Deirdre McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She will give a talk titled “The Great Enrichment:Came and Comes from Ethics and Rhetoric”.
A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a "conservative" economist, University-of-Chicago style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests that "I'm a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian libertarian." Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which argues that an ideological change rather than saving or exploitation is what made us rich, is the second in a series of four on The Bourgeois Era. The first was The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), asking if a participant in a capitalist economy can have an ethical life (briefly, yes). "We fans of innovation and markets have done enough preaching to the choir," she says. "We need to speak to our beloved critics on the left and right who do not think that the Age of Innovation was the best thing to happen since the invention of language." Long known in economics as a critic of its least sensible techniques, she wrote in 2008 with Stephen Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance, demolishing tests of "significance." It was in 2011 the basis of a Supreme Court decision. McCloskey lives in downtown Chicago in a big loft apartment converted from a factory with her Norwich terrier Will Shakespeare ("As soon as he really knows English maybe we can get some more plays. . . from the canine point of view!").
For more info, visit huminst.osu.edu.