Deirdre McCloskey

McCloskey speaking in 2015 in Washington, D.C.

McCloskey earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics at Harvard University. Her dissertation, supervised by Alexander Gerschenkron,[3] on British iron and steel won in 1973 the David A. Wells Prize.[4]

In 1968, McCloskey became an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where she stayed for 12 years, gaining tenure as an associate professor in economics in 1975, and an associate professorship in history in 1979. Her work at Chicago, under her birth name Donald McCloskey, 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.[5] In 1979, at the suggestion of Wayne Booth in English at Chicago, she turned to the study of rhetoric in economics. Later at the University of Iowa, McCloskey, the John Murray Professor of Economics and of History (1980–1999), 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.[6] McCloskey has authored 16 books and nearly 400 articles in her many fields.[7]

Her major contributions have been to the economic history of Britain (19th-century trade, modern history, 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, and the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics, her trilogy "The Bourgeois Era",[8] and the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

McCloskey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.[9]

Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce[10] was the first of a planned series of books about the world since the Industrial Revolution—the Bourgeois Era—and was published in 2006. McCloskey argued that the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertised faith in prudence only, believes in all seven virtues.

The 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.

The third, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, appeared in 2016.[8] McCloskey expanded her argument, coining the term "Great Enrichment" to describe the unprecedented gains in human welfare of the 19th and 20th centuries. She reiterated her argument that the enrichment came from innovation and not from accumulation as argued by many including Thomas Piketty.

She published Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (co-authored with Art Carden) in 2022. The book attributes modern economic growth to liberalism and the bourgeois attaining freedom. In doing so, the book challenges other common explanations for modern economic growth, such as institutions, state capacity, scientific innovation and trade.[11] In a review of the book, Joel Mokyr recognized that the ideology of liberalism was important in facilitating modern economic growth, but argued the book does not convincingly explain why liberalism won out in a marketplace of ideas.[11]

In 2019, she published Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.

McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard University, and Helen McCloskey (née Stueland), a poet. McCloskey was born Donald McCloskey and lived as a man until the age of 53. Married for thirty years, and the parent of two children, she made the decision to transition from male to female in 1995, writing about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press).[12] It is an account of her growing recognition of her female identity, and her transition—both surgical and social—into a woman (including her reluctant divorce from her wife). The book describes how in her teenage years, McCloskey would commit burglaries of neighbors' homes, dressing up in the crinoline dresses favored by young women of that era, in addition to "shoes, garter belts and all the equipment of a 1950s girl". The memoir then goes on to describe her new life, following sex-reassignment surgery, in her career as a female academic economist and scholar of femininity.

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBT community.[13]

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.[14] 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.[15]

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."[16]

In 2008, McCloskey was awarded an honorary doctorate by NUI Galway.

In July 2020, McCloskey appeared publicly as a signatory to A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, published in Harper's Magazine, which calls for an end to "online shaming" and "intolerance" in favor of open debate.

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.[17][18][19]

• 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

• McCloskey, Deirdre (1980). "Review of Stratton and Brown's agricultural records in Britain". Journal of Economic History. 40 (March 1980): 189. doi:10.1017/S0022050700104735. S2CID 154867548.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (May 1985). "The loss function has been mislaid: The rhetoric of significance tests". The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. 75 (2): 201–205. JSTOR 1805596.
• McCloskey, Deirdre N. (February 1988). "The rhetoric of law and economics". Michigan Law Review. 86 (4): 752–767. doi:10.2307/1289214. JSTOR 1289214.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (September 1995). "Modern epistemology against analytic philosophy: A reply to Mäki". Journal of Economic Literature. 33 (3): 1319–1323. JSTOR 2729124.
• McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (March 1996). "The standard error of regressions". Journal of Economic Literature. 34 (1): 97–114. JSTOR 2729411. Pdf.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (January 1998). "Simulating Barbara". Feminist Economics. 4 (3): 181–186. doi:10.1080/135457098338383.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (Winter 2003). "Other Things Equal: Milton". Eastern Economic Journal. 29 (1): 143–146. JSTOR 40326463.
• McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (2004). "Size matters: The standard error of regressions in the American Economic Review". Econ Journal Watch. 1 (2): 331–338. Pdf.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (July–August 2009). "Rhetoric matters: Ethical standards in a humanistic science of economics". Challenge. 52 (4): 25–31. doi:10.2753/0577-5132520403. JSTOR 40722588. S2CID 144681445.
• McCloskey, Deirdre N.; Roberts, Helen (July–September 2012). "What economics should we teach before college, if any?". The Journal of Economic Education. 43 (3): 293–299. doi:10.1080/00220485.2012.686396. JSTOR 23248956. S2CID 144429500.

• List of feminist economists

• Deirdre McCloskey personal home page
• "Leading Economist Stuns Field by Deciding to Become a Woman"
• In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
• Home page of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)
• Home page of the Feminist Economics journal
• IDEAS repository of papers
• Association for Integrity and Responsible Leadership in Economics and Associated Professions
• Roberts, Russ (March 31, 2008). "McCloskey on Capitalism and the Bourgeois Virtues". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper's Magazine