McCloskey quoted in “A Profession at Sea” by Johan Fourie
View “A Profession at Sea” in its entirety at Johan Fourie’s blog, 15 February 2012.
We need, as Deirdre McCloskey eloquently argues at the end of her most recent book (Bourgeois Dignity), ‘a more idea-oriented economics… For such a humanistic science of economics … the methods of the human sciences would become as scientifically relevant as the methods of mathematics and statistics now properly are. Such a widened economic science would scrutinize literary texts and simulate on computers, analyse stories and model maxima, clarify with philosophy and measure with statistics, inquire into the meaning of the sacred and lay out the accounting of the profane. The practitioners of the humanities and the social sciences would stop sneering at each other, and would start reading each other’s books and sitting in each other’s courses.”
