On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Deirdre McCloskey, who is Distinguished Scholar, Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This episode explores Prof. McCloskey’s criticism of the way the discipline of economics has unfortunately been separated from matters of ethics, the importance of liberal values for human progress, and her calls for a human-centered approach to economics called ‘humanomics’.
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The Guest
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is the Distinguished Scholar, Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After getting her PhD in economics at Harvard, she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. She has written twenty‐four books and some 400 academic and popular articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.
McCloskey’s recent books include The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019), and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Transcript
Mark Pennington
Welcome to the Governance Podcast here at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Mark Pennington and I’m the Director of the Centre. I’m very pleased to have with me today Professor Deirdre McCloskey. Deirdre is Distinguished Fellow and holder of the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. She’s also a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics and History, and Professor Emeritus of English and Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She’s the author of many books, the most recent of which is Bettering Humanomics: A New and Old Approach to Economic Science, which is published by the University of Chicago Press. It’s very good to have you with us here today.
Deirdre McCloskey
Well, I’m extremely pleased to be here. I’m only sorry that it didn’t overlap with the Queen’s Jubilee. And the New Zealand test match.
Mark Pennington
Right? Well, that’s next weekend, I believe. So certainly the Jubilee is. And we’re going to be in the middle of what purports to be one of the biggest national rail strikes for two years over that period. So I wonder if we could start off just by talking about the new book Bettering Humanomics and think about this theme of Humanomics that you address there? So my sense in reading the book is that you really have two themes. One is thinking about what might be the best way to defend, broadly speaking a liberal order of society based on open markets, or what you’d refer to as trade tested betterment. And connecting that with debates in essentially the methodology of social science or the methodology of economics in particular. So your argument seems to be that the kind of economics that people practise is both inaccurate in many ways, but also that it lacks a kind of capacity to inspire people to believe in a liberal order. And the liberal order at the moment seems to be under threat from multiple directions. So I wonder if we could start by thinking about what are the threats to the liberal order as you see them and then sort of try to work through how the role of ideas relates to that?
Deirdre McCloskey
Well, the obvious threats are Putin in Ukraine. And I think the advantage of the astounding success of the Ukrainians is that it’s made clear even to people who are not paying attention to politics, or certainly not high political theory. But the issue is not really left or right. It’s a liberal society versus a tyranny. But yeah, the threats are, are myriad, as you point out, in my own country, I don’t need to remind people after the horrible shootings because now it gets to be every week in Buffalo, Denton, Texas, that there is a threat from the right elbow again, it’s not the right, it’s populism, more than anything else. It’s the idea that a man on a white horse will make the nation great. Again, but of course, there are threats to liberalism from the left as well. People are founding a new university, called the University of Austin, that tries to make a space where people can talk free of the threats from both the left and the right to sweet talk, as I call it. And I think we need more sweet talk, we need to get back to real liberalism. But the problem is that the programme isn’t quite the word but the attitudes that the men and women on the white horse are blank, are more inspiring. I was once myself as a socialist and I know more socialist songs than my socialist friends. Voluntary slavery has an appeal to people. They came from families, which are socialist enterprises or authoritarian enterprises. And it was, it was comfortable to be a child. So, we people who believe in non-slave societies need to inspire people. Again. It happened once. So maybe we can do it again.
Mark Pennington
But could you say a little bit about how you think that sort of inspirational model, if you like, or way of talking about liberalism, how has that been lost? Is it that people in positions of political authority, who are partly informed by people from universities have become taken over by a sort of technocratic mindset? Or is it something else? What’s the process which has meant that liberalism has become uninspiring?
Deirdre McCloskey
There are two sides of the non-liberal coin. One is the decision by economists, i.e., ‘economists and calculators’ as Burke, expressed it, to banish ethical, and persuasive, emotionally persuasive talk from their enterprises. This became solid in economics in the 1930s. So, the economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman claimed to be doing positive economics. We’re just scientists here, don’t worry, there’s no ethical matter here. We’re not preaching. Even my friend James Buchanan preached all the time and was hostile to preaching. And on the other hand, more widely, Marx still lives. And it’s thought to be nice to poor people, to treat them as children instead of allowing them to have jobs. And I’m quite shocked, by the way here in London for a few days, of how many people I see sleeping rough. See, it’s even more than in Chicago. And it’s, it’s appalling that, that these, it’s not that they can’t find jobs. It’s that the social safety net, as people conceive it, organised by the state has made employment and housing much harder to get.
Mark Pennington
Well, it’s funny you say that, because the situation here now is very, in some ways, quite odd, because the official unemployment rate, it was actually very low. It’s like 3.2%, the lowest in a very long time. However, there are very large numbers of people who’ve actually left the workforce, partly after Covid. I mean, it’s like there are millions of people and quite a lot on what to call out of work benefits. It’s the same in the States. Now, the people that you see on the street, and I agree, that is very shocking. I’m not sure what the situation is there, whether those are people who are on benefits, or outside of the societies
Deirdre McCloskey
I I don’t think they’re on benefits at all. I think they’re, they have various kinds of problems. We have excluded them from ordinary unemployment insurance, which you’ve had since 1911. I mean, it’s exactly the same in the United States. They’re not exactly the same. But it’s, …
Mark Pennington
So you know, if you talk about how shocking this is to see, you know, the gut reaction of people, many people would think that capitalism is failing to provide for these people.
Deirdre McCloskey
Yeah, and I would say that it’s something like the opposite. Now this is speculation. I’m an economic historian. I haven’t done the homework on this. So I’m not afraid of it. But I would venture to say that there are more people sleeping rough in London now as a percentage of the population than there were in 1900. And the reason is that housing has become vastly more expensive relative to anything from urban planning, which is supposed to help people but ends up hurting.
Mark Pennington
Well, it’s funny you say that. Because I mean, I’ve been intrigued. We’ve had these arguments in the last week about the government introducing a windfall tax on energy companies. And part of the argument for that is the companies have done nothing to deserve the accidental circumstances which have caused a shortage in oil and gas and have driven up the price. But you could apply the same logic to people’s houses, the value of people’s houses has quadrupled in the last 20 years, not because of anything they’ve done. But because of the restriction in supply. And when people try to increase supply, many people object to that on various environmental grounds or other sorts of grounds. So there’s an interesting sort of mismatch, though, in the way that people see those issues.
Deirdre McCloskey
I was on a panel at the National Theatre a few years ago, and the audience was mainly left wing, I could tell by the pattern of applause. And I was not the most right-wing and I don’t consider myself right-wing. I’m liberal, so I’m not on the spectrum. But I’m classified as right wing. And when I said the housing crisis in England, and most particularly in London is caused by planning permission, they hissed. And I know that this inconsistent idea that you can cut the supply of housing, yet nonetheless somehow provide for the poor, was operating in their minds.
Mark Pennington
Yeah. Whether I mean, there are two, there are two things that have happened. There has been significant immigration. So you have lots of people coming in. But even before the immigration, this pattern of rising prices, and this is something I looked at in my PhD thesis. It’s been going on since the 1950s.
Deirdre McCloskey
I have a friend today who teaches at the LSE. He has a house in St. Albans that he bought in 1967, I believe. And he said he could, now with the channel. He could live in the north of France on a farm and commute to the school to teach every once in a while. St. Albans is not that close to London?
Mark Pennington
But let’s proceed this way. So if we think about that issue of how do you address the housing crisis, and relate it to this debate about how economics is communicated. Some people might argue that in order to explain to people the nature of that crisis, they do need to be able to understand sort of supply and demand, the impact that controls and regulations might have, perhaps in quite a technical way. Well, is that right? Or is there another way?
Deirdre McCloskey
No it’s not right and it’s too hard. Look, I’m not a natural economist. I’ve been an economist since I was a second-year student and at University and Harvard College. I love economics, and I practise it, isn’t that wonderful. But it took me years to understand something as simple as the idea that prices, according to economists (and they’re correct) are matters of efficiency, not of justice. That none of your acquaintances pays the same for milk as you do is not just, I suppose. You might think it’s not just, but if you don’t do it, the supply of milk is grossly distorted and goes to the wrong people.
So no, it’s too hard. And as you can see, it’s too hard. From the amazing popular success of books like Thomas Piketty on inequality and Mariana Mazzucato on industrial planning. And, as I’ve said about Piketty in a recent review in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement), it’s based on extremely bad technical economics. But that doesn’t matter, it appeals. So the appeal of liberalism has to be through artists, through rock musicians, through filmmakers, through the people that you and I as academics might influence. But they’re the ones who tell the stories, and it’s through stories. Stories like the occasional Hollywood product in praise of entrepreneurship, and supply and demand. More commonly, the corporate executives in Hollywood produce movies attacking corporate executives. So there’s this kind of ‘Marxoid’ atmosphere that says ‘aren’t you in favour of helping the poor and aren’t you a terrible person if you don’t agree with statism?’
Mark Pennington
So what you’re saying is you need a sort of counter vision as a sort of counter set of images, or rhetorics or plays or productions. That strikes me as being a very long-term project. Does it hold out any hope for the immediate future? If we have to wait that long?
Deirdre McCloskey
Well, the truth is that most people accede to voluntary trade in their ordinary lives. They get indignant when the price of what we Americans call gas, and you can stop and get gas with your food in the United States. Or when their rent goes up or something, and then I start using these, what I’m calling ‘Marxoid’ complaints that the working class is being exploited. But for the most part, when they buy Cadbury’s whole nut. And I tell you, they make an imitation of whole nut, in the United States, and it was nothing like the one here, so I’ve been gobbling it up here. They don’t object, they find it fine. And when they get paid for their services, they say, oh, that’s, that’s good. I deserve this. So that basic, non-statist assumption is strong. And it’s, I think it’s especially good, it’s a mixed bag, but it’s especially strong in Britain and in the United States. In France, it’s not so obvious.
Mark Pennington
I wonder if I could explore what I think are the events of the last couple of years. But maybe, maybe it goes back further than that, that I think there might be a bit of a tension there. Or at least what I’m seeing in the culture, and that is, what you’re suggesting is that, in a sense, a kind of ideological messaging is what’s really important. And you’re suggesting that some of the opponents of liberalism who have been successful have that messaging, which is inspiring. But one of the things that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, is this suggestion that we ought to follow science on things. I certainly saw this in terms of the response to the pandemic. And in a number of spheres of life, people will say, you’re being ideological, you are not pursuing science. So on the one hand, you’re saying people respond to mission statements and ideological visions. But on the other hand, there seems to also be this demand in the public culture to know what science says. How do you square those things?
Deirdre McCloskey
Well, you know, Harry Collins, the great sociologist of science here at Cardiff, and I are in the midst of a paper on exactly this issue. There is scientific truth that we need to pay attention to, and I think there is in science and economic science and historical science and, and biological science and so forth. But it’s not truth with a capital T. It’s not, such as will be revealed. As an Anglican like me thinks at the second coming. It’s provisional and revisable. And certainly in the UK, in the Covid-19 pandemic, the revisions have been striking in contrast to the calls to follow the science because the science keeps wobbling a bit. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to it. But it does mean that it’s not a knockdown argument. And the problem is to explain, as we were saying before, the problem is to explain technicalities of epidemiology or economics. And if it’s just too hard, it’s too hard for people to understand uncertainties in modelling in both epidemiology and economics. It was hard for me, it’s hard for them. And I’m a PhD, I have a PhD in economics. So I can understand them. But it’s hard to explain. So we need to not dismantle science or to think, oh, well, it’s just a bunch of talks at universities. They don’t actually know anything. There’s an awful lot of talk like that, for example, when the Queen complained to the LSE economist back in about 2008 that they hadn’t predicted the great recession. She was just completely misunderstanding what economists can do. They can’t predict the future, although they’re constantly being asked to do exactly that.
Mark Pennington
Well, that’s I mean, that’s an interesting point. Because, again, there seems to be another tension, if you think of the public discussion in the UK, but I think this has been true in the United States as well over the last five to ten years. There’s a minister in the current government, Michael Gove, who was scolded by other people for saying, people have had enough of experts. This was prior to the Brexit referendum vote. But at the same time, that also seems to be if you like, as well as we have this kind of popular suspicion of experts. You also have a populist demand for experts. A lot of people out there who think that oh, well, surely the experts know what the science tells us, whether it’s about economic problems, or public health problems or any other problem and the idea that there might be complexity that we don’t know, isn’t something people want to recognise.
Deirdre McCloskey
There’s populist simplifications on both sides. But that’s not fresh news about politics. So it has always been. The abandonment of the Corn Laws, in 1814 say, as the Duke said, ‘the damned rotten potatoes’. It had rational scientific elements to it, the rise of, of economics. But it was also an appeal to emotions of various kinds. And this is the way it ends there. And as you’re pointing out, they’re contradictory. But, you know, do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. And if the self is the great British public, it’s completely unsurprising that they’re our country, even in the same mind. Contradictory images, a desire to admirable desire to help the poor combined with a belief in supposedly factual or scientific propositions such as that you can have a high minimum wage and that’ll help the poor, that actually hurt the poor or have protection of British Industry. Alas, our own president is a great improvement on the previous one but is also a protectionist the way Donald Trump was.
Mark Pennington
Yeah. I wonder if we could just sort of connect this back to the themes of the book and think about the role of economists here. So obviously, you would want to have, I think, a, in a sense, a larger role for economists in public life and debate, provided they’re communicating in a different way.
Deirdre McCloskey
It’s not just communication, it’s that they have to read and they don’t. Economists were once well-read intellectuals. And now they’re not. They’re specialists. And they feel perfectly justified in not reading any books. Your office is filled with books. And they’re not just about economics, they’re about politics in history, ethics, and various other things with philosophy. That’s how economists once were. And then, really, since the war, they have become extremely narrow. And it’s been so they, as I said, they’ve made this crazy decision that ethics has nothing to do with economics, which is insane. The blessed Adam Smith, au contraire, believed very strongly that the economy and ethics work together. So that’s why I call it a new and old way of thinking about economics because John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall and Adam Smith. And for that matter, John Keynes viewed economics as part of a larger conversation about what a society should be, and how people should act. And what a human life is. And that’s all been dropped.
Mark Pennington
Well, it’s interesting you say that, because even in what strikes me at the moment, it’s certainly in this country, I don’t know what it’s like in the United States. But here, it’s very striking that we’re in the middle of an inflation crisis, potentially. And yet, if you listen to the public media, economists’ voices actually are surprisingly absent. There are very few actual economists who seem to be equipped to even speak about inflation. Is that because only a very small number of people are actually specialised in monetary theory? Or is it more a sort of general reflection that the way that economics has moved. It’s actually quite far removed from practical policy type questions that actually affect the day-to-day way that people live their lives?
Deirdre McCloskey
Well, I think it’s true, it’s true of both, there’s been a specialisation in macro, which would have puzzled Keynes for example. And certainly Marshall. And then there’s an increasing technical burden of macroeconomics, which has become almost insanely so. There’s this great raising of the mathematical ante to be in this game, which is, is foolish. It’s not necessary to know a lot of real analysis, as it’s called, to be an economist and yet all economists are trained in it.
But there’s a third thing, which is that the current inflation is somewhat puzzling. There was an enormous increase we monetarists note, in the liquidity of the world economy for all kinds of reasons. I mean, the balances, the retained earnings of corporations these days are stunning. They sit with billions in their bank account. And yes, and consumer credit is very large. And there should have been inflation already. But there wasn’t. Now partly it’s because we made a big mistake, which I realised a long time ago. So it’s only true worldwide, not country by country. And my colleagues in macro keep talking about country by country. That’s the world we are in as though it were 1955 or something with import controls and investment controls and all kinds of things, making walls around economies.
Mark Pennington
So a lot of the money that’s been produced has actually gone all over the place.
Deirdre McCloskey
It’s gone into Chinese bank accounts in particular. And so I think there’s a coherent explanation for it. I’m very, made very uneasy by this claim that it’s supply restrictions and so on. I find that well, in a way, it’s not macroeconomics, it’s micro, it’s about supply restrictions, about relative prices, not about prices in general. So I, you can see that I’m somewhat confused about it. And so are all my colleagues. So wisely, they shut up.
Mark Pennington
But it is striking to me how, if you listen to the media, very few economists will be debating, for example, monetarism in the way that they were in the 1970s. We had a popular discussion about that. It wasn’t at the very technical level, but it was a discernible debate.
Deirdre McCloskey
Both Paul Samuelson and the Keynesian side. And my former colleague, Milton Friedman, on the monetary side had columns in the magazine, a very popular magazine, Newsweek, every two weeks, I think it was every two they tried doing columns. So there were, you know, it may be that there’s not a Milton Friedman or a Paul Samuelson out there. I mean, Paul Krugman and a few others tried to do that. But I don’t know, I think there was more faith in the predictive powers of economists then. And maybe less after the experience of the last 10 years. I don’t know. One could find out by public opinion survey.
Mark Pennington
Okay, let’s move on. I wonder if we could go to one of your arguments in this book, which sort of connects to one of the big themes of your work actually, over the last sort of ten, fifteen years or so. And that’s the role of institutions. So in this book, and also in the Bourgeois Trilogy, you’re very critical of what you call the Northian new institutionalist view.
Deirdre McCloskey
And even more so in a book, which is supposed to be out by now. It’s another volume, also from the University of Chicago Press.
Mark Pennington
We look forward to that. Maybe we could do a podcast on that as well. But you’re you’re very critical of this idea that the sort of rational choice, if you like, explanation of what institutions do, which in brief, the argument is, if you have institutions that are incentive compatible, where people know that they can keep the gains from any commercial activity that they’re engaged in, then you will have economic growth. Yeah, and your argument is: no, for institutions to function well, they actually need a surrounding set of ideas, of course, which actually legitimise things like entrepreneurial action. And what I wanted to ask you is, some critics would say:you’re going down the route of a purely sort of subjective explanation of things. So, you know, is it simply a matter of what people think in terms of whether an institution works? Or do institutions have some kind of real existence that actually makes a difference?
Deirdre McCloskey
They have a real existence. There’s a central criminal court in London, which I walked past yesterday on my way to St. Paul’s. And if the judge puts on the black cap, in the old days, your goose was cooked. So these things have real effects, of course they do. But they’re ‘well functioning’ as against their ‘nominal functioning’ every time depends on ideas, ethics, ideology.
You can give some tyrannical country all the lawyers in the country, white wigs, silk, even guns, but you won’t get English law. For with all its imperfections, you won’t get it. You can, you can build a parliament, as in Russia, right now you can have a parliament. But if the parliament is run by thugs, and there’s a grand thug in charge, it doesn’t work. This is a point that Tocqueville made and many other people have made that it’s the ‘spirit’.
It’s not just that they’re necessary, they’re often sufficient. You can have very crummy institutions or none, as in Hong Kong, after the war, in 1947, Hong Kong, and the so called mainland were at the same appalling one or two dollars a day income. Now, Hong Kong’s income is almost as high as that of the United States. And that wasn’t because there were all kinds of British institutions laid on. There were a few courts and English trained judges. And then Hong Kongers made their own law. Most business doesn’t depend on law, it depends on leaving people alone to make as reasonably ethical people, or at least people who see that if they cheat all the time, they’re not going to get they’re not going to stay in business. There’s this great intermediate area of what I called spontaneous order that in most other of our activities, except the economy, everyone agrees is enormously important. Language. Here we are speaking. There is no central planning. There is no planned, designed institution of English. And yet, surprise, surprise, here it is.
The same is true of friendship. Xi Jinping would like to regulate the friendship of his subjects, but we don’t do it in most countries. Music science, art, painting, has no central planner and no, it has institutions, the Tate or something. It’s nice, or St. Martin’s in the Field orchestra if that’s what you call it. But music and painting would evolve whether or not those institutions existed. If there’s a strong enough ethic of so-called progress in art or music, then the arts and sciences will evolve.
Mark Pennington
The reason I asked this, it actually connects into the issue that we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. So I’m thinking here about the if you’d like the enemies of liberalism, you would understand it, but people who talk about the importance of a mission commitment from the state or from other entities. I think some of them seem to be giving the idea that if only people believed in the mission commitment of the state, if only people believed in socialism, then it would actually work.
Deirdre McCloskey
Well. That’s the old argument under communism, of the nature of man under socialism. And it’s been tried. It’s not as if, as young people are always saying these days, well, you know, we ought to try socialism. It has been tried, we have splendid examples in Cuba and Venezuela, of trying socialism. And it doesn’t work. It’s terrible. It impoverishes people, we leave the people ignorant. So, no, it’s not the path forward, the path forward is to treat people like adults.
Mark Pennington
But to go back to the argument that what so what you’re saying is, it’s not purely ideas in the sense of, you know, certain ideas doesn’t matter how much people believe in them. They’re not going to work. But even institutions that are good, what you call trade-tested betterment, are only sort of activated to have their real effect if people believe in them.
Deirdre McCloskey
That’s right. And it happened once, after Adam Smith, but not entirely because of him, after the Scottish Enlightenment, not the French Enlightenment, the French Enlightenment emphasise reason, the reason half of enlightenment, but the Scottish Enlightenment emphasised liberty, which is the other half. We could have done without, for a long time, the reason half of the Enlightenment, which in fact, continued to develop into such horrors as Comtian positivism, and then into into socialism and fascism, indeed, if you like nationalism, and you like socialism, maybe you like National Socialism. That reason, idea that we can build the world anew, as though we know how to build the world is was a French idea, completely unsurprising. And the French had been exercising it for 100, a couple of 100 years before the French Revolution.
But up in Scotland, they could express skepticism.Adam Smith famously said, the man of the system believes that he can move people in a great society with the same ease as he can move pieces on a chessboard. And that statist conviction is an enemy of a free society.
Mark Pennington
So how though, do we actually know, you’re saying that it’s worked in the past? But it was a combination of institutions and ideas behind them to activate them. Now, reading your works, it strikes me that in many ways it was an accident. And when things are accidental, like that, how it doesn’t mean we can reproduce the accident.
Deirdre McCloskey
That’s true. It happened in Northwestern Europe in a tiny corner of this quarrelsome northwestern corner of the Eurasian landmass and could’ve happened in China, it could have happened in Japan or the Ottoman Empire, or probably northern India. But it didn’t. For a series of accidents, as explained in a, in a long, long book of mine called Bourgeois Equality. Things turned out right. The Protestant Reformation, which got the idea in people’s heads that they could take over their own religious life, and didn’t have to depend on priests. That’s its main effect, I think, so far, as far as liberalism is concerned, could have failed. If the Spanish Armada had landed on the South Coast of England, the best army in Europe, England could have gone back to being Roman Catholic. And Holland then would have been surrounded. And Protestants might have precedent and might have felt had the English Civil War not happened. If Archbishop Laud and Charles the Second had been reasonable people instead of fools, the idea as Richard Rumbold expressed when he was being hanged in Edinburgh, in 1685, would not have flourished the idea that I think there is no man born of God above another, for no man comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to write him without the American Revolution and the French Revolution. If you see what I mean, these, these all could have gone the other way.
Mark Pennington
But that raises, I think, a very interesting challenge. I mean, what I’m thinking back to the first of these podcasts I did, which was with Barry Weingast.
Deirdre McCloskey
He is a sweet man and a very intelligent man. But he’s a frenemy.
Mark Pennington
But he, I think, also recognises in some of his late, more recent work that the institutions that he advocates arose by accident. And I think, in a sense, the problem is for his theory, for your theory, but for anyone who values liberalism, is that in a way, this is quite a bleak view, because it means that we can’t necessarily plan how liberalism might happen in the future. If it happened by accident in the past, we don’t necessarily have a recipe for how we can make it happen again.
Deirdre McCloskey
That’s an excellent point, which hasn’t occurred to me and I’m so anxious to argue against historical determinists, like Marxists, or the left and conservatives on the right, it hasn’t occurred to me that an accident is precarious. But there are things we can actually do. The word “do” the problem, don’t just stand there, do something means you’re appealing to the state. Because the only thing available for us is the state.
But no, no, we should go on preaching, go on writing books, and hoping we can influence the country music writers and the filmmakers and the journalists. And as in country music, we say the rubber meets the road. It’s those people who we need to convince and convince isn’t the word I’d use, but persuade. And as you’re suggesting, there’s no guarantees even then, because as I keep saying, slavery is attractive. People grew up as children. So another word for liberalism would be adultism. And the trouble is that a lot of people don’t want to be adults. They’ll say, I want to be an adult but then they won’t want to accept the onerous responsibilities of paying child support or showing up for work. Or, you know, being a responsible mother.
Mark Pennington
So Deirdre, I wonder if you could say, just to sort of round off really, what’s next for you? Or do we have, you mentioned another book that’s coming out?
Deirdre McCloskey
Yeah, from the University of Chicago Press. It’s called Against Positivism or something like that. I forget that. And yeah, I’m working on a book on economic history, revisiting some work that I did as long ago as 50 years, I’m that old. And I’m three quarters of the way through that. And I’ve also got a book on theology aimed at theologians: God and Mammon, Public Theology for an Age of Commerce. And it’s attempting to persuade my progressive Christian friends. I mentioned I was an Anglican. That you don’t have to be a socialist to be a follower of Jesus Christ, or Mohammed, or the Hindu gods. You don’t have to be a statist. And then I’m going to do an autobiography. And I just gotta keep scribbling.
Mark Pennington
Well, I was gonna say, how do you have the time to actually produce this amount? What’s a typical day like?
Deirdre McCloskey
That’s the advantage of not having any speaking responsibility, not having any responsibilities to teach, which I haven’t had for a while. Although, you know, in a way we’re all teaching. And that’s kind of my point that we’re preaching. And we don’t just want to preach to the converted, we want to convert some people. I’m having some success. And so are you, Mark, in persuading some young people, a good many young people to think seriously. I have a column I’ve just started, for example, in the largest newspaper in Brazil, that’s been translated into Portuguese, and there’s a surprisingly large number of young students. People in Brazil, kids in Brazil, who are open to these arguments, because they’ve experienced populism and fascism and socialism in their lifetimes.
Mark Pennington
Yeah. Well, I’m certainly looking forward to reading the new books in the way I’ve enjoyed reading Bettering Humanomics and the Bourgeois Trilogy. So thank you very much, Deirdre. And hope to see you again soon.
Deirdre McCloskey
Thank you. I come to London every chance I get. A woman who is tired of London is tired of life.
Mark Pennington
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
