As a dabbler in economic thought (but not an economist), I’m always interested in new books on different aspects of economics. Robert Fulford has probably prompted me to buy Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World:
In a time of sharply limited budgets, this gives a special urgency to the ideas of Deirdre McCloskey, an economic historian at the University of Illinois. She thinks she knows how economic growth works.
Why did northwestern Europe begin growing rich in the 17th century, a process that continues to this moment? Why did various countries elsewhere in Europe have similar success, along with countries created by Europeans, including the United States and Canada?
McCloskey sets aside most of the reasons for prosperity that her academic peers identify. Scientific innovation, natural resources, education, Protestant theology, trade agreements — these can be important but they do not explain global patterns. Often, they are present in societies that have failed.
The West’s success, McCloskey believes, turns out to be a question of imagination, attitude and sensibility. It depends on how we talk and write about business — in fact, how people in the West feel about it.
Fulford also points out that McCloskey has had a very unusual life:
It’s not possible to write about McCloskey without noting the most remarkable aspect of her life, which she described eleven years ago in Crossing: A Memoir. In 1995, Donald McCloskey, a 52-year-old professor, married for 30 years, a father of two, realized that his real identity was as a woman. He began a program of hormone treatment, multiple surgeries and electrolysis, emerging as Deirdre.
As a scholar, she noted that this physical change involved a cultural transformation as well. Having been both a man and a woman, she drew up a long list of changes she’s discovered in herself. Here are a few of them. She cries, she likes cooking, she’s more easily startled by loud noises, she listens intently to stories people tell of their lives and craves detail. She can’t remain angry for long. She’s less impatient, drives less aggressively, has more friends. She’s stopped paying attention to cars and sports. And she feels duty-bound to wash the dishes.
