McCloskey, Deirdre. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.
What made us modern, and rich, was a change in ideology, or 'rhetoric.' First in little Holland and then in Britain a new dignity and liberty for the middle class freed innovation. A unique wave of gadgets, and then a tsunami, raised incomes from $3 a day to $30 a day and beyond. I try to show that the usual materialist explanations don't work — coal, slavery, investment, foreign trade, surplus value, imperialism, division of labor, education, property rights, climate, genetics. The most important secular event since the domestication of plants and animals depended on more than routine. It arose from liberties around the North Sea achieved in the civil and anti-imperial wars from 1568 to 1688, and above all from a resulting revaluation of bourgeois life. In recent decades China and then India have revalued their business people, and have thereby given hundreds of millions of people radically fuller lives. The modern world began in northwestern Europe, in the same way: ideas led. The book gently rejects the materialism typical of conventionally Marxist or economic approaches. Its ambition is to introduce a humanistic science of the economy - 'humanomics' - directing attention to meaning without abandoning behavior, using literary sources without ignoring numbers, combining the insights of the human and the mathematical sciences.
Discussed here: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s3096384.htm.
Showing posts with label Topics: Society: Economics: McCloskey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Topics: Society: Economics: McCloskey. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
McCloskey, Deirdre. "The Rhetoric of the Economy and the Polity, Whether or Not 'In Crisis.'" ANNUAL REVIEW OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 14 (2011)
The first thing to understand is that there is no world 'crisis,' not in the horror-movie form your newspaper implies. The 'crisis' was a fall of 3 or 4 percent in US national income peak to trough (as against ten times that amount from 1929 to 1933), by now made up. A high percentage of the new unemployed are Americans — unsurprisingly considering that the core optimism was overbuilding in the American Sun Belt (with supplements on the Spanish Costa del Sol and the Irish Coast of Much Rain). The panic of the Americano-centric crisis shifts like a balloon pressed down in one place, pushing up in another: Nevada, Iceland, Illinois, Estonia. But real incomes in the wider world are at all-time highs, and their rates of growth impressive. India, China, Australia, Chile in the past few years have done just fine.
'Crisis' comes from Greek krīnein, to separate, to judge, as at a trial, later extended to the decisive turning point of a disease, the turn towards death or recovery. Some people fear that our Great Recession of 2007-2009 is a prelude to death, the Last Crisis of Capitalism. The left regards such a death as a consummation devoutly to be wished, and has been heralding every recession since 1857 as The End. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed a couple looking back at a bearded man who had just walked past them in a prophet's robes, holding a sign: "The End is Still Near." Says the woman: "Wasn't that Paul Krugman?" During the 1980s the late Richard Rorty would go around claiming that the Savings-and-Loan "Crisis" was just that, the last judgment of capitalism. He could not be persuaded to think of it as a bad bet by owners of shopping malls, tiresome but normal in an innovative economy. "Dick, their bets proved wrong, and surely there was a good deal of scamming, too. But the magnitude relative to all economic activity is too small to be a world crisis, or even a national one. We Americans are selling Rockefeller Plaza to the gullible Japanese. Good for us. Quit worrying." "No, no: look at these amazing numbers. Billions, billions! Capitalism is finished!"
The rhetoric of a 'crisis' takes the headline today as the outcome tomorrow. Thus the Marxist geographer David Harvey points to the crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997 as typical of IMF-sponsored cuts in real wages (Harvey 2010). Fair enough. Yet he does not acknowledge the long-run good of the innovation thus secured — even in Southeast Asia, whose incomes for poor people now exceed what they were before the 'crisis.' The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 was followed by a decade of stagnation, true, and very nasty, though not the fault of the IMF. But now the real income per head of ordinary Mexicans is above its level in 1981, and is growing pretty smartly.
People want to think of our recent troubles as portentous, revealing deep scandals about the sinners amongst us, or to be exact amongst you-bad-not-us. The rhetoric sells newspapers, because we like being told that Bad People Did It. It is the master narrative of journalism, after all, from Rachel Maddow to John Stossel. The Democrats point to the greed on Wall Street during Bush II, and want you to draw the inference that Wall Street needs to be regulated much more closely. And anyway bankers are bums. They do not acknowledge that banking is already the most regulated industry in the country, and the stock market is not far behind. The Republicans point to the congressional instructions to Fanny May during the Clinton administration to offer mortgages to poor folks, and want you to draw the inference that subsidies to the poor are dangerous. And anyway the poor are bums. They do not acknowledge that Bush II also pushed for wider home ownership. . . .
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/polity.php
'Crisis' comes from Greek krīnein, to separate, to judge, as at a trial, later extended to the decisive turning point of a disease, the turn towards death or recovery. Some people fear that our Great Recession of 2007-2009 is a prelude to death, the Last Crisis of Capitalism. The left regards such a death as a consummation devoutly to be wished, and has been heralding every recession since 1857 as The End. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed a couple looking back at a bearded man who had just walked past them in a prophet's robes, holding a sign: "The End is Still Near." Says the woman: "Wasn't that Paul Krugman?" During the 1980s the late Richard Rorty would go around claiming that the Savings-and-Loan "Crisis" was just that, the last judgment of capitalism. He could not be persuaded to think of it as a bad bet by owners of shopping malls, tiresome but normal in an innovative economy. "Dick, their bets proved wrong, and surely there was a good deal of scamming, too. But the magnitude relative to all economic activity is too small to be a world crisis, or even a national one. We Americans are selling Rockefeller Plaza to the gullible Japanese. Good for us. Quit worrying." "No, no: look at these amazing numbers. Billions, billions! Capitalism is finished!"
The rhetoric of a 'crisis' takes the headline today as the outcome tomorrow. Thus the Marxist geographer David Harvey points to the crisis in Southeast Asia in 1997 as typical of IMF-sponsored cuts in real wages (Harvey 2010). Fair enough. Yet he does not acknowledge the long-run good of the innovation thus secured — even in Southeast Asia, whose incomes for poor people now exceed what they were before the 'crisis.' The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 was followed by a decade of stagnation, true, and very nasty, though not the fault of the IMF. But now the real income per head of ordinary Mexicans is above its level in 1981, and is growing pretty smartly.
People want to think of our recent troubles as portentous, revealing deep scandals about the sinners amongst us, or to be exact amongst you-bad-not-us. The rhetoric sells newspapers, because we like being told that Bad People Did It. It is the master narrative of journalism, after all, from Rachel Maddow to John Stossel. The Democrats point to the greed on Wall Street during Bush II, and want you to draw the inference that Wall Street needs to be regulated much more closely. And anyway bankers are bums. They do not acknowledge that banking is already the most regulated industry in the country, and the stock market is not far behind. The Republicans point to the congressional instructions to Fanny May during the Clinton administration to offer mortgages to poor folks, and want you to draw the inference that subsidies to the poor are dangerous. And anyway the poor are bums. They do not acknowledge that Bush II also pushed for wider home ownership. . . .
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/polity.php
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Seaton, James. "An Obvious Secret." THE WEEKLY STANDARD June 6, 2011.
McCloskey, Deirdre. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Deirdre McCloskey is well aware that the Western intellectual class—what she calls, following Samuel Coleridge, “the clerisy”—has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism. Since 1848, the most damning adjective among intellectuals from the radical left through the romantic right has been “bourgeois.” McCloskey also knows, and demonstrates beyond cavil, that such contempt has been not only mistaken but dangerous: She observes that “in actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters” while “their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama bin Laden, commonly have been.” The great anticapitalist tyrannies of the 20th century “killed many millions and nearly killed us all.” . . .
Meanwhile, even well-meaning attempts to interfere with free markets have almost always hurt rather than helped those needing help the most. McCloskey provides plenty of examples:
McCloskey will have none of it. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed out to Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were not really different except in having more money. McCloskey makes a similar observation about those with less: “The poor are not better than you and me. They’re just poorer.” Individual success in the market does not require another’s failure, so personal wealth is not an indicator of moral culpability: “Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime.”
Likewise, McCloskey briskly dismisses the clerisy’s use of imperialism as a blanket explanation for the gulf between the wealth of the industrialized nations and the poverty of what is still called the Third World: “Countries are rich or poor, have a great deal to consume or very little, mainly because they work well or badly, not because some outsider is adding to or stealing from a God-given endowment.” Or yet more pithily: “Countries where stealing rather than dealing rules become poor and then remain so.” The kleptocratic socialisms of the Third World, that is to say, have succeeded in preventing the embourgeoisement of their countries at the price of keeping the wretched of the earth wretched.
Others, of course, have made the case for capitalism as an instrument for creating wealth, but some of the most influential defenders have erred, McCloskey argues, in assuming that nothing more needs to be said. They have also erred in believing with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism that human beings are concerned with nothing but maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. On this view, courage, faith, justice, and the other traditional virtues are irrelevant and unnecessary, since the only virtue required for the good life is a narrow prudence. In the American academy for the last half-century the dominant view of capitalism was set by the late Paul Samuelson, whose “Samuelsonian economics” intimated that “the only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. Maximum Utility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character for Love—or any passion beyond Prudence Only.” Thus “in the late twentieth century even sophisticated capitalists came to recommend a devotion to Prudence Only, Wall Street’s ‘greed is good.’ ”
The clerisy properly rejects such an impoverished view of human beings, but falsely assumes that if Bentham and his intellectual descendants are wrong, then capitalism itself is wrong. Deirdre McCloskey is out to demonstrate that life under capitalism—bourgeois life—nourishes the virtues more than life under feudalism, socialism, or any other alternative. She claims that “actually existing capitalism, not the collectivisms of the left or of the right, has reached beyond mere consumption, producing the best art and the best people.” Even if capitalism were not able to do what almost all observers agree it does do—deliver the goods—McCloskey argues that it would, on moral grounds, still be the best economic and social system around: “Had capitalism not enriched the world by a cent nonetheless its bourgeois, antifeudal virtues would have made us better people than in the world we have lost.” . . .
Visit: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obvious-secret_571613.html?nopager=1.
Deirdre McCloskey is well aware that the Western intellectual class—what she calls, following Samuel Coleridge, “the clerisy”—has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism. Since 1848, the most damning adjective among intellectuals from the radical left through the romantic right has been “bourgeois.” McCloskey also knows, and demonstrates beyond cavil, that such contempt has been not only mistaken but dangerous: She observes that “in actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters” while “their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama bin Laden, commonly have been.” The great anticapitalist tyrannies of the 20th century “killed many millions and nearly killed us all.” . . .
Meanwhile, even well-meaning attempts to interfere with free markets have almost always hurt rather than helped those needing help the most. McCloskey provides plenty of examples:
Minimum wages protected union jobs but made the poor unemployable. . . . Zoning and planning permission has protected rich landlords rather than helping the poor. Rent control makes the poor and the mentally ill unhousable. . . . Regulation of electricity hurt householders by raising electricity costs, as did the ban on nuclear power. . . . The importation of socialism into the third world . . . stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor.
Today there should be little question that capitalism “works better for the average person, as we saw 1917-1989, than so-called central planning backed by a Cheka or a KGB.” The success of capitalism and the failure of central planning in improving the lot of ordinary citizens have not, however, diminished the clerisy’s attraction to government planning or its disdain for the market. Instead, the clerisy has claimed that the wealth of some in a world where others are poor is a sure sign of the sinfulness of the former and the innocence, if not sainthood, of the latter.
McCloskey will have none of it. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed out to Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were not really different except in having more money. McCloskey makes a similar observation about those with less: “The poor are not better than you and me. They’re just poorer.” Individual success in the market does not require another’s failure, so personal wealth is not an indicator of moral culpability: “Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime.”
Likewise, McCloskey briskly dismisses the clerisy’s use of imperialism as a blanket explanation for the gulf between the wealth of the industrialized nations and the poverty of what is still called the Third World: “Countries are rich or poor, have a great deal to consume or very little, mainly because they work well or badly, not because some outsider is adding to or stealing from a God-given endowment.” Or yet more pithily: “Countries where stealing rather than dealing rules become poor and then remain so.” The kleptocratic socialisms of the Third World, that is to say, have succeeded in preventing the embourgeoisement of their countries at the price of keeping the wretched of the earth wretched.
Others, of course, have made the case for capitalism as an instrument for creating wealth, but some of the most influential defenders have erred, McCloskey argues, in assuming that nothing more needs to be said. They have also erred in believing with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism that human beings are concerned with nothing but maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. On this view, courage, faith, justice, and the other traditional virtues are irrelevant and unnecessary, since the only virtue required for the good life is a narrow prudence. In the American academy for the last half-century the dominant view of capitalism was set by the late Paul Samuelson, whose “Samuelsonian economics” intimated that “the only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. Maximum Utility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character for Love—or any passion beyond Prudence Only.” Thus “in the late twentieth century even sophisticated capitalists came to recommend a devotion to Prudence Only, Wall Street’s ‘greed is good.’ ”
The clerisy properly rejects such an impoverished view of human beings, but falsely assumes that if Bentham and his intellectual descendants are wrong, then capitalism itself is wrong. Deirdre McCloskey is out to demonstrate that life under capitalism—bourgeois life—nourishes the virtues more than life under feudalism, socialism, or any other alternative. She claims that “actually existing capitalism, not the collectivisms of the left or of the right, has reached beyond mere consumption, producing the best art and the best people.” Even if capitalism were not able to do what almost all observers agree it does do—deliver the goods—McCloskey argues that it would, on moral grounds, still be the best economic and social system around: “Had capitalism not enriched the world by a cent nonetheless its bourgeois, antifeudal virtues would have made us better people than in the world we have lost.” . . .
Visit: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obvious-secret_571613.html?nopager=1.
Monday, February 15, 2010
McCloskey, Deirdre. "The Economic Sky Isn't Falling." PRUDENTIA December 16, 2009.
My non-economist friends keep asking me about an essay by Paul Krugman published on September 2, 2009 in the NY Times Magazine. It seems to be a summary of his old book on the "return to Depression economics." As usual with Paul, it's cute and lucid and 85% correct. And as usual the 15% that's not correct turns out to be pretty important.
The basic mistake that Krugman and many economists and most journalists make is to suppose that the present bad situation (any present bad situation) is a Crisis of Capitalism. It's not. It's a routine severe recession. I don't say that it's fun (or a vacation, as my former colleagues at the University of Chicago have it). I don't say that government should do nothing to offset it. But I do say, as an economic historian, that we should realize that it's happened forty times since 1800, and every time the average person and the very poor have ended up with higher real incomes than at the previous peak. Every single time. Even during the horrible governmental foul-up 1929-1941 in the US. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/editorials/krugman.php.
McCloskey, Deirdre. "Prudence, You No Longer Rule My World." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION January 14, 2010.
My first scientific eureka came when I was a sophomore at university, a very wise fool. As I started to learn the macho science of economics, I suddenly saw that mere prudence, "rationality", rules. Wow: that's so much simpler than attending to human meanings. Hurrah. Therefore, the sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists are idiots. . . .
I came to understand that the point of literary study is not merely to dole out stars for greatness. For another - you can see how it might be encouraged by an interest in the rhetoric of economics - I realised that literary, philosophical and narrative sciences (those sciences humaines) exhibit forms of knowledge not attainable by first-order predicate logic, or a system of axioms rich enough to contain arithmetic. For still another, I grasped that logics and axioms depend on such knowledge. And out of all this came the gobsmacking insight that language is more than the transmittal of bits of information. Language is a way of being human - the way of being human - a mobile army of metaphors (you might say). . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409967.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
McCloskey, Deirdre. "Sliding into PoMo-ism from Samuelsonianism." RETHINKING MARXISM (2008).
In an essay in Cullenberg, Amariglio, and Ruccio, eds. (2001) I went about as far as you can go in arguing that postmodernism wells up within modernism. I argued that the recent postmodernism we all celebrate was a response to a European modernism that arose about 1910---"modernism" being the conviction that We Have All the Answers Now, Because We Are Modern. You could see modernism around 1910 in The Rite of Spring, on the one hand, and the Hilbert Program of mathematics on the other. You could see it around 1980 in the physics and the architecture and the evening performances of string quartets at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. You can see it persisting into the 21st century in a Samuelsonianism that goes on and on asserting that there "must" be micro-foundations for macroeconomics, without telling us exactly why.
My main points in the 2001 essay were that (1.) there have been many modernisms, all of them bossy and elitist and wanna-be-aristocratic, starting with Plato; and that therefore (2.) there have also been many postmodernisms, such as the sophists (that is, the defenders of democracy) attacked by Plato. Augustine vs. Irish heresies. Bacon vs. Montaigne. French vs. Scottish Enlightenment. The pomo is rhetorical, casuistic, virtue-ethical, narrative, anti-elitist, and pragmatic. It challenges stable values in the sense of the values of convention, normal science, rich people, the given. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/pubs/pomo.php.
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