Donald N. McCloskey

The Economic history of Britain since 1700

An economic history of Britain since 1700, in three volumes by 39 eminent historians and economists. It will appeal particularly to first and second year university students, but is also suitable for anyone interested in the history of the British economy.

The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major

The objects, methods of instruction, content, and accomplishments of the undergraduate major in economics at institutions of higher education within the United States are discussed. Recommendations are provided for teaching students to “think like economists.”

The Rhetoric of the human sciences : language and argument in scholarship and public affairs

Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines - mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science and history. Drawing from recent literary theory, it suggests the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry and explores communications beyond the academy, particulary in womens issues, religion and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.

Accounting as the master metaphor of economics

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles. … Little did I dream that I should have lived to see disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men. … I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

From damnation to redemption: Judgments on the late victorian entrepreneur

In the 1890’s it became clear that Britain had lost the industrial leadership of the world to Germany and the United States. Each year the statistics of trade and output brought fresh evidence that the trend established in the 1870’s of slower industrial growth in Britain than in the new industrial nations was continuing. New products and new markets were being developed by German chemists and salesmen and by American engineers and plant managers while British businessmen fought a rearguard action on economic battlefields where they had once stood unchallenged. Such military metaphors as this last flowed naturally from the pens of journalists and scholars describing this humbling experience, and there was much talk of commercial “invasion” and industrial “defeat.” Anthropomorphic metaphors, as well, of “youthful” foreign nations usurping the place of “old” Britain, were called on to bolster the frail illusion of understanding the turn of events. And when metaphor proved unsatisfying, it was natural that attention should turn to the men at the top. When an army is outmaneuvered, who is to blame for its defeat but its incompetent generals? When an economy grows old, who is to blame for its decrepitude but its aging businessmen? increasingly after the 1890’s in the editorial columns of trade journals and in the pages of government reports, for one industry after another, blame for the British lag behind Germany and America was put on British management. On the level of journalism and schoolbook history there is no difficulty in meting out praise or blame: if great entrepreneurs, independent 01 circumstances, were responsible for Britain’s relative rise before 18 70, then surely bad entrepreneurs must have been responsible for her relative decline after 1870. The reasoning involved is the same as that underlying the

The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Prudent Peasant: New Findings on Open Fields

The usual picture of the medieval peasantry is based on nineteenth-century scholarship, which has proven difficult to dislodge from educated minds. This article continues the revision of an important detail in the picture, the scattering of plots in open fields. Some recent work on the subject by Robert Allen and Gregory Clark is midly disputed, and new evidence is presented that risk avoidance is the key to understanding peasant behavior. The reason for the scattering was not sentiment or socialism. Peasants were not perhaps rational in every detail; but they were prudent.

Magnanimous Albion: Free Trade and British National Income, 1841-1881*

During the forty years from Peel’s to Gladstone’s second ministry the commercial policy of the United Kingdom moved decisively from fettered to free trade. National income rose decisively as well, the income of labor with it. It was no surprise to free traders, of course, that the removal of a pernicious tax on enterprise, most particularly on the enterprise of industrial laborers and capitalists, brought with it greater wealth for all. They were even willing to concede that only a portion of the greater wealth, though a substantial portion, was attributable to free trade. After all, it was not the promise of material well being alone that buoyed their spirits in the struggle against protection. Their spiritual leader, Cobden, saw far beyond cheaper corn and better markets for British cotton textiles; he saw, indeed, “in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe-drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.“’ Such cosmopolitan visions dimmed in later controversy, for, unlike the material promise, they had all too plainly not been fulfilled. Later critics of free trade, such as the “fair trade” historian, William Cunningham, could in the 1900s emphasize the * This essay was born in 1971 and has led since then a life of seminars and conferences, accumulating at them a long list of intellectual debts. The institutional debts are to the meetings of the Econometric Society in 1971, and to seminars at the Universities of Chicago,

The writing of economics

Essentially there are two kinds of economics papers : empirical papers, which run data through a model (a series of mathematical equations); and theoretical papers, which begin with a model based on certain premises and then prove that certain outcomes will ensue. These two kinds of papers reflect what the discipline considers to be legitimate economics. Yo u will not find qualitative studies, for instance, nor will you find papers without a mathematical model.

Agon and Ag Ec: Styles of Persuasion in Agricultural Economics

It is a tradition that these addresses be given by an outsider. I speak as an outsider in praise of agricultural economics. An outsider presuming to praise could be accused of condescension, but I assure you I come by a favorable opinion of the field honestly. I am practically an insider. Maternal relations own farms in Illinois, near Watseka. The same Roger Gray, of the Food Research Institute, whom President-Elect Johnston mentions in his paper, is my second cousin once removed. In England I have worked as an agricultural laborer. Once, in Vermont, I milked a cow. Ag econ is in my blood.