Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to the rhetoric of law and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, University-of-Chicago style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests that “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Anglican, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian.” Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, which argues that it was an ideological change, rather than saving or exploitation, that made us rich, is the second in a widely noticed trilogy on The Bourgeois Era.
