Final part of McCloskey's trilogy on political economy is here
April 23, 2016 4:43 PM   Subscribe

Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication University of Illinois at Chicago, published The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce in 2007.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World followed in 2011.

Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World was published on 21 April 2016.

The sum of the pages in the three books is close to 2000.

She makes a long argument for some bold claims. For example:

The upshot since 1800 has been a gigantic improvement for the poor, yielding equality of real comfort in health and housing, such as for many of your ancestors and mine, and a promise now being fulfilled of the same result worldwide—a Great Enrichment for even the poorest among us. (.pdf file Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World on her web page.)

Review in Financial Times. (If you are not a subscriber to FT you will have to go to google first before you can load this page.)

Review in Times Higher Education.

.pdf file of the Table of Contents and Introduction to Volume 3.

youtube lecture at the Legatum Institute. (You might want to skip the academic introduction and the introduction of the introducer which eat up six minutes; her talk is 25 minutes; then there is 50 minutes of discussion.)

previously
posted by bukvich (36 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
this nice profile of her came out last month.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 4:48 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also, she really hates p-values.
posted by escabeche at 5:09 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


McCloskey is very learned and maybe even brilliant but she goes on my list of SQWs, status quo warriors, next to Steven Pinker, who is equally Wrong, mostly as a result of bad initial assumptions clouding their research. I would like to sit down and read all this though.
posted by dis_integration at 5:26 PM on April 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


skip...the introduction of the introducer

We're trying to have a civilization, here.
posted by thelonius at 5:44 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


A world run by the bourgeois is much, much better than the world run by the aristocrats of the Ancien Regime. But it's not the best we can do.
posted by clawsoon at 5:46 PM on April 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


A world run by the bourgeois is much, much better than the world run by the aristocrats of the Ancien Regime. But it's not the best we can do.

The bourgeois of today are tomorrow's aristocrats in pupa form, considering how our system is currently setup. Social mobility is basically non-existent in the US, while child poverty and death rates are some of the highest in the developed world. I'm pretty sure we can do a little better than this ... I mean, theoretically. Don't want to ruffle the feathers too much.
posted by gehenna_lion at 6:14 PM on April 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


The bourgeois of today are tomorrow's aristocrats in pupa form, considering how our system is currently setup. Social mobility is basically non-existent in the US, while child poverty and death rates are some of the highest in the developed world. I'm pretty sure we can do a little better than this ... I mean, theoretically. Don't want to ruffle the feathers too much.

We wouldn't want to ruin the world record attempts of the super rich who merely amass money for sport now, would we?
posted by Talez at 6:25 PM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


McCloskey is very learned and maybe even brilliant but she goes on my list of SQWs, status quo warriors, next to Steven Pinker, who is equally Wrong, mostly as a result of bad initial assumptions clouding their research. I would like to sit down and read all this though.

The Psychologists Take Power. This is a good article from the New York Review of Books detailing Pinker and company's role in helping to normalize torture/human experiments in US culture. SQWs are actually pretty dangerous, which is why I have a knee-jerk skepticism (some may even say, primitive empathetic revulsion) to the arguments they make.
posted by gehenna_lion at 6:49 PM on April 23, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is a good article from the New York Review of Books detailing Pinker and company's role in helping to normalize torture/human experiments in US culture.

That statement makes it sound like Pinker had a direct role in the APA's collusion with US torture. That is not the case, and is not stated in the article.

Shaw does make a very broad association that current psychology thinks about morality improperly (and implies it should be left to philosophers?) and does make a broad generalization that a band of psychologists who make what she sees as moral statements with imperfect foundations leads to bad things, which include both being wrong about stuff and in some cases, apologizing for torture. I'm in no way convinced by her argument, but she is not saying that Pinker legitimized torture.
posted by feckless at 8:22 PM on April 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


That statement makes it sound like Pinker had a direct role in the APA's collusion with US torture. That is not the case, and is not stated in the article.

No, it's not specifically stated in the article. I think that came from my own memory of when the torture reports were revealed, and the Ferguson protests were happening, Pinker went on a news media tour talking about how violence was actually declining, the media was blowing things out of proportion, and things are just as good as ever. Which seemed pretty suspect to me at the time.

To find out he belongs to the same cadre (Seligman and Positive Psychology) that first formulated the torture plan for the CIA made me link the two together. Which I don't think is particularly surprising. Deidre McColoskey herself has spoken well of Positive Psychology, which I don't think is surprising, either.
posted by gehenna_lion at 8:37 PM on April 23, 2016


Here's an example of what I'm talking about re: Pinker. I couldn't turn on a TV set or open a news article without hearing Pinker waving away the torture report or Ferguson protests. Which seemed strange since he was citing a book that was published 3 years earlier.

It reminds me of the line of thinking McCloskey is using. "Everything's great right now, don't mind ya know, all the bad shit happening all around us."
posted by gehenna_lion at 8:46 PM on April 23, 2016


I think it's fine to argue that Pinker, McCloskey, or anyone else is unduly downplaying current bad things in their thinking or arguments. But that is miles away from directly aiding torture -- as many did -- and I think that's a distinction worth preserving.
posted by feckless at 8:54 PM on April 23, 2016 [8 favorites]


Doesn't downplaying something constitute aiding? It's not like doing nothing, or doing some other irrelevant thing. It's not as close to the commission as directly aiding, but it's still participating in the entirety of the endeavor.

It's like you have a group of people breaking into a car, and you're walking down the street. One person who's part of the group breaking in takes you to the side and talks to you to distract you while the crime is being committed. That person isn't actively breaking into the car, but don't you think that's aiding in the crime rather than doing nothing?
posted by gehenna_lion at 9:04 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


Pinker is questionable about a number of things but I've often read his argument about violence as a response to the reactionary notion that the world is slipping into chaos.
posted by atoxyl at 9:11 PM on April 23, 2016


Pinker is questionable about a number of things but I've often read his argument about violence as a response to the reactionary notion that the world is slipping into chaos.

I'm going to stop thread sitting after this, but can you cite sources that demonstrate this notion? I'm a news junkie and I've never really encountered this, outside of local news doing its gross job of only reporting local news on street crime. What I have encountered, though, are conservatives who criticize "victimologists" speaking out against racism, misogyny, and war crimes.

I think that might be the "slipping into chaos" Pinker is talking about, see: article I posted where he makes special mention of crimes against women, black people, and children as declining, so apparently things are just OK in the world (dismissing, of course, what happened in Ferguson that year, and the spate of high-profile rapes, and the release of the torture report, which made his special news media blitz tour seem a little too apt in its timing).

Which dovetails nicely with his association with Seligman, who apparently started Positive Psychology to counter feminists, black activists, and anti-war protestors in the 1960s. And Pinker's own hatred of postmodernism which gives people too much leeway to think and determine things for themselves, I guess.
posted by gehenna_lion at 9:20 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


It can, although I don't think this particular case is that clear-cut.

But specific psychologists actually directly participated in the United States' use of torture, and others directly enabled the policies backing that torture. That's a pretty serious situation that the APA and the field should be grappling with.

Steven Pinker, as far as anyone knows, did not do those things, and to my knowledge has never been accused of those things.
posted by feckless at 9:21 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


From the Guardian piece I think it's safe to say Diedre McCloskey is some sort of religious libertarian. The volume is actually titled, "Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World". It sounds naive, dated, reductive, anti-science, like a false dichotomy, and so on. It sounds like a poorly constructed idea, to me.
posted by polymodus at 9:41 PM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Found an interview from 2014 that compares McCloskey's worldview with Piketty's. Interesting reading.
posted by polymodus at 9:55 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]


I know about Steven Pinker only through a Philosophy of Mind and Language course in graduate school, and am (unpleasantly) unsurprised to hear that he is another one of those sciencey-types-who-overlap-with-philosophy who decided to stuff a whole team of feet in his mouth and talk about shit he has absolutely no business discussing, and failed miserably at not being an asshole in the doing.

Sigh. Thanks metafilter.
posted by zinful at 9:58 PM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Okay so I think I did actually sort Steven Pinker's politics incorrectly in my mind - you can certainly find him taking shots (at a bit of distance) at Black Lives Matter for example. I was not adequately familiar with the source and should have kept my mouth shut. The characterization as a status quo warrior - fighting the notion that something is amiss on both the left and the right - seems appropriate. At the same time I can't really believe you're unfamiliar with the popularity of the idea that the world is fallen, lawless, in decline among right-wing authoritarians.
posted by atoxyl at 10:00 PM on April 23, 2016


She's an idiot of if she thinks that middle class' influence was so wonderful but doesn't see the widening income inequality gap as a serious problem. The whole point is that what's happening is that the middle class is being hollowed out. The bourgeoisie aren't running the show anymore, and that's undoing all these years of progress at a very rapid pace.

I've never understood the Marxist contempt for the middle class. I feel like that's an area where Marxist analysis comes up short for describing the contemporary American scene. But that's an area where I'm out of my depth.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:32 PM on April 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


polymodus one of McCloskey's strongest claims is that Piketty is an incompetent economist who misrepresents what the Supply and Demand argument taught in freshman economics class means. I will dig up a cite if anybody GRARs on it but she has gone all around the world and said nearly literally* Piketty is a crummy economist. It ought to be like one of the top two or three results in a google search.

*nerliterally
posted by bukvich at 12:07 AM on April 24, 2016


I've never understood the Marxist contempt for the middle class.

As a guy who (too) often got to play the "middle-class", the "bourgeoisie" in many dorm-like discussions I think I kind of do. They (we) won't mount the barricades, throw the bricks and the molotovs, take the gravel-fire and grape-shot with our bodies, etc. There would always come a time in every discussion wherein the formerly rational people I was discussing with and listening to would turn to me with hatred and fear in their eyes and vituperative and ad-hominem attacks, acting like vampires just shown a crucifix. I didn't understand, I lacked fervor, pep, etc.

I'm from the south side of Chicago. When some third person plays the "You and him should fight" game, 99 percent of the time you are being chumped. It calls to mind my thoughts in the 60's - I often felt it was ... odd? ... that all those Marcuse students and acolytes wound up doing hard prison time, or worse, but ol' Herb, he just chuckled and hopped along like Brer Rabbit.
posted by Chitownfats at 12:34 AM on April 24, 2016 [12 favorites]



It's like you have a group of people breaking into a car, and you're walking down the street. One person who's part of the group breaking in takes you to the side and talks to you to distract you while the crime is being committed. That person isn't actively breaking into the car, but don't you think that's aiding in the crime rather than doing nothing?


That simile has a phd from the university of being terrible
posted by Sebmojo at 12:49 AM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Her How to Be Human* *Though an Economist is a wonderful book too.
posted by chavenet at 1:47 AM on April 24, 2016


That simile has a phd from the university of being terrible

It's far from perfect, but if someone adds anything to the commission of an act, which includes distraction or downplaying, then I think it constitutes aiding, whether intentional or unintentional. It's a matter of degree and closeness of connection, as opposed to a black or white "yes" or "no". So it's not really a Ph.D. from University Terrible, more like a Ph.D. from University Basic Reasoning.
posted by gehenna_lion at 5:29 AM on April 24, 2016


In the half-century or so when the bourgeois had near-total control - a half-century which occurred at different times in different countries - the result was a horror show. The dark, satanic mills of London and Manchester, the debtors' prisons, the workhouses for the poor, the children crawling into coal mines, the children having their fingers mangled in machinery, the famines in India and Ireland which were greatly worsened by strict bourgeois adherence to market principles (shipping grain out of those nations during famine because higher bidders could be found elsewhere), etc., etc., etc., etc. - these were all expressions of pure bourgeois rule without a counterweight.

To move the setting forward a century and a half, South Korea is a recent convert to bourgeois control, and you can read about some of the results in a recent thread.

At least one of the links brought up Adam's Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" as a defense. No true bourgeois would participate in this immoral horror! But when the bourgeois were given pure power in practise, whether it was by restricting the vote to people who had at least a minimum level of wealth, or whether it was via an alliance with the military, the result has usually been similarly ugly.

What has saved bourgeois rule from itself has been socialism and full democracy. Every bourgeois nation has had to adopt a healthy dose of socialism and has had to transition to full democracy - and, conversely, every socialist nation has had to adopt a healthy dose of democracy and bourgeois values - in order to avoid having its legitimacy destroyed by the horror of its reign.
posted by clawsoon at 5:54 AM on April 24, 2016 [10 favorites]


Here's an interesting write-up on McCloskey that connects with clawsoon's comment:

Anti-Happyism and the defence of bourgeois freedom
posted by gehenna_lion at 6:03 AM on April 24, 2016


the upper middle-class is making great sport out of buying up single-family homes to rent out.

if I were in the Directorate this class of people would be the first in the tumbrels.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:42 AM on April 24, 2016


I've read through her executive summary (the pdf) and some other articles. What I see is problematic because her writing itself is rhetorical and sophistic. It panders to existing intellectually weak libertarian thinking, and for example distorts or at least subverts some key Marxian lines of thought, but buried under that are several distinct, and well, nevertheless interesting, resyntheses of prior debates.

The irony being, only the non-bourgeois might begin to unpack all this subtext and separate the sophistry from the ideas.
posted by polymodus at 12:12 PM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Thanks for the primer clawsoon. Coming from a culturally working class family that aspired to middle or upper class status, and not being familiar in detail with the Marxist arguments your explanation is helpful/illuminating.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:07 PM on April 24, 2016


On a different day, saulgoodman, I might make the opposite argument. :-) There's plenty of good that has come from the "everybody must become middle class" proselytizing urge, and it's definitely better, in my mind, than the "most people must be peasants so that we can be lords" attitude of the pre-bourgeois era. Economic mobility is a great bourgeois contribution to the social contract.

Relevant here is Martin Luther King Jr.'s metaphor of the cheque written by the Founding Fathers - bourgeois all - who said that everybody is equal but who somehow didn't get around to making that true as long as only people like them had the vote. (In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check...) Bourgeois ideas and ideals weren't monolithic, and the best of those ideals were crowded out by the worst of them when only the bourgeois had power.

I'm not familiar in detail with Marxist arguments myself - especially considering that there are people who have dedicated years of their lives to parsing his every word - but at his best he's a great writer who makes you think. The first part of the Communist Manifesto is definitely worth a read - not too long, punchy writing, and a combination of hate and admiration for the bourgeois shines through. You should read it. :-)

And what is the bourgeoisie anymore, anyway? Not the same class of people that it was in Marx's time, and his bourgeois was different from that a couple of centuries previous. That's part of what makes these discussions slippery: Everybody (including both me and the author ☺) can attach various wide or narrow and pleasant or unpleasant connotations to the word from a pretty big universe of possibilities, and all of us can end up being correct in our own definitional bubbles. Is the bourgeois everybody who's urban and middle-class (the broadest definition)? Is it the people who own and run businesses plus the lawyers who help them (a Marxist-ish definition)? Is it anybody with boring middle-brow tastes (the definition used by mocking well-educated leftists)?

Coming from a culturally working class family that aspired to middle or upper class status

I'm not sure how I would class the family I grew up in. Looking in, you'd say "working class", but there were also peasant and educated-middle-class elements mixed in there. Growing up, I definitely assumed I was middle class, and my parents didn't correct me. And my tastes are a mix of bourgeois and redneck. What does that make me?
posted by clawsoon at 5:08 PM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I have an even longer rant about how the author is wrong that all the wonders of the modern world were produced because the bourgeois was unleashed, but I won't go into detail here. The bourgeois has been unleashed before - in Carthage, in ancient Athens, even at various points in Chinese history - but it didn't lead to the average person getting thousands of times more stuff. There's a whole intersection of things converging on the steam engine that the bourgeois were an important part of, but I'd argue that they weren't the necessary and sufficient ingredient.
posted by clawsoon at 5:09 PM on April 24, 2016


Sounds like your cultural background's similar to mine. My parents left me to be raised by my grandparents, a sharecropper from Alabama and an unmarried pregnant teen fleeing an abusive family. They were dirt poor starting out but briefly enjoyed upper middle class incomes as business owners, then ended up busted. But my real mom was German and I lived with her family (mostly with my grandmother and uncle) until my grandparents kidnapped me when I was five.

I have no idea what my class is now, but homeless and broken down seems to be where I'm headed since my wife left me and I lost my job. Ironically, my life has completely fallen apart since I started living healthier and kicked an addiction I developed for a couple of years about four years ago. America is nuts.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:02 AM on April 25, 2016


Sorry to hear that! One thing I am thankful for is a (mostly) boring childhood, which is its own kind of privilege.
posted by clawsoon at 7:45 AM on April 25, 2016


Isn't there some finer distinction that can be made here, between, perhaps, the "bourgeoisie", and what I would call "merchant princes"? Between beneficiaries of the status quo, and ruthless maintainers of the status quo? I mean, plenty of blame to go around, but some innocence too, right?

(PS. saulgoodman, man, pull up! PULL UP!)
posted by Chitownfats at 9:10 AM on April 25, 2016


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