Submitted on 2007/05/31 at 3:14am Hi Deirdre: I feel very comfortable in the world of your books and ideas. A long time ago, I chose [to remember] “Replete of prices and profits, acres and land, economic science is the most measurable of all social sciences”. I thought it was in “Econometric History”, browsed in a (more…)

Dear Deirdre, I am a returning college student – I’ll turn 50 on Sunday -And I’m taking my first ever Econ class. I am astounded by the seeming lack of concern for the effect of economic decisions on humanity. After reading writings by early economic theorists, I was also astounded by their blatant racism. I (more…)

After it was announced that Mr. Friedman had received the Nobel Prize, one day he was lecturing on his permanent income hypothesis. He was describing the effects of small changes in income on current and future consumption. I commented that I thought I understood the hypothesis for small changes and asked whether the same effects (more…)

I have come to your website by way of Martin Durkin (Channel 4 BBC producer). I am an early retired medical doctor with a background in physics and engineering. I am as yet unschooled and unread in economics, but have started Hayak’s Road to Serfdom as a beginning. Considering this thought: If we posit a (more…)

Dear Prof. McCloskey, Sorry for writing a rather tedious email but I am going nuts trying to find a chapter by you that I read about ten years ago. Possibly the chapter itself is much older than ten years. It begins with an extremely long duree look at the significance of the industrial revolution, placing (more…)

I just watched online the recording of your Beyond Belief talk, in which you were cautious not to explain what sparked innovation in 18th c. England except to argue that it was ideological. I was surprised at your restraint, because it seems like you had the makings of a nice just-so story there on the (more…)

Professor McCloskey, I wanted to send you a quick note of encouragement. This semester I am taking a history of economic thought class here at UNI. We recently were discussing Thorstein Veblen, while researching a paper on him I came across some of your work, specifically The Bourgeois Virtues. I started reading it this week (more…)

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.