I’m a big fan of Deirdre McCloskey. She’s become in the past two years one of my favorite intellectuals, alive or dead. At the very least, she’s responsible for introducing me to virtue ethics, my obsession for the past year. So I hate that my first piece for Sweet Talk is rather critical of a recent article of hers.
McCloskey has a new paper titled “Max U vs. Humanonics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism” (PDF) appearing in the Journal of Institutional Economics in which she takes the New Institutionalist school to task for failing to account for the influence of words and ideas in economic history, and especially for asserting that the Great Enrichment (the explosion of incomes from roughly 1800 to the present) can be explained without these concepts. The problem is she doesn’t seem to be talking about the same institutional economics that I’m familiar with (loosely, as a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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