Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is a distinguished scholar and Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. She is also a distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history and professor emerita of English and of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After getting her PhD in economics at Harvard, she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. She has written 24 books and some 400 academic and popular articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.

McCloskey’s recent books include The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019); and, with Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2020).