Comments on: The Argument of Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World

By: Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:56:56 +0000

Dear Mr. Ramachandran:

If there was no way to measure changing attitudes but by their results, then, yes, calling it ”changing attitudes” would merely relabel our ignorance (as Moe Abramowitz put it long ago). But we have plenty of ways to measure changing attitudes. It’s an economist’s prejudice to suppose that something as context-dependent as ”human capital” is easy to measure, but ideas impossible! My brilliant student Nimish Adhia (visiting this year at Beloit College) completed his pioneering PhD thesis last year at UIC measuring the changing attitudes in India during the 1980s towards businesspeople. In Bollywood films, for example, Nimsih found that businesspeople were devils during the 1950s and heroes during the 1980s–and then India started to grow.

Regards, Deirdre McCloskey

By: S. Ramachandran

S. Ramachandran — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:57:56 +0000

The cause of economic growth gets more elusive: “technological change” is the label of ignorance because it is a residual of Solow’s estimated regression, but does not “changing attitude” merely give it a different label?

Useful, perhaps, if one could — by explaining why such attitudes changed when they did — engineer such changes elsewhere. Are we there yet?

By: Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:32:22 +0000

Dear Mr. Smith, Thank you so much for your kind words. I own Gellner, and have read it a little, I seem to recall, but so far it hasn’t affected me. Do you think I should look more closely at it?
Sincerely, Deirdre McCloskey

By: Malcolm Smith

Malcolm Smith — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:51:47 +0000

I have just ‘lost’ a day reading your online draft of Bourgeois Dignity, and watching you Kentucky lecture on YouTube. I am actually quite overcome with a ‘wave’ of reactions and insights which are still washing over me, and I sense they will for some time to come! A most liberating and helpful understanding that will contribute to my own efforts in understanding personality – which is not liberated in aristocratic or secular Christianity ideologies.

One question; from your references I deduce that Ernest Gellner’s work ‘Plough Sword & Book’ has not impacted your work. I wondered if you have come across it?

By: Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:39:30 +0000

Dear Tom,

I thank you, the author yourself of “a very interesting book”!

Regards,

Deirdre

By: Tom Palmer

Tom Palmer — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:37:19 +0000

“A New Understanding of Economic Growth”
I heard Deirdre McCloskey make this argument recently in Berlin, where I attended two conferences on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is going to be a very interesting book: Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.