On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Deirdre McCloskey delivers a keynote lecture at the 2022 Markets & Society conference. She argues that the "great enrichment"—a 30-fold rise in global income per capita since 1776—was driven by liberal economic ideas that champion individual freedom and equality of permission. McCloskey also critiques government intervention, emphasizing the transformative power of removing barriers to foster innovation, prosperity, and human flourishing, and more.
Deirdre McCloskey is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History and Professor of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey is also a Distinguished Affiliated Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
She has published numerous books including Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All(2019) and her trilogy “The Bourgeois Era”: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for a Commercial Society (2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016).
This lecture has been published in the Markets & Society Journal, Volume 1 Issue 1, as "Humanomics." Learn more about the Markets & Society conference and journal here.
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