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A witty and thoughtful romp through the profession and practice of economics
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought...
The last 200 years have witnessed a 100-fold leap in well-being. Deirdre McCloskey argues that most people today are stunningly better off than their forbearers were in 1800, and that the rest of humanity will soon be. A purely materialist, incentivist view of economic change does not explain this leap. We have now the third in McCloskey's three-volume opus about how bourgeois values transformed Europe. Volume 3 nails the case for that transfiguration, telling us how aristocratic virtues of hierarchy were replaced by bourgeois virtues (more precisely, by attitudes toward virtues) that made it possible for ordinary folk with novel ideas to change the way people, farmed, manufactured, traveled...
Arguing that the biggest economic story of our times is how China & India have embraced neoliberalism, Deirdre McCloskey suggests that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment or material causes, & a whole lot more on ideas & what people believe.
In this witty, accessible, and revealing book, Deirdre McCloskey demystifies economic theory and practice to show that behind the economists claim to certainty is the ancient art of storytelling. If You're So Smart will engage, enlighten, and empower anyone trying to evaluate the experts who stand ready to engineer our lives. "Writing with delicious wit and great seriousness."—Publishers Weekly. " "McCloskey is more interesting on an uninspired day than most of her peers can manage at their very best."—Peter Passell, New York Times
Write clearly about any subject: “Writers should check out Economical Writing, and editors should recommend it. Your future readers will be thankful.” —Journal of Scholarly Publishing Economics is not a field known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no. Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she’s here to share the secrets of how it’s done, no matter what your field. Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making...
A collection of writings on economic history and the rhetoric of economics. McCloskey (human sciences, U. of Illinois, Chicago) argues that economics has become ahistorical and narrowly scientific--a harmful development for a moral science; she has declared that economics would improve if economists would read more novels. The papers here, spanning the 1970s, '80s and '90s, work toward exploring and repairing the dysfunctional relationship between economics and the humanities. c. Book News Inc.
Argues that economics is a science, but a human science: a witty guide to the ins and outs of economic philosophy.
A common narrative of the post-World War II economists was that the State is indispensable for guiding investment and fostering innovation. They claimed that the wealth of the modern world is the result of past State guidance and that what is needed for future economic growth is more State guidance. This position has recently been rejuvenated in reaction to the Great Recession of 2008. The truth is that the enriched modern economy was not a product of State coercion. It was a product of a change in political and social rhetoric in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789. The Great Enrichment, that is, came from human ingenuity emancipated from the bottom up, not human ingenuity directed from t...
We have read the stories of those who have "crossed" lines of race and class and culture. But few have written of crossing—completely and entirely—the gender line. Crossing is the story of Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald), once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s and 1960s privilege, and her dramatic and poignant journey to becoming a woman. McCloskey's account of her painstaking efforts to learn to "be a woman" unearth fundamental questions about gender and identity, and hatreds and anxieties, revealing surprising answers.