**Project: fix, 3 days: The chapter is very raw and confused at present. The elite continued to sneer at the bourgeoisie. It is by now widely realized that the sixteenth-century in Europe, with its increasingly literate and even rhetorically cultivated elite, came to view the keeping and finding out of secrets as a suitable occupation (more…)

What changed 1600-1848, and dramatically, was the high- and low-cultural attitude towards thrift, capitalism, innovation, and the bourgeoisie. Weber is here correct, though not in thinking that the Puritans had much to do with it. Thriftiness and other specifically economic virtues, such as prudent calculation of costs and benefits or an admiring attitude towards industrial (more…)

Original entry source » (ACE website) Journal Announcements Econ Journal Watch: Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics A new electronic journal, Econ Journal Watch (EJW), will publish comments on articles appearing in economics journals. It will serve as a forum for discussion about economics research and the economics profession. The objective of EJW is to bring (more…)

The trouble with word-evidence, of course, is that people — and chimpanzees and camouflaging plants — can be dishonest. That is, they can fashion a gap between what they say and what they mean, if no material payment or other physical act is involved. “I just love that outfit!” can mean in the right circumstances, (more…)

The Oxford Libertarian Society hosts a lecture by Prof. McCloskey Date: Saturday, 15th May 2010 @ 5pm Location: Christ Chrurch, Lecture Room 1 Category: Education – Lecture Cost: free Website: www.oxlib.org.uk Contact: nicholas.cowen@worc.ox.ac.uk

The virtue of prudence rose in prestige in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century British men — especially the men — delighted in claiming prudence for their own behavior and a cynical supposition that others were motivated similarly. Thus Adam Smith initiated the economist’s delight in the (more…)

Center for Business Law, Saltmätargatan 19 C Professor Deirdre McCloskey holds this year’s Heckscher lecture The lecture, given in memory of Eli F. Heckscher, will be on “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.” Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey’s most recent book (to be published this fall by University of Chicago Press) is the second (more…)