Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is an emerita distinguished professor of economics and of history, and professor of English and of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of sixteen other books, including If You're So Smart, The Secret Sins of Economics, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Crossing: A Memoir, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
"It has always seemed to me that history is overdetermined, so any
attempt to pick out a single cause will be doomed, and yet
McCloskey's insistence on the essential role of what she variously
calls ideas, ideology, ethics or rhetoric--the social acceptability
of bourgeois folk engaging honourably in business--is persuasive. .
. . Bourgeois Equality is richly detailed and erudite, and it will
join its companion volumes as essential reading on the industrial
revolution, as well as a model of the intellectual depth and
breadth achievable through the study of economics."--Diane Coyle
"Financial Times"
"It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the
third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books,
absorbing Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships,
Tubes, sofas and beds. If that sounds like faint praise, it's not.
I wanted to savour every sentence of this remarkable feast of
prose. It is a giant of a book about a giant of a topic: the 'great
enrichment' of humanity over the past 300 years. It is so rich in
vocabulary, allusion and fact as to be a contender for the great
book of the great book of our age. Dump your copy of Thomas Piketty
and put Deirdre McCloskey on the bookshelf instead."--Matt Ridley
"The Times, Book of the Week"
"McCloskey has spent a long and distinguished career asserting the
efficacy of free markets in goods and labour. . . . Unusually
versed in philosophy and literature, she has acted as something of
a domestic chaplain for the Chicago school of economists,
ministering to the spiritual state of Homo economicus. . . .
McCloskey is at her best in arguing that economics and ethics are
mutually important but largely autonomous spheres of human
endeavour."--Jeffrey Collins "Times Literary Supplement"
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