If you can’t make it in person, you can join the Zoom livestream of this event (beginning at 6:30pm) by clicking here. 

Any innovation—mechanical, biological, institutional, scientific, artistic, personal—begins of course in a human mind. The point is obvious, but has not been prominent in economics. The unprecedented economic growth since 1800, a Great Enrichment of a fully 3,000 percent increase in real income per person, has been traced by economists instead to various intermediate and largely material causes—investment; exploitation; the rule of law—not to the creative fundament of ideas in human minds.

Economics needs to understand the conditions for the flourishing of liberty and its fruits in enriching ideas, and to see that good laws and long railways and creative science and strong institutions depend on it and the ethical accompaniments of liberty, every time. This talk will examine how the role of ideas such as a culture of free speech and an economy of enterprise are key factors that explain the 'Great Enrichment'.

About the Speaker:

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.

She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”

Her most recent popular books, for example, are 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).

Full details:

Date: Tuesday, 31st May 2022

Time: 18:00 - 20:00

Agenda:

18.00 - Doors open + welcome drinks

18.30 - Lecture starts 

19.15 - Q&A 

20.00 - Event closes

For more information or to request a place, please contact events@adamsmith.org