How to be Human-- Though an Economist

Přední strana obálky
University of Michigan Press, 2000 - Počet stran: 287
In this thoroughly engaging book Deirdre McCloskey puts the "dismal science" under the microscope. She offers advice to young economists, offering models from the old; and she lambastes the middle-aged who have allowed economics to become, as she puts it with characteristic verve, "a boys' game in a sandbox." McCloskey deploys her wit and style to serious purpose: to bring economics back to science.
Anyone can learn about the field of economics from How to Be Human. She can learn how economics works as a discipline and as a piece of sociology, who the heroes are and the villains, how a career in economics relates to matters of ethics and epistemology. She can learn what it is like to be a new woman in a boys' subject, a subject that avoids at all costs the word "love."
During the 1990s Deirdre McCloskey established herself as the main internal critic of the economic mainstream. Her quarterly columns in the Eastern Economic Journal, many of which are collected here, have become a handbook for reform. Trained in economics herself, she knows the normal science of the field from the inside: she has done it as a distinguished economic historian; and has watched it work from the faculties of Chicago (for twelve years) and Iowa (for nineteen), and now at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her criticism from the inside is that the two methods on which economics has depended since the 1940s--existence-theorem mathematics and significance-testing statistics--are nonsense. They have, she claims, nothing to do with economic science, and have massively diverted economists from finding out how the economy works.
McCloskey's book is written for anyone interested in economics, whether trained in it or not--anyone who cares about the economy but is not taken in by the boys' game.
Deirdre McCloskey is University Professor of the Human Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Obsah

Be Who You Are Even if an Economist
1
It Helps to Be a Don if Youre Going to Be a Deirdre
7
A Libertarian Abroad
10
Love or Money
12
Make Your Economics Courageously Part of Your Identity and Vice Versa
17
Better than Plowing Says Jim Buchanan
22
The Economic Tourism of Armen Alchian
28
The Persuasive Life of Friedrich Hayek
32
Dont Specialize without Intellectual Trade
149
The Invisible College and the Death of Learning
155
Read More Widely
161
Reading Ive Liked in the Humanities
167
Learn Price Theory Which Is No Easy Task
173
The Natural
178
Why Economics Should Not Be Taught in High School
182
Dont Be Silly about Statistical Significance
187

Some Buried Female Lives in Economics
37
Get Ethics beyond Have a Nice Career
43
What You Read Is What You Are
49
Cheating as a Scientist
52
Follow the Brave
59
The Coolness of Alexander Gerschenkron
65
The Passion of Robert Fogel
78
Work and Pray
91
How to Host a Seminar Visitor
96
To Burn Always with a Hard Gemlike Flame
101
How to Work
106
Watch Your Words and the Work They Do
111
The Rhetoric of Economic Development and of P T Bauer
116
The Rhetoric of Finance
121
Keynes Was a Sophist and a Good Thing Too
126
Learn to Write at Least Competently
131
Why Write Well?
137
Yes Competence Is Profitable Now That You Ask But Why Ask?
140
Why Economic Historians Should Drop Statistical Significance and Seek Oomph
194
The Bankruptcy of Statistical Significance
201
The Insignificance of Statistical Significance
205
And Dont Be Silly about APrime CPrime Proofs in Economics Either
209
In Brief Its Arrogant and Unscientific
215
Quarreling with Ken Arrow about Existence Theorems
220
Take Rules 11 and 12 Entirely Seriously
227
Ask What the Boys in the Sandbox Will Have
233
Cassandras Open Letter to Her Economist Colleagues
238
Simulate Simulate Calibrate Calibrate
247
Calibrated Simulation Is Outstripping Analytic Solutions
250
Simulating Barbara
253
Yet Dont Be Too Certain of Your Expertise
263
Modesty Is the Best Policy Says Herbert Stein
266
References
269
Index of Names
279
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O autorovi (2000)

Deirdre McCloskey is University Professor of the Human Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago. Visit McCloskey's website at: http: //deirdremccloskey.org/index.php.

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