Dr. Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Biography

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been since 2023 a Senior Fellow and holder of the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington DC. From 2015 she has been at the University of Illinois at Chicago an Emerita Distinguished Professor of Economics and of History, and Emerita Professor of English and of Communication, and Emerita Adjunct Professor of Classics and of Philosophy. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written twenty-five books and edited nine more, and has published some five hundred articles on economic history, economic theory, statistical theory, rhetoric, literary criticism, feminism, epistemology, ethics, academic policy, legal theory, and liberalism. She taught for twelve years in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, as a tenured Associate Professor from 1975, and during her he last year there also in History. She describes herself now as a “postmodern, free-market, literary and statistical progressive Episcopalian feminist woman and classical liberal Aristotelian from Boston, Chicago, Iowa, and Washington DC who was once a man.”

Before 2000 her best-known books were The Rhetoric of Economics (1985’ 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (1999). Her books since 2000 are How to be Human* *Though an Economist (2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (Stepha. Ziliak, ed.; 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Ziliak; 2008], and a third edition of her classic manual on style, Economical Writing, (2019). Her most important scientific work is the trilogy on the Bourgeois Era, published by the University of Chicago Press, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019), and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (2020), based on the trilogy. She extended it into a defense of liberalism, for instance a critique of industrial planning, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (with Alberto Mingardi, 2020).

Her scientific work has been largely on economic history, at first especially British and now international. She earlier wrote on British economic “failure” in the 19th century, British trade and growth, English open field agriculture and enclosure, and the international gold standard. The Bourgeois Era trilogy recounts Dutch and British economic and social history in aid of understanding the Great Enrichment since 1776, the world moving from $2 a day per human to $50. Liberty, she claims, not investment or exploitation, caused the it.

Her methodological books include The Rhetoric of Economics (1985; 1998), If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge 1994), and a recent pair on similar topics, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (2021) and Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics (2022).They discuss the maladies of positivism in the social sciences, 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, and especially recently a defense of a liberalism of “equality of permission.” The 2021 and 2022 books introduce a “humanomics,” which is to say an economics acknowledging the uniquely human capability of language.

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