ABSTRACT
Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written 16 books, edited 7 more, and published some 400 articles large and small (her Joyce Carol Oatsean level of productivity makes it hard to be sure of the current number). McCloskey has received six honorary doctorates and is well known for arguing that the field of economics should be focused more on historical, naturalistic, and narrative analyses than on mathematical proofs. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when she was Donald McCloskey, she wrote If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994), and The Rhetoric of Economics (1998). The books reveal the unacknowledged rhetorical side of economics. Superbly written (“slashing and witty” according to The New York Review of Books), the books are full of humor, stories, and wisdom. In 1999 she published Crossing: A Memoir, an account of her transition, at the age of 53, from male to female. With typical precision and self-deprecating humor, she has described herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man.” Her latest books include How to be Human Though an Economist (2000), The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (2006), and, in 2010, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. She has two additional volumes drafted in the Bourgeois series; these will further her argument that economic progress and modernity during the industrial revolution were less a product of new markets, trade, and innovation, but more a function of rhetoric: words and persuasive devices used to communicate about and ultimately approbate markets, free enterprise, and the bourgeoisie itself. 1
