Deirdre Mc Closkey - Career

Career

McCloskey earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Economics at Harvard University. (Her study of British iron and steel won in 1973 the distinguished David A. Wells Prize for best dissertation.)

In 1968 — while still a graduate student — McCloskey was hired by Milton Friedman and Robert Fogel to join the faculty of Economics at the University of Chicago, where she stayed for 12 years with tenure, producing and teaching price theory and economic history before turning in 1979 to the study of rhetoric, feminism, and the history and philosophy of economics and other human sciences. 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 a field of study, "the rhetoric of the human sciences," and an institution and graduate program, the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. McCloskey has authored or edited more than 20 books and over 300 articles challenging standard assumptions in the field.

Her major contributions since the 1960s are in the economic history of Britain, the quantification of historical inquiry, 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. She has argued that economists often celebrate "statistically significant" results while ignoring the economic significance of results, an argument that McCloskey readily admits to being both old and well-known among sophisticates of science.

She discussed some of these issues in the inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture at George Mason University on April 7, 2006. She said there, capitalism "is an ethically drenched human activity" which requires attention to all of the classical seven virtues, while economists usually focus exclusively on prudence. Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce is the first of a projected six-volume magnum opus. The second book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World was published in 2010 and a draft of the third volume, Bourgeois Towns: How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1848, is available online in her website.