Economist Deirdre McCloskey to Give Rogge Lecture

Deirdre McCloskey will present the 2014 Benjamin A. Rogge Memorial Lecture at Wabash College. McCloskey’s lecture, “How Liberty and Dignity Made Us Rich,” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, November 13, in Baxter Hall, room 101.

In addition to her evening lecture, McCloskey will give a lunchtime presentation on “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured, and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review of Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twentieth Century” at 12:10 p.m., Friday, November 14, in Baxter Hall, room 101.

McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. A well-known economist, historian, and rhetorician, she has written 16 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, University of Chicago style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests, “I'm a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian libertarian.”

Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, which argues that an ideological change rather than saving or exploitation is what made us rich, is the second in a series of four on The Bourgeois Era. The first was The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, asking if a participant in a capitalist economy can have an ethical life.

The annual talk honors the late Wabash College professor of economics, Benjamin Rogge. Both talks are free and open to the public.