Books by Deirdre McCloskey

Full length book commentaries

On Bourgeois Dignity and Liberty (continued from above): The Industrial Revolution and its world-making aftermath has usually been explained in materialist terms. Investment, foreign trade, exploitation, coal, imperialism, division of labor, property rights, genetics have all been evoked. Bourgeois Dignity shows in detail that none of the material explanations work, alone or in combination. They cannot explain the factor of ten by which world income per head has risen since 1800, not to speak of the factor of 40 in the most economically successful countries. Nor can they explain the uniquely Dutch and British and eighteenth-century character of the onset of modern economic growth. What can explain it is rhetoric, a change in the way people in Northwestern Europe talked about markets and innovation. Marx called it "ideology." In the first of three volumes devoted to the Industrial Revolution within her larger project on "The Bourgeois Era," McCloskey here deconstructs the materialist hypotheses and offers an idealist hypothesis which better explains the event.

On The Cult of Statistical Significance (continued from above): Existence, arbitrary statistical significance, philosophical possibilities uncalibrated to the sizes of important effects in the world are useless for science. Yet in medical science, in population biology, in much of sociology, political sciences, psychology, and economics, in parts of literary study, there reigns the spirit of the Mathematics or Philosophy Departments (appropriate in their own fields of absolutes). The result has been a catastrophe for such sciences, or former sciences. The solution is simple: get back to seeking oomph. It would be wrong, of course, to abandon math or statistics. But they need every time to be put into a context of How Much, as they are in chemistry, in most biology, in history, and in engineering science.

On The Bourgeois Virtues (continued from above): The story of "The Bourgeois Era" (the six-book series under contract to the University of Chicago Press of which this is the first volume) is of the rise of a prudential rhetoric in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century, its triumph in the Scottish Enlightenment and American colonial thought in the 18th century, and its decline after 1848 from, as Shaw once called it, the Great Conversion. An ethics of the virtues, as old as Aristotle and as new as feminist ethics, provides a way out of the growing self-hatred of the bourgeoisie. "Bourgeois virtue" is not a contradiction in terms. Economists are recognizing that virtue underlies a market economy; economic historians have long understood so in the lives of Quakers and the vital few. What the social sciences have not recognized since the 18th century and its notion of doux commerce is that a market economiy can underlie the virtues. Not all virtues. Some virtues — in fact the ones we celebrate in philosophy and myth — are pagan or Christian, aristocratic and plebian. We need new philosophies and myths, new readings of the ancient virtues, to suit a world in which we are all now bourgeois.

On The Secret Sins of Economics (continued from above): It's not its abstraction or its mathematics or its statistics or its conservative slant that are the sins of economics. The two real and mortal sins are: (1) Use of mere existence theorems and (2) use of mere "statistical significance" (t tests at the 5% level, for example) to draw conclusions about the economics world. (1) is especially prevalent in the highest-prestige journals; (2) is rampant everywhere. Neither makes any scientific sense — they are literally nonsense — and both have diverted economics from serious scientific work.

On If You're So Smart ... (continued from above): Human affairs are deeply unpredictable for one powerful reason: if they were not, fortunes could be made. McCloskey here pursues the logic of rational expectations and modern finance into its wider cultural implications, showing that storytelling is fundamental to economics, but strictly limited by the principle of If You're So Smart ... Why Aren't You Rich? The book is the narrative mate to the metaphorical The Rhetoric of Economics. Economists are novelists, as the other book said they are poets. The two logics mutually limit what economics can do by way of social engineering and recommend a more modest and more humanistic science.

On The Applied Theory of Price (continued from above): Still regarded as one of the classic microeconomic texts of the Chicago school (with books by Friedman [père et fils], Stigler, and Landsburg), it proved to be "too difficult" for undergraduate use, but has been used freely since then to set problems for serious courses trying to teach the art of economic thinking and to prepare for graduate comprehensive exams. Its difficulty is not the formal mathematical difficulty of the standard graduate textbooks but its insistence that the student actually learn to think like an economist.