The idea that robots can be programmed for ethical behavior is based on the false impression that morality boils down to rules, a view that Deirdre McCloskey lampoons so well with her 3×5 index card metaphor.

From Cengage, Issue 18, Spring 2000 William A. McEachern, Editor Deirdre McCloskey’s Crossing: A Memoir offers an unflinching personal account of her transformation from Donald to Deirdre (University of Chicago Press, $21.45 including shipping from Amazon.com). The book is written in the third person, which allows her to refer to Donald as a “he” before (more…)

How To Be Human* [original link] By Arnon Grunberg A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Chicago to meet the distinguished economist Deirdre McCloskey. The reason for the meeting was research for my new novel. I wanted to know more about economists. A mutual friend had introduced us and Deirdre McCloskey was kind enough (more…)

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Nick Krafft quoting Daniel Little in Open Economics (Notre Dame), September 29, 2009. Source site and title: “Social Economics” as an Alternative

The Bourgeois Revaluation: How Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848 [Vol. 3 of The Bourgeois Era] © Deirdre McCloskey 2010 Medieval and Early Modern Economies had Bourgeois Capitalists And So Did the Ancient World But the Bourgeoisie has been Disdained There were Precursors of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie Yet on the Whole the Bourgeoisies have been Precarious The (more…)

The usual explanations for the modern world, Marxist or anti-Marxist, do not work very. What does work is a story of innovation by the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie revalued 1600 to the present, first in Holland and then in Britain and then the world. That’s what was argued in Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010).

Where then to look for the springs of innovation? The place to look, I say, is in the innovative activities of the urban middle class, …. [continues; click title bar above]

[D]own to his death in 1964 Polanyi and his associates tried to demonstrate that at any rate the ancient world followed his anti-market model, and in particular that ancient Mesopotamia did. As socialists they wanted the market and the bourgeois life to be a mere recent stage, now thankfully to be superseded by the re-establishment of the communism that most intellectuals in the 1940s believed the remote past had seen and that the not-too-remote future would again achieve. The idea that a market society would turn out to be the end of history was from 1944 to 1964 obnoxious to the leading members of the European clerisy. [continues; click title bar above]