Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey

McCloskey in 2014
Born Donald Nansen McCloskey
(1942-09-11) September 11, 1942
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Fields Economic history
Alma mater Harvard University
Thesis Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron and Steel, 1870–1913 (1970)
Doctoral advisor Alexander Gerschenkron
Known for Economic history of Britain

Deirdre N. McCloskey (born Donald McCloskey, September 11, 1942 in Ann Arbor, Michigan)[1] is an American professor who is a Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also adjunct professor of Philosophy and Classics there, and for five years was a visiting Professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctorates.[2] In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity.[3] Her main research interests include the origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, and the study of capitalism, among many others.

Career

McCloskey earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Economics at Harvard University. Her dissertation, supervised by Alexander Gerschenkron,[4] on British iron and steel won in 1973 the David A. Wells Prize.[5]

In 1968, McCloskey became an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where she stayed for 12 years, gaining tenure as an associate professor in economics in 1975, and an associate professorship in history in 1979. Her work at Chicago is marked by her contribution to the cliometric revolution in economic history, and teaching generations of leading economists Chicago Price Theory, a course which culminated in her book The Applied Theory of Price.[6] In 1979, at the suggestion of Wayne Booth in English at Chicago, she turned to the study of rhetoric in economics. Later at the University of Iowa, McCloskey, the John Murray Professor of Economics and of History (1980–99), published The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and co-founded with John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and others an institution and graduate program, the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.[7] McCloskey has authored 16 books and nearly 400 articles in her many fields.[8]

Her major contributions have been to the economic history of Britain (19th-century trade, modern history, 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, and the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics, and recently in her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, the origins of the Industrial Revolution.[9]

Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce[10] was the first of the trilogy, published in 2006. The second, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World was published in 2010, and the third, "The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Ethical, 1600-1848, and then Suspect" will appear in 2014.[9]

Personal life

McCloskey is the eldest child of Robert McCloskey, a professor of government at Harvard University, and the former Helen Stueland, a poet.

Married for thirty years and the parent of two children, she transitioned from male to female in 1995, at the age of 53, writing about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press).[11] It is an account of her growing recognition of her female identity, and her transition—both surgical and social—into a woman (including her reluctant divorce from her wife). The book describes her new life, following sex-reassignment surgery, continuing her career as a female academic economist.

McCloskey advocates on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBT community. She was also a key person in the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory controversy and in the debate over J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen, both regarding the reasons why transsexual women desire a male to female transformation.[12]

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 libertarian."[13]

Publications

Articles

See also

References

  1. ↑ CV
  2. ↑ McCloskey, Deirdre (May 11, 2011). "Curriculum Vitae of Professor Deirdre Nansen McCloskey". Deirdre McLoskey.com. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
  3. ↑ "Julian L. Simon Memorial Award". Competitive Enterprise Institute. 2014. Retrieved April 7, 2015.
  4. ↑ The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics
  5. ↑ McCloskey, Deirdre. Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey, ed. Stephen Thomas Ziliak (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, Mass., USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2001), 350.
  6. ↑ McCloskey, Deirdre. "The Applied Theory of Price" (PDF). PDF. Deirdre McCloskey.com. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
  7. ↑ "People". Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (2008-2015). The University of Iowa. Retrieved April 5, 2015.
  8. ↑ Walsh, Matt (December 2, 2013). "Economist Deirdre McCloskey: playing both sides of the street". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved April 5, 2013.
  9. 1 2 McCloskey, Deirdre. "Books by Deirdre McCloskey". Deirdre McCloskey.com. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
  10. ↑ McCloskey, Deirdre (2006). Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an age of Commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  11. ↑ "From Donald to Deirdre: How a man became a woman — and what it says about identity". Reason. 1999–2012. Archived from the original on 2008-06-07. Retrieved 2008-10-27.
  12. ↑ Carey, Benedict (2007-08-21). "Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege". New York Times.
  13. ↑ McCloskey, Deirdre. "Informal Biographical Remarks". DeirdreMcLoskey.com. Retrieved 3 January 2014.

External links

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