Deirdre McCloskey
McCloskey in 2014
Born	(1942-09-11)September 11, 1942 (age 83) Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Education	Harvard University (BA,MA,PhD)
Known for	Economic history of Britain McCloskey critique
Scientific career
Fields	Economic history Cliometrics Economic methodology
Thesis	Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron and Steel, 1870–1913 (1970)
Doctoral advisor	Alexander Gerschenkron
Notable students	Stephen T. Ziliak Claudia Goldin
Website	deirdremccloskey.com

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (bornDonald Nansen McCloskey; September 11, 1942) is an American economist and academic. Since 2023 she has been a Distinguished Scholar and holder of the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at theCato Institute inWashington, D.C. From 2000 to 2015, she taught at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Distinguished Professor ofEconomicsHistory, and Professor ofEnglish andCommunication.^[1] During those years, she (as a visitor) taught economic history at theUniversity of Gothenburg, economics at theUniversity of the Free State, and philosophy atErasmus University Rotterdam.^[1]

McCloskey holds twelvehonorary doctorates.^[2] She has served as President of theSocial Science History Association and theEconomic History Association. Co-founder of the Cliometrics Society, she is a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been a fellow of theGuggenheim Foundation, theNational Endowment for the Humanities, and theInstitute for Advanced Study. Her research interests include the economic and political origins of the modern world, the misuse ofstatistical significance in economics and other sciences, British economic history, the rhetoric of economics, and the history and philosophy of liberalism, among others.

Born inAnn Arbor, McCloskey received anAB ineconomics fromHarvard University in 1964, and aPhD in economics from Harvard in 1970, where she studied underAlexander Gerschenkron.^[1][3] Her doctoral dissertation on the British iron and steel industry won the 1973David A. Wells Prize.^[4]

In 1968, McCloskey became anassistant professor ofeconomics at theUniversity of Chicago, and thenassociate professor in 1973; she wastenured in 1975, and appointed simultaneously as associate professor of history in 1979.^[1] Her work at Chicago is marked by her contribution to thecliometric revolution in economic history, and teaching generations of leading economistsChicagoPrice Theory, a course which culminated in her bookThe Applied Theory of Price.^[5] In 1979, at the suggestion ofWayne Booth in English at Chicago, she turned to the study ofrhetoric in economics. Worried in 1980 when her colleagues in economics would not promote her to full professor, McCloskey left Chicago for theUniversity of Iowa, where she taught until 1999, being appointed the John F. Murray Chair in Economics in 1984.^[1] Soon after joining Iowa, she publishedThe Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and co-founded with John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and others an institution and graduate program, theProject on Rhetoric of Inquiry.^[6] In 1996 at Iowa she andStephen Ziliak published a seminal paper of econometrics, "The Standard Error of Regressions" inJournal of Economic Literature, marking the beginning of a decades-long collaboration, led mostly by Ziliak, on the history, philosophy, and practice of statistical significance testing and estimation in economics, medicine, and other sciences.^[7]

McCloskey has authored or co-authored 25 books and nearly 500 articles.^[8] Her major contributions have been to theeconomic history of Britain (focusing on 19th-century trade and industry, and medieval agriculture), the quantification of historical inquiry (cliometrics), the rhetoric of economics, the rhetoric of the human sciences, economic methodology, virtue ethics,feminist economics,heterodox economics, the role of mathematics in economic analysis, the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics, her trilogyThe Bourgeois Era,^[9] and the origins of modern economic growth.

Her bookThe Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce,^[10] published in 2006, argued that the bourgeoisie exhibits all of theseven virtues of the Western Tradition.

A second,Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, was published in 2010, and argued that the unprecedented increase in human welfare of the 19th and 20th centuries, from $3 per capita per day to over $100 per day, issued not from capitalist accumulation but from innovation under an unprecedented liberalism in northwest Europe and its offshoots.

The third,Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016) explains the origins of the liberalism that made the modern world.^[9] The trilogy gives a new, and old, account of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.

A popular version of the trilogy isLeave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (co-authored with Art Carden) in 2022.

Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019) and much of her recent work develops a full-scale defense of true liberalism.

McCloskey is the eldest child ofRobert McCloskey, a professor of government atHarvard University, and Helen McCloskey (née Stueland), an opera singer in her youth and a poet in her maturity. McCloskey was born Donald and lived as a man until age 53. Married for thirty years and parent of two children, she transitioned in 1995, among the first academics to do so, and wrote about her experience in aNew York Times Notable Book of the Year,Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press).^[11]

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in theLGBTQ community.^[12]

In 2003, McCloskey was a vocal critic ofJ. Michael Bailey after the release of his bookThe Man Who Would Be Queen, which presented and popularized sexologistRay Blanchard's theory ofautogynephilia as a motivation for sex reassignment surgery.^[13] McCloskey initiated complaints against Bailey at Northwestern University and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, and assisted a few others to do the same; all such complaints were ultimately either dismissed or resolved in Bailey's favor. She also led a successful campaign pressuring the Lambda Literary Foundation to withdraw the book's previous nomination for one of its awards.^[14]

McCloskey has described herself as a "literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressiveEpiscopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian Classical Liberal."^[15]

McCloskey ran as theLibertarian Party candidate in the 2022Illinois Comptrollerelection against incumbentDemocratSusana Mendoza, coming in third with 1.9% of the vote.^[16][17][18]

• Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 (1971)^[19]ISBN 978-0691051987
• Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron & Steel, 1870–1913 (1973)ISBN 978-0674428478
• Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981)ISBN 978-0415313056
• The Applied Theory of Price (1982 & 1985)ISBN 978-0023785207
• The Rhetoric of Economics (1985 & 1998)ISBN 978-0299158149
• The Writing of Economics (1987) reprinted asEconomical Writing (2000)ISBN 978-1577660637
• Econometric History (1987)ISBN 978-0333213711
• The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (1987)ISBN 978-0299110246
• The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (1988)ISBN 978-0521342865
• A Bibliography of Historical Economics to 1980 (1990)ISBN 978-0521153850
• If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990)ISBN 978-0226556710
• Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of U.S. Economic History (1993) (edited)ISBN 978-0195101188
• Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994), Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0521436038
• The Vices of Economists, the Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (1996)ISBN 978-9053562444
• Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey (1999) (edited by Stephen Ziliak)ISBN 978-1852788186
• Crossing: A Memoir (S1999). New edition University of Chicago Press, 2000,ISBN 978-0226556697
• The Secret Sins of Economics (2002), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0971757530
• The Bourgeois Virtues : Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226556635
• The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), University of Michigan Press (with Stephen T. Ziliak).ISBN 978-0472050079
• The Economic Conversation (2008) (with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak)ISBN 978-0230506800
• Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226556659
• Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226333991
• The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics (2016), Oxford University Press. (with George F. DeMartino).ISBN 978-0199766635
• Why liberalism works: how true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all (2019), Yale University Press.ISBN 978-0300235081
• Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (2021), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226765921
• Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics (2022), University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226819440

• McCloskey, Deirdre (1980). "Review of Stratton and Brown's agricultural records in Britain".Journal of Economic History.40 (March 1980): 189.doi:10.1017/S0022050700104735.S2CID 154867548.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (May 1985). "The loss function has been mislaid: The rhetoric of significance tests".The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings.75 (2):201–205.JSTOR 1805596.
• McCloskey, Deirdre N. (February 1988)."The rhetoric of law and economics".Michigan Law Review.86 (4):752–767.doi:10.2307/1289214.JSTOR 1289214.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (September 1995). "Modern epistemology against analytic philosophy: A reply to Mäki".Journal of Economic Literature.33 (3):1319–1323.JSTOR 2729124.
• McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (March 1996)."The standard error of regressions".Journal of Economic Literature.34 (1):97–114.JSTOR 2729411.^{[permanent dead link]}Pdf.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (January 1998). "Simulating Barbara".Feminist Economics.4 (3):181–186.doi:10.1080/135457098338383.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (Winter 2003). "Other Things Equal: Milton".Eastern Economic Journal.29 (1):143–146.JSTOR 40326463.
• McCloskey, Deirdre; Ziliak, Stephen T. (2004)."Size matters: The standard error of regressions in the American Economic Review".Econ Journal Watch.1 (2):331–338.Pdf.
• McCloskey, Deirdre (July–August 2009). "Rhetoric matters: Ethical standards in a humanistic science of economics".Challenge.52 (4):25–31.doi:10.2753/0577-5132520403.JSTOR 40722588.S2CID 144681445.
• McCloskey, Deirdre N.; Roberts, Helen (July–September 2012). "What economics should we teach before college, if any?".The Journal of Economic Education.43 (3):293–299.doi:10.1080/00220485.2012.686396.JSTOR 23248956.S2CID 144429500.

• List of feminist economists

• Official website
• "Leading Economist Stuns Field by Deciding to Become a Woman"
• Roberts, Russ (March 31, 2008)."McCloskey on Capitalism and the Bourgeois Virtues".EconTalk.Library of Economics and Liberty.
• Appearances onC-SPAN
• A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper's Magazine

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