| Deirdre McCloskey | |
| Birth Date: | 11 September 1942 |
| Birth Place: | Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. |
| Fields: | Economic history Cliometrics Economic methodology |
| Education: | Harvard University (AB, AM, PhD) |
| Thesis Title: | Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron and Steel, 1870–1913 |
| Thesis Url: | http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/003882993/catalog |
| Thesis Year: | 1970 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Alexander Gerschenkron |
| Notable Students: | Stephen T. Ziliak Claudia Goldin |
| Known For: | |
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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
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.[3] Her doctoral dissertation on the British iron and steel industry won the 1973 David A. Wells Prize.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7]
McCloskey has authored or co-authored 25 books and nearly 500 articles.[8] 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.
Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce,[9] 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.[10] 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.
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 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).[11]
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.[12] 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.[13]
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."[14]