Deirdre McCloskey

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Deirdre N. McCloskey (Born Donald N. McCloskey) (1942 - ) is an American economist and professor. Professor McCloskey is transgender and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1996.

Contents

[edit] Career

Deirdre McCloskey did her undergraduate and PhD training in economics at Harvard University before joining the University of Chicago faculty. She has written roughly 20 books and 200 articles, often challenging standard assumptions in the field.

Her contributions concern the role of persuasion in economics; the language and rhetoric of economic argument; the role of mathematics in economic analysis; and the use (and misuse) of statistics by economists.

On this last topic her contributions have been particularly well-regarded. She has argued that economists often celebrate "statistically significant" results while ignoring the economic significance of results.

McCloskey discussed some of these issues in the inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture at George Mason University on April 7, 2006. She said there, capitalism "is an ethically drenched human activity" which requires attention to all of the classical seven virtues, while economists usually focus exclusively on prudence. Her latest book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce provides further analysis.

McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, with appointments in the Departments of Communication, Economics, English, and History, and Distinguished Professor of Economics, Art, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies, Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam. [1]

[edit] Personal life

McCloskey is perhaps as well known as a gender-crosser as for her contributions to economics and literature. In 1995-1996 she changed her name from Donald to Deirdre and, in conjunction with her sex-reassignment surgery in 1996, began to live as a woman. Around the same time McCloskey and University of Iowa Professor of Nursing Joanne McCloskey divorced after 30 years of marriage. McCloskey was married, the father of two grown children, when she made the leap. McCloskey's book "Crossing: A Memoir" documents and discusses this phase of her life.

McCloskey had faced tensions with some family members and at least one Chicago colleague, including allegations of insanity. In regard to "the issue of my alleged madness," at one point McCloskey said, "The fact is that I am not crazy, I am transsexual."

Prominent groups and individuals in the economics, literature, and history academic communities have continued to embrace McCloskey and her work.

[edit] Fields of study

[edit] Books

  • The Bourgeois Virtues : Ethics for an Age of Commerce (June 2006)
  • The Secret Sins of Economics (August 2002)
  • How to be Human* *Though an Economist (2000)
  • Crossing: A Memoir (September 1999) is McCloskey's account of her growing recognition (while a boy and man) of her female identity, and her transition — both surgical and social — into a woman (including her reluctant divorce from her wife). Following sex-reassignment surgery, the book describes her new life continuing her career as a female academic economist.
  • The Vices of Economists, the Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (1996)
  • Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994)
  • Second Thoughts: Myths and Morals of U.S. Economic History (1993)
  • A Bibliography of Historical Economics to 1980 (1990)
  • If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990)
  • The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (1988)
  • The Writing of Economics (1987) reprinted as Economical Writing (2000)
  • Econometric History (1987)
  • The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (1987)
  • The Rhetoric of Economics (1985 & 1998)
  • The Applied Theory of Price (1982 & 1985)
  • Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981)
  • Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron & Steel, 1870-1913 (1973)
  • Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840 (1971)

[edit] Articles

  • Modern Epistemology Against Analytic Philosophy: A Reply to Maki Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 1319-1323
  • The Rhetoric of Law and Economics Michigan Law Review Vol. 86, No. 4 (Feb., 1988), pp. 752-767
  • The Loss Function Has Been Mislaid: The Rhetoric of Significance Tests. The American Economic Review Vol. 75, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1985), pp. 201-205
  • The Rhetoric of Economics Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 481-517

[edit] External links

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