "The loss function has been mislaid: The rhetoric of significance tests". The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. 75 (2): 201–205. JSTOR 1805596.
McCloskey, Deirdre N. (February 1988). "The rhetoric of law and economics". Michigan Law Review. 86 (4): 752–767. doi:10.2307/1289214. JSTOR 1289214.
McCloskey, Deirdre (September 1995). "Modern epistemology against analytic philosophy: A reply to Mäki". Journal of Economic Literature. 33 (3): 1319–1323. JSTOR 2729124.
McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (March 1996). "The standard error of regressions". Journal of Economic Literature. 34 (1): 97–114. JSTOR 2729411.[permanent ^dead ^link] Pdf.
McCloskey, Deirdre (January 1998). "Simulating Barbara". Feminist Economics. 4 (3): 181–186. doi:10.1080/135457098338383.
McCloskey, Deirdre (Winter 2003). "Other Things Equal: Milton". Eastern Economic Journal. 29 (1): 143–146. JSTOR 40326463.
McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (2004). "Size matters: The standard error of regressions in the American Economic Review". Econ Journal Watch. 1 (2): 331–338. Pdf.
McCloskey, Deirdre (July–August 2009). "Rhetoric matters: Ethical standards in a humanistic science of economics". Challenge. 52 (4): 25–31. doi:10.2753/0577-5132520403. JSTOR 40722588. S2CID 144681445.
McCloskey, Deirdre N.; Roberts, Helen (July–September 2012). "What economics should we teach before college, if any?". The Journal of Economic Education. 43 (3): 293–299. doi:10.1080/00220485.2012.686396. JSTOR 23248956. S2CID 144429500.

References

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rsa

...Taylor: Have the unprecedented threats we face in many areas – Covid-19, climate change and rising populism – changed your thinking about capitalism in its current form and our best route to recovery?

McCloskey: The real threats we face today are two: tyranny, which denies liberalism; and poverty, which tyranny causes. After dealing with tyranny and its evil fruit, the rest can follow; dealing for example with global warming (humanly caused and humanly solvable), or with the alleged rise of inequality (which in fact is falling in the world like a stone). Authoritarian populism of the Trump-and-Putin sort leads backwards, away from liberalism. There is no other good future for humans but a generous and respectful liberalism.

Taylor: The pandemic has resulted in calls for further state intervention and, at present, governments worldwide have indeed taken a greater role.

McCloskey: It’s like a forest fire, which we liberals believe the state should fight quickly, as South Korea and New Zealand did. Alas, the UK and the US did not, and now they are in flames. But it does not mean the state should take over the economy permanently. Labour’s Clause IV has been well tried, not to speak of the USSR or Venezuela, and has not worked.

Taylor: There is mounting evidence that the impacts of climate change are with us already.

McCloskey: Yes: look at the literal forest fires on the west coast of the US earlier this year. But a liberal economist says, ‘be prudent’. (Actually, any economist says that: it is what we are hired to say.) ‘Don’t do foolish things, like closing down industrial civilisation. The threat is not existential, despite what Swedish schoolgirls believe. Listen to Danish engineers instead.’ LOMBORG?!]

Taylor: Do these factors change the role that we need the state to play?

McCloskey: No. We must be wary of throwing away our creative liberties in exchange for a masterful man on a white horse, or even a Sir Humphrey Appleby GCB KBE MVO in a white hall.

...

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Deirdre McCloskey

American economist & academic

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Deirdre McCloskey - Wikipedia

Deirdre McCloskey is an American economist and academic who has made contributions to economic history, cliometrics, rhetoric, and liberalism. She is a Distinguished Scholar at the Cato Institute and has authored or co-authored 25 books and nearly 500 articles.

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Deirdre N. McCloskey: Home Page

Learn about Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, a distinguished scholar and author of twenty-five books on economics, history, philosophy, and more. Explore her views on liberalism, globalization, gender, and the role of ideas in human progress.

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The Many Transgressions of Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey is a distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication who challenges the narrowness and phoniness of mainstream economics. She argues for a broader and deeper understanding of economic history, rhetoric, and values, and offers advice for young economists.

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