This transcript was prepared with AI assistance and lightly edited for clarity. Minor inaccuracies may remain.
Interviewer: Hello. My name is Samantha Cacace, and today I’m here with the economist Deirdre McCloskey, who is visiting Boise State on behalf of the Spriggs Family Lecture Series. Professor McCloskey, thank you so much for joining us.
Deirdre McCloskey: I’m extremely pleased to be here.
Interviewer: Thank you. For students who may be new to your work, how would you describe the main idea behind your research?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, it’s to show how the economy works inside a society and inside politics. I’m a historian as well as an economist, so I try to look at the long-run fate of our lives, our economies, and our societies.
Interviewer: Perfect. Many college students feel uncertain about their economic future. What would you say to students who feel like opportunity is shrinking?
Deirdre McCloskey: I don’t think it is. I think they should not be thinking only of their first job. They should think of their lifetime of work. It’s not true that there is great technological unemployment, or that foreign trade is taking jobs to any substantial degree.
It turns out, by the way, that in an economy like the United States, France, or Britain, one out of seven jobs disappears every year, and always does. It goes away. The company moves away, or it changes its practices. So the job slots come and go, and come and go. We have a much more dynamic economy than some people think, and certainly that worries students.
Interviewer: So you would say that the job pool is inevitable and prone to change over the years.
Deirdre McCloskey: It changes, but we adjust. We move. Think of the oil boom in North Dakota, as an example. It came and went. People moved in and out.
Interviewer: What is one misconception about capitalism or markets that you wish college students understood differently?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, for one thing, they’re very fearful of large corporations. Large corporations are not saintly. I admit that. But the real danger is from state intervention. It’s from the government. I wish people weren’t so frightened of Amazon and were more frightened of, say, ICE.
Interviewer: You received your BA and PhD from Harvard and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Both universities are usually regarded as centers of mainstream economics, and yet much of your work goes against the grain of what is taught there.
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, yes, that’s true. I’m like my heroine. There was a great American comedian back in vaudeville and in the movies, back in the ’20s and ’30s, Mae West. She said, “I was Snow White, but I drifted.” And that’s me. I was Snow White. I was a standard economist, at first a Harvard-type economist, a sort of Democrat, large-D. Then I became a Chicago-school economist.
And now, as you’re suggesting, I kept finding things that didn’t seem to work in either of those approaches. So I’ve slowly come to think of my own approach as being humanomics: economics with the humans left in, or indeed humans with the economics left in. I don’t think we need to throw away what we learn from other economics.
Interviewer: What are your central criticisms of orthodox American economics?
Deirdre McCloskey: It has certain techniques that it uses, such as tests of statistical significance. It turns out that a little, teeny test has infected the discipline very much. That’s one thing.
But more important than issues like that is that it’s statist. Many economists believe that if there’s a problem in society, the government should step in to fix it. I think we’ve gone too far on that. We need to draw back and not have such a large state. But I’m afraid most of my economist colleagues don’t agree. They’re wrong, and I’m right.
Interviewer: Good to hear.
[Light laughter]
Interviewer: Do you think that ties into your perspectives on the power of thought and how it folds into prosperity?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, thought runs the world. Ideas run the world. We’ve been Marxists, all of us, even if we weren’t Marxists, since Marx. Marx said ideas are not important. What matters is the relations of production, and the ideas just float on top of them and are not important. It’s interests that matter, material interests.
I think, of course, material interests do matter and affect how people vote and so on, a little bit. But what people feel in their hearts is much more important. The conceptions, the ideas they have, like about monopoly in the economy or the role of the government, are what determine what actually happens, at least in a free society. In an authoritarian society, it’s the bosses from the top who are telling you what to do. But in a free society, it’s us.
Interviewer: Your work in economic history is largely concerned with economic growth. You call the process the Great Enrichment rather than the Industrial Revolution. Why?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, it’s not so much what is driving the Industrial Revolution as what it is. It’s an enormous enrichment since around 1776, this anniversary we’re having this very year. It’s an incredible increase in income per head worldwide.
In 1800, the average person got along on $2 a day. I mean $2 a day that you could spend in Boise. Imagine. You wouldn’t have a house. You’d have one suit of clothes, if any. You wouldn’t have enough to eat. You’d die young. Your children would all be dead, et cetera. That’s the life we all came from around 1776.
Now, in the world, the average is not $2 a day, but $50 a day. So it’s an enormous improvement. It’s completely unique. In all of the 300,000 years of human history, it didn’t happen. And now here we are, you and I, the descendants of Italian and Irish peasants. Here we are.
Interviewer: Do you think that ties into how people find their identity within a capitalistic society?
Deirdre McCloskey: Yes. It’s the ideas that mattered. The big idea was what is properly called liberalism. Now, it’s not what we mean by it in the United States. We mean left-wing thinking or socialism or something. That’s not what I mean. It’s the original liberalism of people like Adam Smith. I always cross myself when I mention Adam Smith. And Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine.
Those people in the 1700s said all men are created equal, and women too. This idea of equality, I call it equality of permission in a book of mine that’s coming out in some months. It’s allowing people to do things. Not making equal incomes, not even equal opportunities, because we all vary in our intelligence and our families and our nations, but not adding rules that prevent us from doing what we want, as long as we give everyone else this permission. That’s true, primary liberalism. And that’s what I advocate for.
Interviewer: As a woman, especially going through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and studying all of these aggressive topics in economics and capitalism, how did you truly find your place?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, I found my voice by thinking against the grain, by not supposing that just because everyone says it, it’s true. I think that’s crucial for any young person to learn to do.
I don’t mean saying, “Well, everyone’s lying. I’m going to go down this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.” I mean a kind of sober critical thinking. For example, this idea of statism, that the state should do everything. Well, it hasn’t worked out very well in history, North Korea being a terrible example of a socialist country like that.
You should be an inquirer. You should say, “Now, wait a second. Is that really true? Well, I guess it is. Okay, now, how about this part?” That’s what education is for, after all.
Interviewer: Do you think that ties into your notion of sweet talk?
Deirdre McCloskey: Yes. It is my notion of what rhetoric is and should be. People should have free speech, and we should be trying to persuade each other, not yelling at each other. Not saying, “Oh, you’re a Trump supporter, I hate you,” or, “You’re an anti-Trump person, I hate you,” or, “You’re a Protestant, I hate you,” or, “You’re a Catholic, I hate you.” All the hate stuff should go away.
We should start thinking of a politics of sweet persuasion, where we don’t just sneer at people, but we try to persuade them. In a class just half an hour ago, I was trying to persuade the students that natural monopoly in modern capitalist societies is a minor problem. Most people think it’s a big problem. It’s not. So, sweet talk. Don’t say, “Oh, you’re stupid. You think that.” No, no.
Interviewer: What first step do you think the average Joe, or especially young people, should take in order to practice that sweet-talk notion?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, they have to know something. They have to try to have wide experiences of life and read a lot. I am quite disturbed, though, about the rabbit holes, as they’re called. People do research on the internet, and they go down these paths that are not good and are dangerous.
I suppose a good rule would be: when you’re doing research, if you find that its outcome is hatred, turn away. If you do research and someone is saying, “Well, Muslims are all terrorists and dangerous, and so we should hate them,” I think one should know, as a person who loves, to move back and say, “No, no, I’m not going to hate you.”
Interviewer: For the students watching this today, and those who are experiencing entrapment in those echo chambers online, what advice or key takeaway do you want them to gain from your research?
Deirdre McCloskey: Well, that there’s a lot of danger in the state, in the government. The government is often not the solution. Suppose the government prevented you from speaking your mind on any number of issues. Wouldn’t that be terrible? So it’s mainly the government that’s the danger.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey the government, or should start killing people, or anything. We should try to persuade people to become adults. I often call what I advocate adultism: the conviction that a society of free adults with self-respect and respect for others is the kind of society we want.
The trouble is that it is very comfortable to be a child, to have mommy and daddy take care of everything. I want people to accept freedom, and accept a responsible freedom, where they take care of their families and their friends, and their country, for that matter, and act like grown-ups.
Interviewer: Perfect. I think that concludes our conversation. Thank you so much. That was amazing.
Deirdre McCloskey: Nice to talk to you.
Interviewer: You too. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Samantha Cacace. Have a great day.
