Deirdre McCloskey

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Deirdre McCloskey (2014)

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (born Donald Nansen McCloskey on September 11, 1942 in Ann Arbor , Michigan ) is an American economist and professor .

Career

Deirdre McCloskey is considered one of the leading economists, scientists, and intellectuals in the United States. Her professorship at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) - where she has been teaching since 1999 - is an expression of a rather unusual academic career. Her current title is Full Professor of Economics, History, English and Communication. She is also Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics at UIC and was Professor of Economics, Philosophy, History, English and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands for a period of five years . Since October 2007 she has received two honorary doctorates .

Raised the eldest child of a poet, Helen Stueland McCloskey , and Robert McCloskey , a well-respected professor of governance at Harvard University , McCloskey studied economics at Harvard University. Her study of the British iron and steel industry earned her the 1973 David A. Wells Prize for outstanding dissertations . During her graduate studies in quantitative economic history, she was greatly influenced by the thinking of Russian economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron . Around the same time, McCloskey became interested in the thinking of the Chicago School of Economics. In 1968, before she graduated from college , McCloskey was invited by Milton Friedman and Robert Fogel to teach in the University of Chicago School of Economics . She taught and researched price theories and the history of economic thought there for twelve years until, in 1979, she turned her focus to rhetoric, feminism and the history and philosophy of economics and other human sciences. Her publication The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and the establishment of the research field The Rhetoric of Human Sciences together with John S. Nelson, Allan Megill and others, as well as the graduate program The Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry should be emphasized here .

McCloskey is the author or editor of more than 20 books and over 300 articles that critically examine the assumptions of economics.

Her main contributions to her research area since the 1960s are treatises on the economic history of Britain, quality assessment of historical analysis, rhetoric of economics, rhetoric of human sciences, economic methodology, ethics, feminist economics, heterodox economics , the role of mathematics in economic analysis as well as the Use (and abuse) of significance tests in economic research.

Her research in the latter field is considered by economists of all schools to be an important contribution to modern economics. She criticized the fact that economists too often only look for statistical significance without paying attention to economic significance.

However, your main work deals with the ethics of virtue. Love, she says, should be considered by economists in research, as should efficiency and rationality. She clarified some of these remarks at a lecture at George Mason University on April 7, 2006, where she said that capitalism is "ethically watered-down human activity" that requires the presence of all human virtues . However, economists overly took into account the virtue of prudence . Her latest book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, is the first of an announced five-part magnum opus .

Life

McCloskey underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1995 at the age of 53 . She described this process in her eye-catching book Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press). A discussion with J. Michael Bailey on this subject led to great media interest in the USA.

Publications

  • Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 . 1971
  • Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron & Steel, 1870–1913 . 1973
  • Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics . 1981
  • The Applied Theory of Price . 1982 and 1985
  • The Rhetoric of Economics . 1985 and 1998
  • The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs . 1987
  • Econometric History . 1987
  • The Writing of Economics . 1987, reprinted as Economical Writing . 2000
  • The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric . 1988
  • A Bibliography of Historical Economics to 1980 . 1990
  • If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise . 1990
  • Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of US Economic History . 1993
  • Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics . 1994
  • The Vices of Economists, the Virtues of the Bourgeoisie . 1996
  • Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey . 1999 [edited by Stephen Ziliak]
  • Crossing: A Memoir . 1999
  • How to be human. Though an economist . 2000
  • The Secret Sins of Economics . 2002
  • The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce . 2006
  • with Stephen T. Ziliak: The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives . University of Michigan Press, 2008
  • with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak: The Economic Conversation . 2008
  • Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World . 2010.
  • Bourgois Equality. How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World . Chicago University Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA 2016, ISBN 978-0-226-33399-1 .

items

  • The Rhetoric of Economics . In: Journal of Economic Literature . Volume 21, No. 2 (June 1983), pp. 481-517
  • The Loss Function Has Been Mislaid: The Rhetoric of Significance Tests. In: The American Economic Review . Volume 75, No. 2, May 1985, pp. 201-205 (Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association)
  • The Rhetoric of Law and Economics . In: Michigan Law Review . Volume 86, No. 4, February 1988, pp. 752-767
  • Modern Epistemology Against Analytic Philosophy: A Reply to Maki . In: Journal of Economic Literature . Volume 33, No. 3, September 1995, pp. 1319-1323
  • Measured, unmeasured, mismeasured, and unjustified pessimism: a review essay of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the twenty-first century . In: Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 7, No. 2, Fall 2014, pp. 73–115

literature

  • Mark Blaug (Ed.): Who's who in economics. 3rd edition, Elgar, Cheltenham [u. a.] 1999, ISBN 1-85898-886-1 , pp. 751-752

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deirdre McCloskey: The Hobbes Problem: From Machiavelli to Buchanan ( Memento of July 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) ( Internet Archive Alternatives ( Memento of April 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive )) - (PDF, 25 pages ), George Mason University, April 7, 2006
  2. ^ Benedict Carey: Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege , New York Times, August 21, 2007
personal data
SURNAME McCloskey, Deirdre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen (full name); MacCloskey, Donald Nansen (name until 1995)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and professor
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Ann Arbor , Michigan