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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey Profile
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

@DeirdreMcClosk

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Postmodern, quantitative, literary, ex-Marxist, economist, historian, Episcopalian, coastie-bred Chicagoan but now Washington woman who was once not.

Washington DC
Joined December 2012
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
I've decided, at the urging and with the guidance of some young friends, to get active on Twitter. It's s strange week to do so, as Twitter disintegrates a la Musk! But I'll me sending you to items I've written, and very occasionally offering also my Latest Profound Thoughts.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"Economics should be a worldly philosophy, looking on the economy from a height—with among other telescopes those supply and demand curves." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
I am now working at Cato in Washington DC---age 80 and back in the paid labor force! I love it. My condo is literally next door. 50 meter commute! It's great to be in a policy institute, especially as Cato is philosophical and historical among the 80 or so in Washington.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
13 days
I just went to New Delhi to a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. The enthusiasts for childish policies, though, portray the Mont Pelerin Society as a deep, dark conspiracy of the 'neo-liberal' posh—conservative and powerful. I’m the oncoming President of the Society, for a
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"[Hirschman] was an advocate of what some of us now call “humanomics,” an economics that uses all the resources of our culture, from numbers to words, from life to art." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
A thousand people have signed a petition against Michael Knowles 'debating" me on transgender matters on April 18 at Pittsburgh. They should be ashamed. True, Knowles is an anti-Jesus Catholic, a fascist advocating state power over ideas. But we live in a free country.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 months
An editor for @clarincom in Buenos Aires asked me to tell why I described @JMilei , the libertarian candidate in Argentina, as not a “fully adult liberal.” Yet I wish Argentinians would vote for him on 19 November, against the smooth but corrupt and Peronist statist.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"But it was not this French, rational side of the new ideas that mattered most. It was the new, Scottish, liberty side." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 months
Peronism must stop. I pray that Milei can get Argentinians to grow up. But I worry that Milei may not be the grownup to do it. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"The way we actually get better off is not by shuffling jobs around, or letting the geniuses in Washington or Brasilia decide what the great new industries should be, but by thinking up better ways to do things." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
I want you economists to read two books of mine that came out in the past couple of years from the University of Chicago press, 2021 and Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
10 months
Why do most people of good will—and those of evil will, too, but for different reasons—dismiss liberalism? My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
The AI Panic is Insane. "Maybe not in Brazil, but in the USA we are going insane about artificial intelligence. Our Congress might act to regulate, which is always a worrying sign of a panic attack." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"It is beautiful, and true, that much of our life, such as the Portuguese language and our patterns of love and friendship, and much of our economic life, is the outcome of spontaneous order, like the spontaneous order of a forest." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
Here's a column I just wrote for the Brazilian newspaper. I do this every week, and will drip them out from now on---been doing it for a year now, so there is all sorts of mad opinion!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
On April 18 at the University of Pittsburgh I "debate" with the very young, ultra-conservative Michael Knowles on transgender rights. A week later I have a knee replacement. The "debate" will let a young hater spew hatred. The operation will let an old woman walk.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"Yet the conviction has grown up over the past century that the state should take responsibility for solving every “problem,” because it has the orders to solve it." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"Uh oh.  The claim of “externality” justifies state power in everything. 1984.  China." Read my latest column for Folha de S.Paulo here 👇
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
What caused innovation? Dignity and liberty for the common people, and particular the middle class. Hierarchy loosened, 1600-1848
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
Time for a quiz. Who benefits monetarily from better local schools? A new restriction on house building? A denial of planning permission to change agricultural land on the edge of Cambridge, England to residential uses? Answer: the owners of existing land in the city center.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
I'm coming to the end of a month at the Cato Institute in Washington, and will be doing a month every autumn and spring from now on. Cato-ians are My People: real liberals, not conserves or socialists. What's liberalism? Adultism. Non slaves to any other human.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
New word for capitalism? The best I can come up with is "market-tested innovation and supply." Pretty clumsy, eh? But every word counts.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
5 years
Well, amazingly we won our debate against good opposition at the Oxford Union (about 150 to 100 at the division) on Thursday, Feb 18, 2020. Nicole ASchoff was the final speaker in favor of the Proposition we opposed, namely, "Feminism cannot be capitalist."
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
Quite surprisingly, considering their steadily increasing confidence, economists have never shown scientifically that imperfections in exchanges are big. And likewise they have never shown that states can fix the imperfections. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
In 1492, if you knew somehow that the Great Enrichment as going to happen, you would bet rationally on China. Not the pathetic Europeans.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
OK, let's see if I can make this work. Hmm. We 80-year folds are not exactly fluent in electronic mysteries. . . .
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
7 months
I recently spoke at @sflibertycon LibertyCon discussing the significant role freedom plays in fostering innovation and prosperity. For those interested, the talk is now available online.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
To repeat, I'm at @CatoInstitute after seven years of retirement from university teaching. Fifty years of teaching! But with all the young people here, it's like being back teaching. I mainly write my own books, increasingly about liberalism---correctly defined, of course!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
I'm also working, or going to work, with @amingardi on a book of portraits of what we call "the plausible illiberals," people like @MazzucatoM who call themselves liberals, but are not. They are, like many in the modern world, "statists." The opposite of liberal.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
"Mobility is good, being part of personal liberty. But the big one is liberating people in all ways. As Moses said to Pharoah, “Let my people go.” In order to have a go." My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
Working on a few books, always. The one that's almost out of the oven is God's Economy: Public Theology for an Age of Innovism. "Innovism" is my (better) name for what is misleadingly called "capitalism." The book persuades Christians to support liberty in the economy.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
6 months
Most non-economists and all Marxist economists, bless ‘em, believe in the “labor theory of value.” You do, probably. Bless you also. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
If you want to read more about my mad career and present activities, see my website,
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 year
Reparations Are Wrong If the Injustice Is Old. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
Why read the two books? Because they contain a diagnosis of what's going wrong with economics and then a suggestion for reforming at as "humanomics." We can do much better as a science.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
What cause dignity and liberty for commoners? Accidents of European history in the 16th and 17th centuries, which made people bold.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
The outline of The Treasured Bourgeoisie is up on http://t.co/tG0gg4fQxP. I use Tocqueville's trick of declarative chapter titles.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
C-SPAN says it will broadcast our Hayek forum this Sunday at 8 am and 8 pm as part of Book TV. I comment on Bruce's important book.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
@Cracklin_ Is this sarcastic? I do hope so.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
8 months
A nation doesn’t know what it wants, because it’s not an “it." Brazil, viewed as a free society and not an anthill, is 214 million individual people, with billions of plans for today, for life. My column for Folha de S.Paulo. Also on my Substack:
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
4 months
I just came back from a big Cato conference in Buenos Aires, 11-12 June about “The Rebirth of Liberty in Argentina and Beyond.” My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
Markets and maximizing are not new, and can't explain the the Great Enrichment, Only innovation can, a la Kirzner and Mokyr..
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
For our readers in Brazil and Portugal: this year I've been writing a weekly column for the big newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Here's the link to some of them in Portuguese. The paper's website has the original English versions.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
The Great Enrichment is the rise of real income per head since 1800, 30 times---that's 2900%, class. Investing and exploiting can't cause.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
It is no deep European superiority, no tendencies stretching back into the Middle Ages, that explains why Europe rather than China won.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
5 months
Yet our friends on the left, and many of our friends on the right, too, believe that every “social problem” requires state intervention. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
5 months
If you think like this you are “thinking like an economist,” which every professor of economics wants you to do. I do, for example.  @JMilei does. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 month
The authoritarians worldwide have already lost. If the only way that Maduro, Putin, and Erdogan can stay in power is to fake elections, jail and murder opponents, and recruit enough fascist-inclined policemen to squash protests, their regimes are fragile.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
Look for moi being interviewed on @CatoPodcast with @cobrown . Whenever: SUBSCRIBE!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
5 months
My @Google search has taken to beginning always with an AI result. It’s irritating. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
7 months
English speakers are confused about the idea of “liberty.” I hope you in Brazil are not. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo. Also on my Substack:
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
We need a new word for "capitalism." The old one keeps driving us to think that piling brick on brick, or BA on BA, did it.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
Art Carden, columnist for Forbes, and I are writing a (we hope) popular book on the theme of the trilogy of The Bourgeois Era. Wish us rich!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
6 months
The state is big and getting bigger.  It requires papers, proofs of property or citizenship, by the ton. That gives rise to the problem of what the Greek-American economist @Elena_Panaritis calls “informality.” My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
19 days
The balloon theory and fine-tuning, then, are factually mistaken. Let’s stop believing in the Keynes’ Brains. My latest column for @folha Available on my Substack:
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
6 years
@RyanTAnd @Heritage Dear Dr. Anderson, I am astonished that you gave a platform to radical feminists and conservatives, but did not have an actual transgendered person to reply.. Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
7 months
Universal Basic Income? The word “universal” is only one of UBI’s problems.  It’s wholly impractical to give much to literally everyone. My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo. Also on my Substack:
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
@majavonwestphal I understand. I waver, but in the end it seemed irresponsible for a safely old and well positioned person like me to not reply to him. He does not believe in anyone's liberty.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
8 months
A true er liberalism, then, should promise in the race of life only an equality of permission.  Wherever you start the race you may, as the sporting British put it, “have a go.” My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo. Also on my Substack:
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
If you want to humanize yourself in a hurry, and shame yourself into getting a real education, buy and read Clive James' Cultural Amnesia
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
9 years
@Noahpinion @ZeevKidron Except that Professor Smith in his "critique" of my review bragged that he did not read the review.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Bagehot (1855): " a man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea."
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
1 month
Watch Out for Lawyers Lawyers think that if there’s a problem, the solution is to pass a law that coerces people into doing good. Check out my latest Substack post.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Econ grads think that “empirical” means #econometrics with #significance testing. It means in Greek "experience": simulate, compare, memory
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Novels draw economists into thinking about meaning, and away from mere rat behavior, as for example A House for Mr. Biswas drew Bob Lucas.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
"Capitalism" is a misleading word, making us think that "K" (physical or human) must be central. What does accumulate is savoir faire.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
Crossing, about my transition from Donald, is free June for download at the U of Chicago Press. Mom: "Don't do anything more interesting"!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
And this is the positive volume, telling how we can get out of the behaviorist hole 0676668.html
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Capital depreciates, rather rapidly, whether a house or a woman (I'm telling you!). It can't accumulate over centuries, so can't explain us
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
The 3rd vol is called The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Ethical, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect. Order early!!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
Dears: I finally remembered my password, so I'm back being active again! Stupid, eh?
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
That we insist on ruminating on something called “capital” does not mean that its accumulation was in fact unique to modernity.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Wallerstein: “capitalism is . . . from capital. It would be legitimate therefore to presume that capital is a key element." No.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Cromwell, frustrated by the Scottish Presbyterians, wrote : “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
My dad was also a professor, and one time he said to a good but narrow grad student. "This summer read 30 first-rate novels." It worked.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
6 years
@genino1831 @larepublica_co Human capital is owned by the workers, so Piketty measures "capital"and its ownership incorrectly. Try my article
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Stop pretending "we" can "make policy" by "measuring" "happiness." Lit and phil and art explore it, not 1, 2, 3 http://t.co/vnHaTV5p
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
11 years
While I get my hip joints replaced in July I'll finish The Bourgeois Era, the third and final volume. And get a Boxed Set, and die happy!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
I'm off Picasso, and game theory, tired of "life is terrible," and "we cheat." Matisse, Chagall affirm life, like Ostom, V. (& A.) Smith
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
8 years
@nickschulz @JimPethokoukis Dear Mr. Schultz: Try reading the arguments in Bourgeois Dignity and Bourgeois Equality before judging, yes?
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Well, here I am on Twitter. I feel sooooo cool and up-to-date!
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Why not liberty? “Vested interests.” But liberty and dignity yield 100 fold. Only ideas can explain the success, and the failures.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
And so I am determined to read in Greek at least Bk. 1 of The Iliad, "μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ." Hold me to it.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
@mwickstrom40 It's not hard. Every cell of my body says XY. It's what you wish to infer from the fact that's the problem. Likewise certain sequences of DNA yield black skin. It's what people do with the undoubted fact that that makes for unchristian and anti-liberal treatment.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
For example, the Great Fact of growth, 1800 to now, a factor of 100 per person belies K accumulation or imperial exploitation, right or left
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
@Still_Mark_Rami Just a little personal news, close together. Can you see that both are painful, but one gives hope, he other despair?
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Gobbled up Netfliks #HouseofCards , very well done, tho dark, dark. On to the old BBC version, and see that it is the Bard's Macbeth updated
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
2 years
@floydt123 Your Biblical scholarship is defective, unhappily. do look into it. I take it your Greek is up to snuff? Have any Hebrew? Surely you must, considering your certitude. And I take you are an orthodox Jew, and have not merely selected a few out of the 614 commandments?
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
6 years
@genino1831 @larepublica_co It is not true over any long time that human capital has grown slower than physical. Workers own it. So ignoring it biases the case. As to envy, it is surely the basis of much of socialism, if not your personal version. See
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
The Master: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets.” No. Ideas, images, ethics, metaphors, stories. Not K but ? & !
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
#humanomics says that we know about the economy from more than meaningless t test or existence theorem. Novels, philosophy, watching.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
7 years
@GavinMarguerite @PrudentiaMag Dear Ms. Gavin, Thank you so much for your kind words. As I write this, my aged mother (95) is listening to your elegant voicing.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
7 years
@GavinMarguerite @PrudentiaMag I have an account of my transition, published in 1999 by the U of Chicago Press. You would be ideal for the second half. Male for first.
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@DeirdreMcClosk
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
12 years
Google "McCloskey Probreza de Boldizzoni" for a review of The Poverty of Cliometrics. The review is in English.
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