Listen Even to the Other Side

Prospect Magazine, 13 August 2020.

McCloskey, a signer of the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that appeared recently in Harper’s Magazine, addresses some “silly things” said by fellow signer J. K. Rowling.

“Take Rowling’s opinions on the trans issue. I do not want to ban her from conferences or stop people from reading her childish books. I just want her, and the numerous people who wax wroth when anyone says that gender is a social construction, to listen to the other side. I want to correct what I believe are her mistakes, as she can then correct mine. Nice. As an economist, I approve of mutually advantageous exchange.”

Capitalism and Covid

Institute of Art and Ideas, June 2020.

McCloskey, Grace Blakeley, Paul Krugman, and Matthew Taylor discuss the pandemic and debate governments’ responses to it.

The Little Midwestern City

Draft for Lauck, ed., The History of the Midwest, forthcoming.

“The little Midwestern city has for a century or so been an object of contempt by most of the tribe of scribblers and lecturers and preachers,” the “clerisy,” says McCloskey, in a draft book chapter. “The contempt is especially strong if the cleric is an American coastie, or a coastie-educated academic.”

“She might have a better opinion of the little cities of the Midwest if she had actually spent time in Dell Rapids, South Dakota or Columbus, Indiana or Iowa City, Iowa. … But mostly she won’t, because she has read American fiction since 1922 and Babbitt. And she won’t because she has taken so much from European ideologies of left or right, flourishing after the disappointments of the revolutionary year of 1848. The ideologies recommended hatred of the bourgeoisie and disdain for the bourgeoisie’s ideology of liberalism. ”

Back to Import Substitution?

Fronteiras do Pensamento, May 2020.

McCloskey considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Brazil and its politics in an interview by Francisco de Azeredo.

“There is a lot of silly talk about ‘shortening supply chains,’ in other words going back to the policy of ‘import substitution’ of Raúl Prebisch, Hans Singer, and Celso Furtado, which ruined Latin American economies for decades. ... You can depend on it that businesspeople will think up methods of insurance against future plagues better than government-imposed restrictions on whom you can buy from.”

Capitalism Is Good for Women

Oxford Union debate, 20 February 2020.

McCloskey spoke on the negative side of an Oxford Union debate in which the house held “That Feminism Cannot Be Capitalist.” Her brief notes for the debate are available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org.

On American Agricultural Development

Letter to Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, April 2020.

McCloskey praises the work of Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode on American agricultural development:

“I think you need to somehow get your news out to students of technology more broadly. Like Joel Mokyr and me, you are saying that innovation depends on politics and ideology and, to use a too-vague word, ‘culture’ more than on endowments or faux ‘logics’ of factor prices. As Tocqueville said, ‘Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman…inspired by the sense that he can do anything…I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, or given him coal or iron.’”

Why Liberalism Works, Korean ed., 2020.

Free adults, and not merely educated ones, make a country rich, as McCloskey writes in her preface to the Korean edition of Why Liberalism Works.

“South Korea’s devotion to education, to be sure, doesn’t hurt. But education without freedom would merely make better slaves, not better entrepreneurs. Most venturing in the economy doesn’t require a PhD in engineering. In the Soviet Union, education was excellent, as many North Korean students learned, but served only a nightmare of gulags and five-year plans.”

Why Does Liberalism Work?

The Economist, 8 January 2020.

McCloskey tells The Economist in only 150 words, though there's also more in a new interview.

“A liberal ‘rhetoric’ explains the good features of the modern world compared with earlier and later illiberal regimes—the economic success of the modern world, its arts and sciences, its kindness, its toleration, its inclusiveness, and especially its massive liberation of more and more people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern. Its enemies claim that it also explains alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money or the loss of community or the calamity of immigration by non-Christians. But they are mistaken.”

Liberalism and Democracy

Free Thoughts Podcast, 8 November 2019.

McCloskey talks about Why Liberalism Works with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus.

“Liberalism is the theory that there should be no masters. No husbands over wives, no masters over slaves, no politicians over citizens. It’s egalitarian. Adam Smith speaks of the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice, by which he meant social equality, economic liberty and legal justice. And the key feature of democracy is that everyone can vote. ... This is the real joined-at-the-hip connection between liberalism in the one end and democracy in the other: that the equal right to vote is a message of dignity, a message of equality.”

Consistent with True Religion

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, 24 October 2019.

McCloskey replies, with a brief letter, to recent use of her gender change as a way to attack her liberalism.

“God, as this no doubt terribly confused Episcopalian (‘catholic lite’) believes, wants humans to be free. Sin, virtue, and salvation make no sense if we are God’s pets in Eden, unable to choose. True liberalism, like science, is perfectly consistent with true religion. So is changing gender.”

Out of Touch

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, 19 October 2019.

McCloskey criticizes attempts to “imitate in economics what is called in medicine the ‘gold standard’ of randomized trials,” such as those cited by the committee that awarded the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer.

“The economists, like the medical researchers, seem to have lost touch with their proper role. They are not ethically assigned to master our lives. The mastering assignment is what they assume when they focus on ‘policy,’ understood as tricking or bribing or coercing people to do what’s best. It sounds fine, until you realize that it is what your mother did to you when you were 2 years old, and had properly stopped doing to you by the time you were 21. The field experimenters scorn adult liberty. ”

Why Liberalism Works

Yale University Press (2019)

McCloskey’s new collection Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All will be published October 15 by Yale University Press. The table of contents and the preface are available now.

“From the Philippines to the Russian Federation, from Hungary to the United States, liberalism has been assaulted recently by brutal, scare-mongering populists. A worry. Yet for a century and a half the relevance of liberalism to the good society has been denied in a longer, steadier challenge, by gentle or not-so-gentle progressives and conservatives. Time to speak up.”

Socialism for the Young at Heart

National Review, May 2019.

“When an adolescent in a free society discovers that there are poor people, her generous impulse is to bring everyone into a family of 330 million members,” writes McCloskey in a National Review symposium.

“People come in adolescence to hate the bourgeoisie or to detest free markets or to believe passionately in the welfare and regulatory state. It becomes part of a cherished identity, a faith hard to change. ... [But] the romantic ideals of socialism, so appealing to youth, are crazy-inconsistent, as [Leszek] Kolakowski showed in his history of European socialism. They promise a freedom from work that nonetheless makes us rich, a central plan without tyranny, and individual liberties strictly subordinated to a general will.”

Lessons from the War on Poverty

The Politic (Yale Univ.), 10 February 2019.

“What lessons can we take away from the War on Poverty?” McCloskey answers this and many more questions in an interview with a Yale University student publication.

“The War on Poverty was fine, and anyway politically necessary. ... But even since the 1960s the main improvement of the poor has come through innovation, itself mostly private and profitable. Better medicine. Better cars. Better housing. And the notion that massive government is justified by its support of the poor runs up against the so-called ‘median voter theorem.’ The 51st percentile decides elections. Such a voter is from the middle class. She votes herself farm subsidies, tax relief, and jobs bossing the poor.”

Happiness and Competitiveness

La República, 31 January 2019.

In an interview for Colombian publication La República (available here in English), McCloskey is asked to explain why that country is ranked highly in ‘happiness’ but low in ‘competitiveness.’

“Man does live by bread, or even excellent coffee, alone! I think the ‘happiness’ measures are idiotic, and say more about the social conventions in a particular country about complaining than anything else. ‘Competitiveness’ is not a word that a serious economist ever uses... It’s business-school talk, and is meaningless. Any country has a comparative advantage, regardless of income, and the patterns of trade are determined by it, not by what economists call ‘absolute’ advantage (that is, how productive you are). If absolute advantage, ‘competitiveness,’ causes trade, everyone not as productive as, say, the U.S. or Japan should sit down and do nothing at all, yes? If James Rodríguez is the best player on the football pitch, have the rest of the team sit down and do nothing, right? Not right.”

Speech Runs the Economy

Journal of Law & Liberty, forthcoming 2019.

Persuasive work now accounts for 30 percent of the economy. What does that mean? McCloskey explains, and contrasts the past of such work with its present and future, in a recent lecture.

“On balance the sweet-talking share of labor income was probably smaller before the Great Enrichment raised real income 1800 to the present by its astounding 3,000 percent. A manager did not have to be a...teacher. He or she could simply be a tyrant. Commanding Lieutenant (not yet Captain) William Bligh of the Bounty is supposed to have been a case in point, “that Bounty bastard,” as the sailors later called him in extenuation of their mutiny. The captain even of a merchantman, still more of one of His Majesty’s warships, expected instant obedience, necessary when rounding the Horn in a force-9 gale. The monastic Rule of Benedict required immediate, pride-fighting obedience. Occupations that depended on sweet talk were fewer in olden days. In future days they will be more and more numerous.”

An Exhilarating Story

Claremont Review, forthcoming 2019.

“It’s good to have a cheerful economic history of the United States,” writes McCloskey of Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s Capitalism in America: A History, even if the book’s cheer “occasionally grates.”

“Some of the most original portions of the book are those on monetary affairs... They give a capsule version of their theory of the business cycle: ‘People will always accumulate too much risk. Innovators will always dance with danger.’ Spot on. The business cycle, as against an earlier war-and-famine non-cycle, starts in the very late 18th century. Why is that? Answer: because an enriching people with diverse portfolios will want to accumulate more risk; and because innovators will dance with the risk if liberalism allows them to have a go, as increasingly after 1800 it massively did. Since then we have seen over forty ups and downs of irrational exuberance (as one might put it) followed by excessive pessimism, albeit with the subsequent up always higher than the last one. Up, up, up is not merely irrational cheer on the part of Greenspan and Wooldridge.”

Courage to Live

BBC Mundo, January 2019.

Irene Hernandez Velasco asks McCloskey, in a new interview: “Did you need an enormous amount of courage to decide, in 1995 when you were 53 years old, to become a woman? Which advice would you give to a person that faces the same situation?”

“You and I and everyone else needs courage to live. The mother who gets up every morning to help her severely handicapped son has more courage than most soldiers. The man who works three jobs to give his children a better life is a saint of courage. People think that gender change requires massive courage because they wouldn’t want to do it—like jumping out a plane without a parachute! My advice is to take advantage of a free society in which you can make such a choice—I do not recommend the parachute one—and then get on with your life.”

How Growth Happens

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, November 2018.

McCloskey has drafted a paper “summarizing the core economics and economic history from The Bourgeois Era trilogy, with some further thoughts,” for an audience of economists.

“What matters is human creativity liberated by liberalism. Innovism, not tricky proposals for utilitarian nudging, should be the focus of economics. Economics should become ‘humanomics,’ that is, economics with the philosophy, history, literature left in. No one would deny that having a free artistic or scientific community is good for us. Yet then they will deny the same in the economy. They think, as we Ivy League economists did in the 1960s, that ‘fine tuning’ is all the economy needs, and that expert economists from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton can provide it. The danger is a contempt for the difficulty of creativity in business, or for that matter in individual life.”

Libertarian Atheists

Reason, October 2018.

Why are libertarians commonly atheists? McCloskey avers that “the independent-minded child that denies at age 19 both left or right is also likely to have already denied the silly stuff his parents say about God to him at age 14.”

“That’s my preachment to my atheist-libertarian friends. ‘Dears,’ I say pleadingly, ‘do you really want to rest at arguments, commitments, ways of life that seemed sooooo cool to a 10- or 14- year old boy?’ (The girls, I find, are less dogmatic.) ‘Have you read a serious book about religion at age 30 or 50?’ They reply, ‘No, why would I do that? I already know it’s rubbish. I decided it was at 19 or 14 or 10.’”

The Father of Economics

Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2018.

For the Wall Street Journal, McCloskey reviews Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: The Father of Economics (available here, .pdf).

“Mr. Norman’s canny judgments about the political history of the realm nowadays and in the 18th century might be expected in a politician and a man of varied practical experience. But he combines canniness with strict historical accuracy, philosophical depth and, episodically, economic sense.”

Empty Economic Boxes Revisited

History of Economic Ideas, 2018.

“The trouble we economists have had...after 1848 is that seldom has an alleged imperfection in market-tested betterment been subject to a measurement showing that the imperfection is important enough to abandon the approximations of supply and demand,” writes McCloskey in a new paper, “The Two Movements in Economic Thought, 1700–2000: Empty Economic Boxes Revisited.”

“The imperfections might, that is, to use an image of the economic historian and student of Marshall, John H. Clapham, in 1922, turn out to be ‘empty economic boxes.’ We don’t know because we have not measured. Most scientific justification depends on measurement. ... From the point of view of the sciences depending on measurement, such as geology or history, the course of economic science since 1848 looks strange indeed.”

Why We Need to Admire Entrepreneurs

Peace Love Liberty, Autumn 2018.

“Only if people approve of other people making profit from commercially tested betterment can we have free and rich societies,” says McCloskey in an interview with a Viennese magazine, where the interview is translated into German (on page 6).

“If people are angry and envious about entrepreneurs, we get socialism in one form or another. … In socialism we have fixers, judges, lobbyists, politicians, rent seekers. In a free society we have producers. The one is about zero sum, the other about positive.”

A July Fourth Manifesto

Humane True Liberalism, forthcoming 2019.

For your Independence Day reading needs, McCloskey offers a “Manifesto for a Humane True Libertarianism.”

“The pioneering management theorist of the 1920s, Mary Parker Follett, defined democracy not merely as majority voting—and then after the voting a bit of pushing the losers around—but as the true-liberal program of discovering, in her coinage, ‘win-win.’ Mill and Tocqueville would have agreed. It’s the best version of being a liberal, inclusive, democratic, and pluralistic human, such as has been the best theoretical ideal of an American since 1776.”

Is Facebook a Problem?

Institute of Art and Ideas, 11 April 2018.

“No, not especially,” writes McCloskey. “What should we do about it? Nothing.”

“It is indeed a problem when a company, or the state, fools people by telling them they are being taken care of when they are not. Free exchange among informed adults benefits both sides, and practically everyone else. But if the exchange is fraudulent, it does not. ‘Not to worry,’ says Facebook, ‘We have your privacy for social chitchat in mind, and would never abuse it.’ ‘Not to worry,’ says the state, ‘We have your entire privacy, income, safety, right to vote, education, health, legal justice, protection from knife attacks, and freedom in mind, and would never abuse them.’ In Facebook’s case, if the fooling becomes egregious, and is publicized through a free press, or private suits before a court, and if Facebook is not protected by the state in a cozy monopoly, the buyer of chitchat goes to a competitor, or ceases chitchatting.”

A History of Ordo-Liberalism

Literary Review, March 2018.

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is fascinating and scholarly, writes McCloskey in a review.

“Slobodian traces ordo-liberalism, the core of international neo-liberalism, back to the shock that World War I delivered to liberal capitalism. Continental liberalism, at first in a much-reduced Austria and then especially in Geneva and beyond, Slobodian shows, began to argue for institutions ‘protecting capitalism on a global scale.’ ... Globalism, led by what Slobodian calls the Geneva School, mainly German speaking, sought to tame national populism in all its forms, from Lenin to Perón to Chávez to Trump.”

P. T. Bauer’s Cultural Pessimism

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, March 2018.

The development economist P. T. Bauer courageously advocated for economic liberalism when it was out of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Bauer was similar to other economists of his day, writes McCloskey in a conference paper, in that he—sometimes—was unduly pessimistic about the prospects for economic growth in places where culture was perceived to be a barrier.

“No one would deny that deep ignorance as much as charming customs can obstruct the choices that Bauer put in the midst of his account of growth. But ignorance and custom are not always permanent. They can change, sometimes with startling speed, in which case the conditions that Bauer thought so sluggish can become suddenly favorable. And choice—the profit motive that even a mere consumer exercises when she is free—can overwhelm the ignorance and custom.”

Networks and Meaning

Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2018.

Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook is “brilliant,” says McCloskey in a review (also available here), though it sometimes neglects matters of meaning and ethics.

“Networks are easily diagramed, and armies of sociologists do diagram them. But after diagraming the networks, horizontal or vertical, what have we learned? Mr. Ferguson notes that the official hierarchy in Japan has put the Emperor of the Chrysanthemum Throne at the top for more than 1,000 years. But the continuity in the vertical network diagram has by no means meant that the emperor has always been the boss. ... A ‘connectography’ sounds delightful and profound but does not tell how markets and especially human innovation work, which is with meaning.”

Against ‘Capitalism’

Reason, January 2018.

“The word is a Marxist coinage,” writes McCloskey, and it represents “a scientific mistake.”

“Romans and Chinese and human beings back to the caves have always accumulated capital, abstaining from consumption to get it. What made us rich were new ideas for investing it, not the investments themselves, necessary though they were. ... Liberating ordinary people inspired them to extraordinary ideas, which in turn redirected the capital, the labor, the liquid water, and all the other necessaries.”

A Crisis of Democracy

ASSA Meeting, 6 January 2018.

"The high rate of youth unemployment in many places nowadays, and its increase since earlier times, signals bad economic air," says McCloskey in a new conference paper (available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org).

“In France the extravagant job protections for people who already have jobs means that oldsters cling desperately to the wrong job and youngsters haven’t got a shot at permanent employment. On the West Side of Chicago the war on drugs combined with the minimum wage combined with protective regulations of businesses combined with licensing requirements for 1,000 occupations nationwide combined with zoning preventing opening of businesses large and small combined with building codes in favor of union plumbers and electricians make for no jobs for young people, and frozen jobs for old people.”

Letter to a Young Scholar

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, December 2017.

McCloskey requests that a would-be critic of her Bourgeois Era trilogy engage competently with it.

“The main point of all three books is that the surrounding social approval for bourgeois activity is what mainly mattered. ... We need to understand, really understand, what our colleagues are claiming if we are going to ‘test’ them. I welcome tests. If I am wrong, I will be sad but nonetheless glad that at least we know one thing better than we once did. That way lies scientific progress. But slap-dash ‘tests’ that miss the point do not advance science. They make it go in circles.”

A Changing Atmosphere

The Tiger (Clemson U.), 23 October 2017.

McCloskey finds “astonishing” the changes over the last few years in Americans’ attitudes toward the LGBT community, she tells the Clemson University Tiger:

“Societies are complicated, and always changing. In most places, middle-school kids still are homo- and transphobes, in their confused way, calling people ‘gay’ for example without knowing what the word means to adults. But nowadays even many high schools have LGBTQ clubs, and the football team doesn’t seem to object. At universities, of course, it’s not an issue at all, even in the South. The ‘religious’ objection to toleration, by the way, does not as it claims rely on Biblical texts. The texts are few and ambiguous. Anyway a few verses earlier a text would condemn most U.S. teenagers to stoning, because they talk back to their elders. And the message of our Lord and Savior is love, not hate.”

Sweet Talk and Social Media

AEIdeas, 13 October 2017.

In "A Conversation with Deirdre McCloskey," James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute asks about the struggle to communicate important ideas:

Pethokoukis: “It’s been documented that people aren’t really open to being challenged. They go on Facebook to just reaffirm whatever that existing bias is, and when it is challenged they feel very upset by that because they’re just not used to that kind of engagement. Is that a concern? That people will just never be exposed to your sweet talk?”

McCloskey: “It’s a concern, but it’s always been a concern. In a traditional society in the 17th century, people were enclosed in the same way. They were all Congregationalists, or Church of England, or all Catholics, and they wouldn’t speak to other people, and got very angry when those people acted in ways they didn’t like. So there isn’t anything new about how hard it is to change ideas.”

Rich and Free

Bourgeois Dignity (Polish ed.), 2018.

Capital was not the cause of the Great Enrichment, McCloskey notes in her preface to the forthcoming Polish-language edition of Bourgeois Dignity.

“Pouring capital into an economy without ideas results in masses of stupid dams and pointless factories. Look at Ghana. Look at pre-1989 Poland. Pouring ideas, if they pass the test of profit in voluntary exchange, finds the capital readily enough, and then enriches us all. Look at China and India, Spain and Poland.”

The Other Threat to Liberty

Right-Wing Collectivism by Jeffrey Tucker, 2017.

McCloskey has written a preface for Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty, a forthcoming book by Jeffrey Tucker (draft available on DeirdreMcCloskey.org).

“In elegant prose and deep history Tucker tells the story of how the twin anti-liberal, fathered c. 1820 by Gottfried Hegel, parted company. Prussia and Russia, you might say. Anything but England. The twin on the right, from Carlyle and recently Breitbart News, elevated the state with nationalism. The twin on the left, from Marx and recently MSNBC, elevated the state with socialism. Either way, the state, with its monopoly of violence, was elevated. English liberalism—which meanwhile gave us our liberties and then our riches—elevated instead the individual people and their voluntary agreements.”

Bookkeeping Was Not Crucial

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, September 2017.

McCloskey writes to Gregory Waymire, arguing that bookkeeping practices were not of great importance in European enrichment.

“I realize you think that it suffices to establish the mere existence of an innovation that seems necessary, looked at from present routines. But the method is mistaken. For one thing, as a matter of logic a necessary X does not imply a sufficient X. For another thing, you have not shown that your favored X is quantitatively important. And for still another thing, the economic history does not support any of the usual X's as necessary. As Alexander Gerschenkron long ago reminded us, economics, and therefore economic history, is about substitutes, not necessities, flexibilities, not fixed coefficients. Joint sufficiency is what we seek.”

Private Monopoly Is Not the Problem

Institute of Art and Ideas News, August 2017.

McCloskey has written a contribution to a forum on regulation of large companies or monopolies, for the Institute of Art and Ideas (draft available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org).

“We need to think of monopolies not in terms of the present share of a company in some defined market but in terms of the potential for entry by competitors, in the defined market or in entirely different markets. The monopoly of first-class mail was competed into the dust by the entry of an entirely different industry, email.”

The Myth of Technological Unemployment

Reason, August/September 2017.

"Otherwise sensible folk are, for some reason, terrified by robots." McCloskey reminds the readers of Reason magazine that advancing technology will not lead to mass unemployment.

"Consider the historical record: If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent. In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing."

Institute for New Economic Thinking, 28 June 2017.

McCloskey "discusses her career, critiques of economics, and offers advice for young economists" for the Institute of New Economic Thinking's "Rebels and Masters" interview series. INET has a 16-page complete transcript of the interview and a playlist of 18 video clips.

“People come to their scientific convictions in all kinds of ways, arguments from authority. ‘Milton Friedman told me so, therefore I believe it,’ say. Or arguments from analogy, which is a very powerful scientific tool. From metaphors. Stories. The story of economic development as a tale in which the expert economist comes from the World Bank and helps the poor people become rich. And tales our mothers told us. Diagrams. Films. Fiction. Most people think they understand what was happening in the early Industrial Revolution to poor people. How do they know this? Because they’ve read Hard Times by Charles Dickens so they think this guy who knew nothing about industrialization is a good guide to economic history. It’s not that these are just fallacies. It’s how humans honestly and seriously persuade. ... So in order to understand science, and this is a point that sociologists of science understand very well, you’ve got to get beyond the official cover story.”

How (Not) to Get Somewhere

Economic Affairs, May 2017.

McCloskey replies to Eric Jones's review for Economic Affairs of the Bourgeois Era trilogy.

“‘She comes out against a preference for parsimony or Occam's Razor.’ No, not really. The parsimony of the stunning size of the Great Enrichment is indeed a knock-down argument against all manner of Samuelsonian or Marxist or neo-institutionalist accounts, an argument which I employ with gusto. It is the main point of Bourgeois Dignity, and is to be sure a parsimonious, quantitative, positivist point. But I do not ignore qualitative evidence, either. To that extent, I avoid the fatal cut that so many male economists have given themselves while shaving with Occam's dangerously straight razor.”

Neo-Institutionalism Is Not Yet a Scientific Success

27 February 2017.

McCloskey has drafted a reply, available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org, to Barry Weingast's Scandinavian Economic History Review article on the causes of the Great Enrichment.

Nationalism and Socialism Are Very Bad Ideas

Reason, February 2017.

But liberalism is a good idea, writes McCloskey in an essay for Reason.

“What to do? Revive liberalism, as the astonishing successes of China and India have. Take back the word from our friends on the American left. They can keep progressive, if they don't mind being associated with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, and its eugenic enthusiasms for forced sterilization and for using the minimum wage to drive immigrants, blacks, and women out of the labor force. And we should persuade our friends on the right to stop using the l word to attack people who do not belong to the country club.”

Growth, Not Forced Equality, Saves the Poor

New York Times, 26 December 2016.

In a New York Times op-ed ("the most important article of 2016"?), McCloskey urges a focus on economic growth rather than on forced redistribution, writing that "equality beyond the basics in consumption and in political rights isn’t possible in a specialized and dynamic economy."

Faith & Economics, 2017 (forthcoming).

McCloskey replies to criticisms of Bourgeois Equality made by Robert Whaples, Peter J. Hill, Nancy Ruth Fox, Paul Oslington, and Peter Boettke and Rosolino Candela, in a symposium to appear in the journal Faith & Economics (draft available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org).

“I am a sisterly Christian real liberal. But we need in Christian economic ethics to get beyond a naive optimism about governmental intervention, a misunderstanding of the cooperative character of a market society, a weighting of one human soul against another in money, a quantitative misunderstanding of the size of charity, an ignoring of the raising up of the wretched of the earth by economic growth, and much of the rest of [Catholic Social Thought].”

The attractions of socialism

Interview by G. Canlorbe (forthcoming).

In an interview by Grégoire Canlorbe (possibly to appear in a future issue of Man and the Economy), McCloskey muses on the appeal of socialist ideas.

“I myself was a long time ago a mild-mannered Marxist. I think the attractions of socialism arise from our experience as children in a loving family, in which income falls mysteriously from Dad, and Mom is the central planner. Unless we are raised on a farm or in a small business, we get no early instruction in the charms, and terrors, of voluntary exchange. We think commands rule the economy, the way commands do rule the family or firm inside—though the child does not realize that prices in markets outside rule all. It is shocking to a child of the bourgeoisie such as Marx and Engels and Lenin, to find that he or she cannot command the rich to relieve poverty. It does not occur to the child that voluntary exchange, and having a go under a liberal ethic, are what has in fact relieved poverty. The relief has not come out of redistribution by state violence from the rich to the poor.”

On A Culture of Growth

Prospect Magazine, October 2016.

McCloskey praises Joel Mokyr's new, "brilliant book" on the intellectual history of the modern economy.

"Mokyr takes seriously the job of making an argument. For example, his glittering chapters late in the book on Chinese history make the point that we need to understand China, which in 1500 led the world, in order to understand the peculiarity of northwestern Europe, 1500 to 1800, which came to lead it. The book is not beach reading. But you will finish it impressively learned about how we got to where we are in the modern world."

McCloskey to visit Chile

Santiago, La Tercera, Pulso, and El Libero, September 2016.

In advance of Deirdre McCloskey's October visit to Chile, she has given several press interviews, including ones to the publications Santiago, La Tercera, Pulso, and El Libero. Here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org is the English text of the interviews conducted by Patricio Tapia for Santiago, Mauricio Rodriguez for La Tercera, and Francisca Guerrero for Pulso.

"We have to make the choice to resist."

Magyar Narancs, September 2016.

In an interview with the Budapest weekly Magyar Narancs (available in English here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org), McCloskey remarks on religion and liberalism, among other topics.

"Religion and liberalism can be perfectly consistent, just as religion and science can. God wants us to have free will, and so she puts us in a world in which real choices between good and evil exist, in which F = ma and earthquakes happen and, in particular, tyrants prosper. We are not God's pets in a choiceless Eden. If we do not want to be the tyrant's pets, a world in which Jobbik and Fidesz run our lives, we have to make the choice to resist."

Not Saving or Psychology, or Science, but a New Liberalism

Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Autumn 2016.

McCloskey replies to five reviews of her Bourgeois Equality, by Gerald Gaus, Jack Goldstone, Jennifer Baker, Sonja Amadae, and Joel Mokyr, in a symposium for the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

If We Keep Our Ethical Wits...

Independent Review, Winter 2016.

We can see over into a Great Enrichment, says McCloskey in a new paper coauthored with Art Carden for the Independent Review.

"Rest easy if the person on the plane next to you is reading on her Kindle The Art of War—or even The Art of the Deal—in order to become a better manager in a company that specializes in pine straw installation. Lose sleep only if she is reading even these books in order to better lead a revolution against the commercial social order or to make actual, non-metaphorical war, in a program of populism of the left or right."

Istituto Bruno Leoni, 7 July 2016.

McCloskey ponders the consequences of the Brexit for liberalism, nationalism, and socialism, in an essay for the blog of the Istituto Bruno Leoni (also available in italiano).

Guaranteed income? Yes.

Orlando Sentinel, 28 June 2016.

McCloskey advances the case for a minimum income policy in a column for the Orlando Sentinel.

"When President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty, The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a bank truck drawn up to the curb with the guards handing out money from bags. One of the bystanders said to another, 'Well, finally the War on Poverty has gotten under way!' That's right. The poor may have social and psychological and even ethical problems about work and consumption, which we should help them solve, if they want to. On the other hand, so do the rich—he who is without sin, cast the first stone."

"Designed to screw low-wage workers"

Reason, July 2016.

McCloskey discusses Thomas Leonard's research into the history of minimum-wage laws, in a book review for Reason magazine.

"Leonard shows in detail that the minimum wage arose in the early 20th century as a Progressive policy designed to screw low-wage workers. Designed. And unlike many other laws 'designed' to achieve a result (for example, protective tariffs designed to enrich America), the minimum wage achieved what it was after."

Business Is As Ethical As It Has Ever Been

Financial Times, 16 June 2016.

McCloskey assesses the state of business ethics in Britain and beyond, for the Financial Times.

"Businesspeople are no worse, and may be better, than in the 1950s. The present danger is from hostile opinion about businesspeople. ... It has fed, for example, a hostility to corporate 'monopolies' selling trainers and beer—which for some reason frighten people more than actual monopolies exercised by MI6 or the Inland Revenue."

Ideas Transformed the World

Essays adapted from Bourgeois Equality, May 2016.

The Wall Street Journal and Reason magazine are this month featuring essays adapted by McCloskey from her new book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

"Free Thoughts" on the Bourgeois Era

Libertarianism.org, 27 May 2016.

Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus, hosts of the Libertarianism.org podcast series Free Thoughts, speak with McCloskey on the Bourgeois Era trilogy.

Why I Changed My Mind

BBC Radio 4, 11 May 2016.

Dominic Lawson, for the BBC, asks McCloskey why her views on economics and politics, her faith, and her gender have changed over the course of her life.

The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics

Oxford University Press (2016)

The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics, co-edited by George DeMartino and Deirdre McCloskey, is now available. It explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice. The Handbook brings together new contributions of leading economists, professional ethicists, and others, all of whom probe here what it means to be an ethical economist, and what is required of economics to be a responsible profession. The Handbook widens substantially the terrain of economic ethics by examining the ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice.

"Nothing Interrelates Them."

In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 1 May 2016.

In a new interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks McCloskey about her self-description as "a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man."

"What interrelates these philosophies and positions?"

"Nothing interrelates them. That is the serious joke in my self-descriptions. Anyone who tries to keep philosophical consistency through her life is going be dominated necessarily by her immature plan for philosophy—whatever it was at age 14. It's like the many intelligent people who decide in their wisdom at age 14 to be courageous, independent-thinking atheists (following slavishly in this most of the intelligent children in their cohort), and then never pause at age 30 or 60 to reexamine the 14-year old's life plan. It’s childish—though unhappily it characterizes many otherwise intelligent people."

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, 28 April 2016.

McCloskey has prepared this talk (.pdf) to deliver during the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in Wales.

"The English Leveller Richard Rumbold, facing the hangman in 1685, declared, 'I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.' Few in the crowd gathered to mock him would have agreed. A century later, many advanced thinkers like Tom Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft, did. By 1985 virtually everyone did. And so the Great Enrichment came."

American Philosophical Association meeting, 30 March 2016.

McCloskey interacts with the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, James Buchanan, and Martha Nussbaum (and more, of course) in a new paper (.pdf) for the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division annual meeting in San Francisco on March 30.

"We need direct ethical change, and that is to be achieved not by a Fifth Great Awakening but by the recovery of explicit and full ethical talk. Only that will protect the constitution, or result in wide capabilities, or give birth to a society of love."

The Economic Sky Will Not Fall

Prospect Magazine (London), March 2016.

McCloskey challenges "a gaggle of Tory/Liberal economists" over the prospects for future economic growth.

"In short, no limit to fast world or U.S. or European growth of per-person income is close at hand, no threat to ‘jobs,’ no cause for pessimism—not in your lifetime, or even that of your great-grandchildren."

Irish Poets, Learn Your Trade

Money in Law and Literature Conference, February 2016.

For a conference at the University of Chicago this month, McCloskey looks for law and economics in poetry.

"And indeed why would one expect to 'find economics, or law, in a literature'? What would be the point? It is: to lean against the premise in Irish poetry, or English and American poetry, or indeed in Mesopotamian poetry, Chinese poetry, Italian poetry, and it seems in every poetic tradition—I solicit exceptions to the rule—that law and the economy are not proper poetic subjects."

Bourgeois Equality, coming soon

University of Chicago Press, 2016.

The third and final book of McCloskey's Bourgeois Era trilogy will be published in April by University of Chicago Press.

A free seven-page summary of the trilogy, written by McCloskey, is available here on DeirdreMcCloskey.org—and in italiano from Istituto Bruno Leoni, and in het Nederlands from De Groene Amsterdammer.

The Great Enrichment

National Review, 19 November 2015.

"Time to rethink our materialist explanations of economies and histories," says McCloskey in an essay for National Review.

"...what mattered were two levels of ideas: the ideas for the betterments themselves (the electric motor, the airplane, the stock market), dreamed up in the heads of the new entrepreneurs drawn from the ranks of ordinary people; and the ideas in the society at large about such people and their betterments—in a word, liberalism, in all but the modern American sense. The market-tested betterment, the Great Enrichment, was itself caused by a Scottish Enlightenment version of equality, a new equality of legal rights and social dignity that made every Tom, Dick, and Harriet a potential innovator."

Been There, Done That

Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 October 2015.

On gender change, writes McCloskey in the Chronicle of Higher Education (also here, .pdf), "colleges have calmed down":

"The calming has mainly come, as Lincoln said in 1858, through public opinion, not laws: 'he [or she, dear] who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.'"

Bourgeois Equality for Conservatives

American Spectator, 15 October 2015.

McCloskey discusses the importance of social dignity for ordinary people in a new essay for the American Spectator.

"To confine honor to an elite, whether social superiors or social engineers, is to suppose that we already know who are hoi aristoi, the best suited to rule, and that the best already know how exactly we mere occupants are to be flogged or planned or nudged into submission. For our own good. It is the traditionalist’s error, yet also the progressive’s error, to suppose there is nothing to be discovered. As Harry Truman said, an expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert."

Piketty and Europe

Wprost, August 2015.

Tomasz Wróblewski, of the Polish weekly Wprost, queries Deirdre McCloskey about inequality, Europe, and the work of Thomas Piketty (English translation, .pdf).

"People say that Sweden is 'socialist.' Poles know that this is silly, having experienced real socialism until 1989, and during communism going over to Sweden to make money in a capitalist way. 'Socialist' Sweden even nowadays is bourgeois and 'capitalist,' and not much less so than the United States. … To rise into the top rank of rich countries, Poland needs to change its ideology."

Forbes Opinion, 25 May 2015.

McCloskey talks to Jerry Bowyer about how her Bourgeois Era trilogy connects various fields of inquiry (listen to part one and part two).

"What I love about this project is in my old age, or as we say, now, my late-middle age, I found a project that I think uses my skills; whatever they are, it uses them. So I’m an economist, so I do quantitative work, and I get the numbers right. But I’m also an English professor, and so I use theater and plays, and poems, and so on to illustrate those points. So it’s not my life’s work; it’s my end-life’s work, which I find very pleasant, because so often people’s careers end with a whimper, and mine is ending with a bang, which I like a lot."

Des Moines Register, 5 May 2015.

Following Bruce Jenner's coming out, McCloskey offers a reminiscence and some reflections on calmness in the Des Moines Register, and she advises readers to watch Diane Sawyer's interview with Jenner.



"Capitalism has always been with us, since the caves."

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Spring 2015.

In an essay taken from the manuscript of her forthcoming Bourgeois Equality, McCloskey criticizes the common reliance by economic theorists on outdated narratives of the Industrial Revolution and the succeeding Great Enrichment.

"Acemoglu and Robinson and the rest are accepting a leftish story of economic history proposed in 1848 or 1882 by brilliant amateurs, before the professionalization of scientific history, then repeated by Fabians at the hopeful height of the socialist idea, and then elaborated by a generation of (admittedly first-rate, if mistaken) Marxian historians, before thoroughgoing socialism had been tried and had failed, and before much of the scientific work had been done about the actual history—before it was realized, for instance, that other industrial revolutions had occurred in, say, Islamic Spain or Song China…"

Explaining the Great Enrichment

Scandinavian Economic History Review, spring 2016.

McCloskey's session paper for the Allied Social Science Associations annual meeting seeks to provide "A Humanistic and Social Scientific Account" of "the largest social and economic change since the invention of agriculture."

"The reward from allowing ordinary people to have a go, the rise at first in northwestern Europe and then worldwide of economic liberty and social dignity, eroding ancient hierarchy and evading modern regulation, has been anything from 2,900 to 9,900 percent. Previous ‘efflorescences,’ as the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone calls them, such as the glory of Greece or the boom of Song China, and indeed the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century in Britain, resulted perhaps in doublings of real income per person—100 percent, as against fully 2,900 percent since 1800."

DeirdreMcCloskey.org, January 2016.

Helen McCloskey's poetry collection The Curve of Nature is now available for download here (.pdf).

The Humanities Are Scientific

Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming.

In a forthcoming paper for the Journal of Institutional Economics, Deirdre McCloskey replies to defenses of neo-institutionalism—​by Avner Greif and Joel Mokyr (also forthcoming), Richard Langlois, Robert Lawson, and Guido Tabellini—made in response to McCloskey's earlier critique.