Deirdre McCloskey is a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man.” She is also AN AMAZING GUEST!

A bit more about Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.” Her most recent popular books, for example, are Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal.

Here are Ron’s questions from the interview…

Professor, Welcome back to TSOE! You were our first guest, Episode #6, August 2014. Your work continues to blow, and change, our minds!
In your recent book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, (October 2019), you wrote:

“The point here is to convert you to a ‘humane true liberalism.’ Capitalism” (innovism) has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent, or a 2,900 percent increase over the base, stunning Great Enrichment, well beyond the classic Industrial Revolution of 1760–1860, which had merely doubled income per head.”

This is the greatest untold story of the world. How did it happen, Professor?

Yours is such a powerful argument because we continue to all these materialist explanations (for the Great Enrichment), and yet you take them down one by one. You point out in the old days, especially around Europe, the only way to get honor was being a soldier or being a priest. These ideas started to change, we started to accept creative destruction, we no longer looked at innovation as a sin or a heresy, wasn’t it?
And freedom is an attitudinal, ideological change. What role did religion play role in helping to change those attitudes?
I was listening to Tyler Cowen’s podcast the other day, and he had on Paul Romer [former student of Professor McCloskey]. Tyler asked Romer why China didn’t develop the Industrial Revolution, and Romer cited a paper by Justin Lind, because China didn’t invent the social system we call science. You don’t buy that theory, do you?
One of the things your trilogy of books taught me is how many inventions came out of China [and believed by The California School], and then you wonder why it stopped.
In your book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, you have a few chapters on Thomas Piketty and his work [especially his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century]. You point out for all his data fetish, he doesn't include human capital in his inequality statistics. To me that’s just a glaring error. How can you draw any conclusions from his book? [The World Bank Estimates that about 80% of developed nation’s wealth].
Are you worried if Jeff Bezos becomes the world’s first trillionaire?
As the Nobel (2018) economist William Nordhaus estimates, inventors in the United States since World War II have kept only 2 percent of the social value of the betterment they produce.
What was your position on Brexit?
You discuss economists Robert Gordon of Northwestern, Tyler Cowen, and John Maynard Keynes who all believe we’ll lose jobs because of technology. Why all this talk about the “winners” compensating the “losers”? You quote Stephen Landsburg, “Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money online. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist?
You quote essayist T. B. Macaulay who wrote in 1830, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” That pessimism just bleeds through some of the recent economic work. Are you optimistic or pessimistic with respect to liberty?

…and here are Ed’s questions:

I just wanted to thank you for being our first guest. You were incredibly gracious. If you weren’t as gracious as you were, I don’t know if we would have had a second guest.
On COVID-19, Steven Landsburg [also a student of Professor McCloskey’s], wrote on his blog the other day [This is What a Pandemic Looks Like] that nobody considered locking down the economy in 1969 during the Hong Kong flu, because they couldn’t afford to given their relative poverty, they preferred to spend their wealth on other things. Today’s lockdown is widely supported because it’s a luxury we’ve grown rich enough to afford. In other words, a lockdown is yet another triumph of capitalism!
The word that’s thrown around so often is “unprecedented,” but as an economic historian are there some precedents that we can put into practice for what we’ve done to the economy—one economist calls it “The Great Suppression”?
We’re facing here an 18% unemployment, 38 million people, which is Great Depression era levels. You said at the end of our last show that Keynesianism works in the case of mass unemployment. Is it still the case we can spend our way out of this current one, or no?
With all of the spending we’ve done, is this a situation where if we don’t have a significant inflation in six months to a year, we have to rethink what causes inflation? Because I would think this “helicopter money,” this would be it?
There was a question from one of our listeners, Bo, a friend of mine and a delegate to the Libertarian Party convention tonight, asks: “Psychologists keep telling us that rationales come last, so how do we know that the changing attitudes weren’t a trailing indicator of the changing situation on the ground?”
What are your thoughts on the New York Times 1619 Project?
Have you seen Hamilton, and if so, what did you think of that?
This July on Disney+ they are releasing the Hamilton movie?
Do you have a half-baked or fully-baked Constitutional Amendment you’d like to make?
- [1. Get rid of the Electoral College; 2. Pass the Equal Rights Amendment; and 3. Remove the two-term limitation on the president].

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