Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey 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 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] 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 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, the quantification of historical inquiry, 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 of significance testing in economics, her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, and the origins of modern economic growth.
''Bourgeois'' trilogy
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 its offshoots.
The third, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World 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 in 2022.
Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All 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, 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 academics to do so, and wrote about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir. Crossing was a finalist for the 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature.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 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."
McCloskey ran as the Libertarian Party candidate in the 2022 Illinois Comptroller election against incumbent Democrat Susana Mendoza, coming in third with 1.9% of the vote.
Publications
Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron & Steel, 1870–1913 Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics The Applied Theory of Price The Rhetoric of Economics The Writing of Economics reprinted as Economical Writing Econometric History The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric A Bibliography of Historical Economics to 1980 If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of U.S. Economic History Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Cambridge University Press. The Vices of Economists, the Virtues of the Bourgeoisie Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey Crossing: A Memoir. New edition University of Chicago Press, 2000, The Secret Sins of Economics, University of Chicago Press. The Bourgeois Virtues : Ethics for an Age of Commerce, University of Chicago Press. The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, University of Michigan Press. The Economic Conversation Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, University of Chicago Press. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, University of Chicago Press. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics, Oxford University Press.. Why liberalism works: how true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, Yale University Press. Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science, University of Chicago Press. Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, University of Chicago Press.- ''Liberdade: 100 Conversations Starters on Liberalism, Latin America, and Brazil''