Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (born Donald N. McCloskey; September 11, 1942) is an American economist and academic who has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000, where she serves as a professor of economics, history, English, and communication.

She is also an adjunct professor of philosophy and classics at UIC, and for five years was a visiting professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

The book describes how in her teenage years, McCloskey would commit burglaries of neighbors' homes, dressing up in the crinoline dresses favored by young women of that era, in addition to "shoes, garter belts and all the equipment of a 1950s girl".

The memoir then goes on to describe her new life, following sex-reassignment surgery, in her career as a female academic economist and scholar of femininity.

McCloskey has advocated on behalf of the rights of persons and organizations in the LGBT community.

Born in Ann Arbor, McCloskey received an AB in economics from Harvard University in 1964, and a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1970, where she studied under Alexander Gerschenkron.

In 1968, McCloskey became an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where she became an associate professor of economics in 1973, was tenured in 1975, and became an associate professor of history in 1979.

Her work at Chicago, under her birth name Donald McCloskey, 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.

Her doctoral dissertation on the British iron and steel industry won the 1973 David A. Wells Prize.

In 1979, at the suggestion of Wayne Booth in English at Chicago, she turned to the study of rhetoric in economics.

McCloskey left Chicago for the University of Iowa in 1980, where she taught until 1999, being appointed the John F. Murray Chair in Economics in 1984.

Sh co-edited the Journal of Economic History from 1980 to 1986, and served on the editorial boards of several major academic journals, including Explorations in Economic History, the Economic History Review, and the American Economic Review.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Whilst at Iowa, she 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.

McCloskey has authored 16 books and nearly 400 articles in her many fields.

McCloskey has served as a contributing editor for Critical Review since 1987.

Married for thirty years, and the parent of two children, she made the decision to transition from male to female in 1995, writing about her experience in a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crossing: A Memoir (1999, University of Chicago Press).

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).

She left Iowa for the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000, where she was appointed a Distinguished Professor of Economics in 2002, a professor of English in 2004, and a professor of communication in 2006.

In 2003, McCloskey was a vocal critic of J. Michael Bailey and participated in a deplatforming campaign against him after the release of his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which presented and popularized sexologist Ray Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia as a motivation for sex reassignment surgery.

McCloskey initiated complaints against Bailey at Northwestern University and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, and assisted a few others to do the same; all such complaints were ultimately either dismissed or resolved in Bailey's favor.

She also led a successful campaign pressuring the Lambda Literary Foundation to withdraw the book's previous nomination for one of its awards.

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 Classical Liberal."

Her book The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce was the first of a planned series of books about the world since the Industrial Revolution titled The Bourgeois Era, and was published in 2006.

McCloskey argued that the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertised faith in prudence only, believes in all seven virtues.

Since October 2007, McCloskey has received six honorary doctorates.

The second, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, was published in 2010, and argued that the unprecedented increase in human welfare of the 19th and 20th centuries, from $3 per capita per day to over $100 per day, issued not from capitalist accumulation but from innovation.

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.

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.

The third, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, appeared in 2016.

Her major contributions have been to the economic history of Britain (focusing on 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, the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics, her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

McCloskey expanded her argument, coining the term "Great Enrichment" to describe the unprecedented gains in human welfare of the 19th and 20th centuries.

She reiterated her argument that the enrichment came from innovation and not from accumulation as argued by many including Thomas Piketty.

She published Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (co-authored with Art Carden) in 2022.

The book attributes modern economic growth to liberalism and the bourgeois attaining freedom.

In doing so, the book challenges other common explanations for modern economic growth, such as institutions, state capacity, scientific innovation and trade.

In a review of the book, Joel Mokyr recognized that the ideology of liberalism was important in facilitating modern economic growth, but argued the book does not convincingly explain why liberalism won out in a marketplace of ideas.

In 2019, she published Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.

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

McCloskey was born Donald McCloskey and lived as a man until the age of 53.