For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s _The Bourgeois Virtues_, a (...) magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. _High Noon_, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. _The Bourgeois Virtues _is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner. (shrink)

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. (...) McCloskey in _Bourgeois Dignity_, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity. An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book _The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity_ is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives. (shrink)

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe. Or so says Deirdre N. (...) McCloskey in _Bourgeois Dignity_, a fiercely contrarian history that wages a similar argument about economics in the West. Here she turns her attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old. The wealth of nations, then, didn’t grow so dramatically because of economic factors: it grew because rhetoric about markets and free enterprise finally became enthusiastic and encouraging of their inherent dignity. An utterly fascinating sequel to her critically acclaimed book _The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity_ is a feast of intellectual riches from one of our most spirited and ambitious historians—a work that will forever change our understanding of how the power of persuasion shapes our economic lives. (shrink)

Is economics a science? Deidre McCloskey says 'Yes, but'. Yes, economics measures and predicts, but - like other sciences - it uses literary methods too. Economists use stories as geologists do, and metaphors as physicists do. The result is that the sciences, economics among them, must be read as 'rhetoric', in the sense of writing with intent. McCloskey's books, The Rhetoric of Economics and If You're So Smart, have been widely discussed. In Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics he (...) converses with his critics, suggesting that they too can gain from knowing their rhetoric. The humanistic and mathematical approaches to economics, says McCloskey, fit together in a new 'interpretive' economics. Along the way he places economics within the sciences, examines the role of mathematics in the field, replies to critics from the left, right and centre, and shows how economics can again take a leading place in the conversation of humankind. (shrink)

Biometrics has done damage with levels of R or p or Student’s t. The damage widened with Ronald A. Fisher’s victory in the 1920s and 1930s in devising mechanical methods of “testing,” against methods of common sense and scientific impact, “oomph.” The scale along which one would measure oomph is particularly clear in biomedical sciences: life or death. Cardiovascular epidemiology, to take one example, combines with gusto the “fallacy of the transposed conditional” and what we call the “sizeless stare” of (...) statistical significance. Some medical editors have battled against the 5% philosophy, as did, for example, Kenneth Rothman, the founder of Epidemiology. And decades ago a sensible few in education, ecology, and sociology initiated a “significance test controversy.” But, grantors, journal referees, and tenure committees in the statistical sciences had faith that probability spaces can substitute for scientific judgment. A finding of p <.05 is deemed to be “better” for variable X than p <.11 for variable Y. It is not. It depends on the oomph of X and Y—the effect size, size judged in the light of how much it matters for scientific or clinical purposes. In 1995 a Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group, for example, came to a rare consensus on effect size: 10 different studies had agreed that a certain drug for treating prostate cancer can increase patient survival by 12%. An 11th study published in the New England Journal in 1998 dismissed the drug. The dismissal was based on a t-test, not on what William Gosset had called, against Ronald A. Fisher’s machinery, “real” error. (shrink)

Virtue ethics proposes a set of seven—four pagan virtues and three Christian—as a roughly adequate philosophical psychology. Hobbes tried to get along with one virtue, prudence, to which Rawls added a veiled virtue of justice. Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice adds the virtue of love. But in criticizing Rawls, she enunciates a “Nussbaum Lemma,” that is, a good society is unlikely to arise from over-simple models of ethical life. Since virtuous, flourishing societies are what we wish, we had better insert the (...) virtues, as she puts it, “from the start.” James Buchanan's constitutionalism, for example, solves moral hazards in a Nussbaumian world, but leaves hanging the ethical start. To start a project ending in constitutional citizenship—or human capabilities, or justice as fairness, or a Leviathan state, or the categorical imperative, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number—we need already an ethical actor, embodying the seven principal virtues. (shrink)

Historians and economists will find here what their fields have in common - the movement since the 1950s known variously as 'cliometrics', 'economic history', or 'historical economics'. A leading figure in the movement, Donald McCloskey, has compiled, with the help of George Hersh and a panel of distinguished advisors, a highly comprehensive bibliography of historical economics covering the period up until 1980. The book will be useful to all economic historians, as well as quantitative historians, applied economists, historical demographers, (...) business historians, national income accountants, and social historians. (shrink)

For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst (...) disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation-a tradition of sustained and lively inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice and the content of professional economic ethics. It explores current thinking that has emerged in these areas while widening substantially the terrain of economic ethics. There has never been a volume that poses so directly and intensively the question of the need for and content of professional ethics for economics. The Handbook incorporates the work of leading scholars and practitioners, including academic economists from various theoretical traditions; applied economists, beyond academia, whose work has direct and immense social impact; and philosophers, professional ethicists, and others whose work has addressed the nature of "professionalism" and its implications for ethical practice. (shrink)

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neoinstitutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, (...) movies, what your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life. In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neoinstitutionalism. She proposes a "humanomics," an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of "market-tested innovation" against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. (shrink)

Paolo Silvestri interviews Deirdre Nansen McCloskey on the occasion of her latest book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science. The interview covers her personal and intellectual life, the main turning points of her journey and her contributions. More specifically, the conversation focuses on McCloskey’s writings on the methodology and rhetoric of economics, her interdisciplinary ventures into the humanities, the Bourgeois Era trilogy with its history of the ‘Great Enrichment’, her liberal political commitments, and (...) the value and meaning of liberty, equality, and solidarity. Finally, the conversation returns to McCloskey’s ‘humanomics’ approach: an economics with the humans left in. (shrink)

_An insightful and passionately written book explaining why a return to Enlightenment ideals is good for the world__ "Beginning with the simple but fertile idea that people should not push other people around, Deirdre McCloskey presents an elegant defense of 'true liberalism' as opposed to its well-meaning rivals on the left and the right. Erudite, but marvelously accessible and written in a style that is at once colloquial and astringent."—Stanley Fish__ The greatest challenges facing humankind, according to (...) class='Hi'>Deirdre McCloskey, are poverty and tyranny, both of which hold people back. Arguing for a return to true liberal values, this engaging and accessible book develops, defends, and demonstrates how embracing the ideas first espoused by eighteenth-century philosophers like Locke, Smith, Voltaire, and Wollstonecraft is good for everyone. With her trademark wit and deep understanding, McCloskey shows how the adoption of Enlightenment ideals of liberalism has propelled the freedom and prosperity that define the quality of a full life. In her view, liberalism leads to equality, but equality does not necessarily lead to liberalism. Liberalism is an optimistic philosophy that depends on the power of rhetoric rather than coercion,_ and on ethics, free speech, and facts in order to thrive. (shrink)

In Bettering Humanomics: A New and Old Approach to Economic Science, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for a better humanomics. McCloskey argues for an economic science that accepts the models and mathematics, the statistics and experiments of the current orthodoxy, but also attests to the immense amount we can still learn about human nature and the economy. From observing human actions in social contexts, to the various understandings attained by studying (...) history, philosophy, and literature, McCloskey presents the myriad ways in which we think about life and how we justify and understand our actions in a synergistically human approach towards economic theory and practice. (shrink)

The reply to five reviews of Bourgeois equality in a symposium in EJPE observes that all the reviewers admit the great force of ideas in causing the Great Enrichment. Materialism is dead. Liberalism reigns.

Friedman misunderstands postmodernism?or, as it could better be called, metamodernism. Metamodernism is the common sense beyond the lunatic formulas of the Vienna Circle and conventional statistics. It has little to do with the anxieties of Continental intellectuals. It therefore is necessary for serious empirical work on the role of the state.

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation has had enormous influence since its publication in 1944. In form, this influence has been salutary: Polanyi targets one of the main weaknesses of modern economics. But in substance, Polanyi's influence has been baneful. Mirroring the methodological blindness he criticizes, Polanyi insists on the all‐or‐nothing existence/ nonexistence of laissez faire—and on its all‐or‐nothing goodness/badness.

The field of economics proves to be a matter of metaphor and storytelling - its mathematics is metaphoric and its policy-making is narrative. Economists have begun to realize this and to rethink how they speak. This volume is the result of a conference held at Wellesley College, involving both theoretical and applied economists, that explored the consequences of the rhetoric and the conversation of the field of economics.

Both history and economics have rhetorics which limit their practitioners as to what sorts of evidence and what sorts of logical appeals they can make if they wish to retain an audience. The thesis of Robert Fogel's Railroads and Economic Growth could be summed up by a three-line proof, but Fogel used courtroom procedure, scientific jargon, statistics, simulation, and the traditions of economic and historical argument to persuade an audience of both historians and economists. It was a book about rhetoric (...) in economics and history as much as one about American railroads, and it became the archetype of cliometrics because of its powerful argumentative form and its startling, compelling conclusion. Knowledge in history or economics is a social event, often a new style of conversation, a new way of speaking; Fogel managed to create that new way of speaking. (shrink)

Three recent books?Richard Posner's Law and Literature, Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, and James Boyd White's Justice as Translation? struggle over the relationship of law and literature. Fish and White defend the relevance of literature to law; Posner tries to kill the nascent law and literature movement by hugging it to death. Posner's literary criticism is belles?lettristic, concerned chiefly with how?great? a work is. Fish's is social, emphasizing the interpretative community. White attempts to make a new community, in which (...) we come to understand one another by an effort of translation. White's vision is attractive, though it surrenders Science to non?translation. As the sage said, even in science it is translation, and rhetoric, all the way down. (shrink)

Martin Hollis, in the introduction to the collection of Rationality and Relativism he edited recently with Steven Lukes, describes himself as the most arch of arch rationalists, “by which we mean, merely, that [we] reject the forthright relativization of truth and reason.” You might suppose that his self-description would place him unambiguously in the army of traditionalists arrayed against what Richard Rorty fondly calls the New Fuzzies. You might suppose, then, that Hollis would indulge in furious letter writing to, say, (...) Harper's, telling us that “we need to stand shoulder to shoulder against the growing army of enemies of rationality. By that I mean the followers of the fashionable cult of absolute relativism, emerging from philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, and deconstructionism.” You might suppose that he would go on in this way equivocating between “rationality” and “rationalism,” identifying the people he dislikes with the enemies of civilization: fascists, Stalinists, bikers, bomb throwing nihilists — Richard Rorty and Wayne Booth and Stephen Toulmin riding into town on their Harley- Davidsons, spurning warrants for belief and good reasons, reading pornographic comic books, and snarling at the townsfolk huddled behind the local syllogism. (shrink)

Mark Blyth's rebuttal to our constructive critique of Polanyi “blithely” takes for granted the accuracy of Polanyi's now‐outdated historiography of capitalism—by means of a loose, overly expansive definition of capitalism that question‐beggingly equates it with modernity. Blyth emphasizes the need to view markets as “socially embedded,” with which we agree—but he appears not to take account of the individual self‐interest that is thus embedded. Similarly, he asserts a priori the role of ideas in history, in parallel to the economists he (...) condemns (unfairly) for reading ideas out of history a priori. All of this poorly serves the cause of extracting Polanyi's welcome emphasis on social embeddedness and on the empirical from the ideological and methodological certitudes and errors in which The Great Transformation placed them. (shrink)

There is a similarity between the most technical scientific reasoning and the most humanistic literary reasoning. While engineers and historians make use of both metaphors and stories, engineers specialize in metaphors, and historians in stories. Placing metaphor, or pure comparison, at one end of a scale and simply a listing of events, or pure story, at the other, it can be seen that what connects them is a theme. The theme providing the connecting link between poles for both the engineer (...) and the historian is time. Themes in engineering that mention time are those titled differential equations. The differential equation is story-like because it speaks of time and therefore organizes experience in time, at least implicitly. Time- speaking themes shape the raw experience, as a story does when it is more than a mere unthematized chronicle. The chaotic nature of non-linear differential equations parallels the chaotic nature of history in that large results need not have large causes. Narration becomes difficult in chaotic systems because the knowledge of initial conditions is rarely sufficiently detailed to allow for accurate explanation or prediction for either engineers or historians. (shrink)

Challenges to Legal Theory offers the reader a fascinating journey though a variety of multi-disciplinary topics, ranging from law and literature, and law and religion, to legal philosophy and constitutional law. The collection reflects some of the challenges that the field of legal theory currently faces. It is compiled by a selection of international and Spanish scholars, whose essays are made available in English translation for the first time. The volume is based on a collection of essays, published in Spanish, (...) in honour of Professor José Iturmendi Morales, of Complutense University, Madrid, and brings the rich scholarship of pre-eminent Spanish scholars of law and legal theory to an international audience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Patient Self-Determination ActElizabeth Leibold McCloskey (bio)What are the ethics of extending the length of life? We know that we cannot artificially end life (Thou Shalt not Kill), but how about artificially extending life? Is that always good, sometimes good?... In ethics, is keeping people alive the highest good? Should our priority be to keep people breathing?... What does basic religious ethics say about this?(John C. Danforth, letter (...) to the author, 19 August 1989)The Patient Self-Determination Act, signed into law as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) last November, marks the first time that Congress has passed legislation concerning the ethics of life-sustaining medical treatment. The bill was spearheaded by Senator John C. Danforth (RMO), who has a special interest in this area. An Episcopal priest, Danforth was formerly an assistant chaplain at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and now sits as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Although Senator Danforth's legislative initiative was not a result of the Cruzan case, it was in his state of Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court case involving removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube arose (Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health, U.S. Supreme Court, 58 LW 4916, 26 June 1990). From his unique vantage point, he felt it was time to craft a legislative response to some of the difficult issues surrounding prolongation of life.The short answer to Senator Danforth's questions about when to artificially extend life is simple enough: people must be free to determine that for themselves. Common law and common sense dictate such a conclusion; living will and health care proxy statutes, enacted in almost every state, codify that right. The Catholic moral tradition teaches that one is not morally obligated to use extraordinary means to prolong life, a tradition shared both by the mainline Protestant and the reform and conservative Jewish community. Yet most people are unaware of their fundamental legal right to make such decisions, and as court cases from Quinlan (In re Quinlin, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 1975) to Cruzan demonstrate, few know [End Page 163] how to make arrangements for this right to be exercised if they become incapacitated.Meanwhile, health care practices are often driven by a denial of death. When Senator Danforth and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) introduced the bill on October 17, 1989, Senator Danforth said:More and more it is arguable that we play God by subjecting people to unwanted and sometimes unnecessary treatment, treatment that unnaturally prolongs the dying process. Our health care system has become obsessed with extending life, at times neglecting the caring component of medicine and trampling on the rights of patients.(Congressional Record 1989, 135:5.13566)The American Hospital Association estimates that 70 percent of deaths now occur after a determination to withhold or withdraw medical treatment. Many of those decisions are made without the benefit of an incapacitated patient's views, yet a Harvard study revealed that 95 percent of the population would like to prepare in advance for such decisions. Only 4 percent of hospitals have a systematic method of asking patients if they have an advance directive. Family members confront painful choices in the face of uncertainty about their loved one's wishes and it can be even more painful when a family knows the patient's desires but providers and the courts act otherwise because clear evidence is lacking.The Patient Self-Determination Act is rooted in the belief that people should be given information that enables them to specify the extent of medical treatment they wish to receive should they become incapacitated. The public should be educated about applicable state laws that protect the individual's right to make such choices through the use of an advance directive.The Act moves toward that goal by promoting knowledge of state laws. It requires every hospital, nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and health maintenance organization that participates in Medicaid or Medicare to routinely give all adult patients information about advance directives. Patients will also be given information on the... (shrink)

A discussion of one of the three books by which McCloskey launched his own economic rhetoric. The main criticism is that McCloskey enlarged view of rhetoric is still not encompassing enough, being limited to rhetoric in the writing of economic literature, while leaving the function of metaphor and other tropes in the more basic processes of conceptualization, theory change, and construction of 'observed' phenomena.

Although risky decision-making has been posited to contribute to the maladaptive behavior of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, the performance of psychopathic groups on a common task of risky decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), has been equivocal. Different aspects of psychopathy (personality traits, antisocial deviance) and/or moderating variables may help to explain these inconsistent findings. In a sample of college students (N = 129, age 18–27), we examined the relationship between primary and secondary psychopathic (...) features and IGT performance. A measure of impulsivity was included to investigate its potential as a moderator. In a joint model including main effects and interactions between primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and impulsivity, only secondary psychopathy was significantly related to risky IGT performance, and this effect was not moderated by the other variables. This finding supports the growing literature suggesting that secondary psychopathy is a better predictor of decision-making problems than the primary psychopathic personality traits of lack of empathy and remorselessness. (shrink)

Background Since the UK Abortion Act (1967), women have travelled from Ireland to the UK for legal abortion. In 2011 >4000 women did so. Knowledge and attitudes of medical students towards abortion have been published, however, this is the first such report from Ireland. Objective To investigate medical students’ attitudes towards abortion in Ireland. Methods All medical students at the University of Limerick, and physicians who graduated from the university within the previous 12 months, were invited via email to complete (...) an anonymous online survey. The questionnaire comprised 17 questions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. Results Response rate was 45% (n=169; 55% women; 88.2% <30 years of age; 66.7% Irish; 29.2% North American). Outcomes were: abortion should not be legally available (7.1%), abortion should be allowed in limited circumstances only (35.5%), abortion should be legally available upon request (55%). 72.8% of respondents were moderately/strongly prochoice (74% of women/71% of men/72% and 76% of Irish and North American respondents, respectively). Students aged >30 years were less likely to be prochoice (55%). While 95.2% believed that education on abortion should be offered within medical school curricula, 28.8% stated that they would decline to terminate pregnancies even if legally permitted. While 58.8% indicated that they might perform legal abortions once qualified, 25.7% would do so under limited circumstances only. Conclusions The majority of participants wanted education regarding abortion. Despite being predominantly prochoice, considerably fewer students, irrespective of nationality, indicated that they would perform abortions. (shrink)