Deirdre McCloskey

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. 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.

McCloskey holds twelve honorary doctorates. 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
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. Her doctoral dissertation on the British iron and steel industry won the 1973 David A. Wells Prize.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

McCloskey has authored or co-authored 25 books and nearly 500 articles. 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, and the origins of modern economic growth.

The Bourgeois Era
Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, 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. 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
McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard University, and Helen McCloskey (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).

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBTQ community.

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. 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.

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."

Publications

 * 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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