We are thrilled to announce that the prolific economist Dr. Deirdre McCloskey will be delivering the Sunday keynote address at ISFLC  on February 15th from 12:00-1:00 pm, thanks to our friends at the Institute for Humane Studies!

A Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Deirdre McCloskey has written fourteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law.

She is known as a “conservative” economist, University-of-Chicago style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests that “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 (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 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 (2006), asking if a participant in a capitalist economy can have an ethical life (briefly, yes). “We fans of innovation and markets have done enough preaching to the choir,” she says. “We need to speak to our beloved critics on the left and right who do not think that the Age of Innovation was the best thing to happen since the invention of language.”

Long known in economics as a critic of its least sensible techniques, she wrote in 2008 with Stephen Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance, demolishing tests of “significance.” It was in 2011 the basis of a Supreme Court decision.

In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity.

Easily one of the most influential academic figures alive today, Dr. McCloskey’s talk will truly be one for the books. Register today!

Also, IHS still has a few spots left for their exclusive, pre-ISFLC lunch. If you’re interested in going to grad school in the future, be sure to apply.