The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an explosion in economic growth and proof that economic change depends less on foreign trade, investment, or material causes, and a whole lot more on ideas and what people believe.

In this talk Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will link culture, ethics and rhetoric with entrepreneurship and economic development.

Deirdre McCloskey is an economist, historian, and rhetorician who has written 16 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and ethics. She is known as a ‘conservative’ economist, but says she is “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, argues that an ideological change, rather than saving or exploitation, is what made us rich.