Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty-four books and some four hundred academic and popular articles on economic history, rhetoric, philosophy, statistical theory, economic theory, feminism, queer studies, liberalism, ethics, and law. She taught 1968–80 at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department during its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-marxoid, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal." She is well known for her 2019 Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, and her massive economic, historical, and literary trilogy The Bourgeois Era (2006, 2010, 2016), as well as for The Rhetoric of Economics (1985), If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), Crossing: A Memoir (1999; 2019 with an Afterword), and with Stephen Ziliak The Cult of Statistical Significance (2008). Books in press include Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Way to Do Economics (2021), and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (2020).