Prudentia  a MacDonald magazine from www.deirdremccloskey.org

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1.) "Why Economics Can't Explain the Coming of the Modern World"

…which introduces people to the trilogy with the University of Chicago Press about capitalism, its history, its functioning, its ethics: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006); Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010); and forthcoming April, 2016, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. For economists, historians, and the general public.

2.) "The Bankruptcy of Statistical Significance"

…criticizing the gross misuse of statistical as against substantive "significance" (much of her writing on this has been with Stephen Ziliak, such as their book of 2008, The Cult of Statistical Significance). The talk is aimed at applied econometricians and other users of statistical methods.

3.) "Virtue Ethics in a Bourgeois World"

…a summary of The Bourgeois Virtues (2006), directed at ethicists in schools of business, but relevant to philosophers and economists.

Other Talks:

"Crossing: Notes of a Novice Woman"

Deirdre McCloskey, internationally known economist, historian, and rhetorician, was until 1995 "Donald." She describes her adventures—sad, funny, terrifying, illuminating of gender roles—in crossing genders, from her 1999 memoir, Crossing (1999), a New York Times Notable Book.

"A Novice Woman in Academic Life"

Deirdre McCloskey starts from her unusual perspective a discussion about being a woman and being a professor. McCloskey, twelve years a professor at the University of Chicago and nineteen at Iowa, now teaches economics, history, English, communication at three universities. She was until 1995 "Donald." What changed? How can academic life become more open to women?

"Free Market Feminism: A Contradiction?"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known "Good Old Chicago School" economist, thinks it is not a contradiction. The market, she argues, has been the chief liberator of women; and the government has been most often a men's club.

"A Conversation with Deirdre McCloskey"

Deirdre McCloskey describes herself as a "postmodern, free-market, quantitative, rhetorical, Anglican, transsexual, Midwestern, European, female economist -- that's why I haven't got any friends!" Is such a mixture possible? McCloskey is ocular proof that it is. She says, "It's like believing in infant baptism. Not only do I believe in it, I've seen it."

"Learning to Love Globalization"

Deirdre McCloskey, a well-known economist and economic historian, argues in favor of capitalism, globalization, and modern economic growth. She views them as the hope for the world's poor and the promise of the century before us.

"The Rhetoric of Some Mathematical Sciences"

Deirdre McCloskey is well known as one of the originators of the "rhetoric of inquiry," a broad-based use since the early 1980s of an ancient tradition to understand scholarship and public affairs. She here discusses her latest thoughts on how literary and communications theory can illuminate-and improve-science and scholarship.

"Theology and Capitalism"

Deirdre McCloskey describes herself as an "Anglican, statistical, literary, post-modern free-market economist who was once a Trotskyist, Keynesian, positivist agnostic." Can God and Mammon (Aramaic: "money") lie down together? Says McCloskey, Yes, as even Jesus of Nazareth affirmed.

Formal Biography

Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written twenty books and edited seven more, and has published some four hundred articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a “postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian.” Her latest books are How to be Human* *Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press 2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (S. Ziliak, ed.; Edward Elgar 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets, U. of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, 2008], The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (U. of Chicago Press, 2010), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (U. of Chicago Press, 2016), and Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale U. Press, 2019). Before The Bourgeois Virtues her best-known books were The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1st ed. 1985, 2nd ed. 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (U. of Chicago Press, 1999), which was a New York Times Notable Book.

Her scientific work has been on economic history, especially British. Her recent book Bourgeois Equality is a study of Dutch and British economic and social history. She has written on British economic "failure" in the 19th century, trade and growth in the 19th century, open field agriculture in the middle ages, the Gold Standard, and the Industrial Revolution.

Her philosophical books include The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed. 1998), If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (University of Chicago Press 1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge 1994). They concern the maladies of social scientific positivism, the epistemological limits of a future social science, and the promise of a rhetorically sophisticated philosophy of science. In her later work she has turned to ethics and to a philosophical-historical apology for modern economies.

Informal Autobiographical Remarks

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.

She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”

Her most recent popular books, for example, are Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019) and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Also in 2019 the Chicago Press published a third edition of her classic manual on style, Economical Writing, and a 20^th-anniversary re-issue of Crossing: A Transgender Memoir, with a new Afterword. But she’s technical and quantitative, too. For example, with Stephen Ziliak in 2008 she wrote The Cult of Statistical Significance, widely praised, which shows that null hypothesis tests of “significance” are, in the absence of a substantive loss function, meaningless. The point, made long before McCloskey by a few statisticians, is becoming widely accepted, for example in the American Statistical Association, though not yet in economics and medicine.

Her latest scholarly book again from the University of Chicago Press, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), was the final volume of the Bourgeois Era trilogy. It argues for an “ideational” explanation of the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person 1800 to the present in places like Britain and Japan and Finland. The accidents of Reformation and Revolt in northwestern Europe 1517–1789 led to a new liberty and dignity for commoners—ideas called “liberalism” in the proper sense—which led in turn to an explosion of commercially tested betterment, “having a go.” The second book in the trilogy, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), had shown that materialist explanations such as saving or exploitation, don’t have enough economic oomph or historical relevance to explain the Enrichment. The alleged explanations that do not focus on the new ideology of “innovism”—her name for the ill-named “capitalism”—are mistaken. And the Enrichment did not corrupt our immortal souls. The inaugural book in the trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), had established that, contrary to the clamor since 1848 of the clerisy left and right, the bourgeoisie is pretty good, and that commercially tested betterment is not the worst of ethical schools. In short, the trilogy looks forward, if populism does not spoil the prospect, to a world of universal dignity and prosperity created by liberal innovism.

PR Bullet Points

• Until 1995 Deirdre McCloskey was "Donald." A Harvard graduate--she wishes it had been Radcliffe!--she was tenured in economics and history at the University of Chicago, and taught for 19 years at the University of Iowa.
• She's been at UIC since 2000 as a UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, and adjunct in Classics and Philosophy. Of her many departments, she jokes: "I want to be in so many that I can be shopping and everyone thinks I'm in the other department!"
• She has written fourteen books, edited seven more, and has written about 360 articles in economics, history, philosophy, statistical theory, literary criticism, and gender studies.
• Her book Crossing was a New York Times Notable Book in 1999.
• She describes herself as a "post-modern, quantitative, free-market, feminist, Episcopalian, Midwestern, gender-crossing, literary woman" — which is why, she says, she hasn't got any friends!
• She has held a Guggenheim and National Humanities Fellowship, and National Science Foundation grants, and has been a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer.

Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago;
and Professor of Economic History, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Prudentia      Luis Abrigo, Editor

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