Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (born Donald 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 the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. From 2000 to 2015, she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Distinguished Professor of Economics History, and Professor of English and Communication.[1] During those years, she (as a visitor) taught economic history at the University of Gothenburg, economics at the University of the Free State, and philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.[1]
Deirdre McCloskey
September 11, 1942
Harvard University (AB, AM, PhD)
McCloskey holds twelve honorary doctorates.[2] She has served as President of the Social Science History Association, the Midwest Economics Association, and the Economic History Association. Co-founder of the Cliometrics Society, she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research interests include the economic and political origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, British economic history, the rhetoric of economics, and the history and philosophy of liberalism, among others.
The Bourgeois Era[edit]
Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce,[10] published in 2006, argued that the bourgeoisie exhibits all of the seven 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 is 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 is Leave 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.
Personal life[edit]
McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard 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 of academics to do so, and wrote about her experience in a New 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 the LGBTQ community.[12]
In 2003, McCloskey was a vocal critic of J. Michael Bailey and participated in a deplatforming campaign against him after the release of his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which presented and popularized sexologist Ray Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia 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, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian Classical Liberal."[15]
