The Vices of Economists : The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie

In this work, the "vices" are three bad habits into which economists have fallen over the past 50 years (bad statistics, bad theory, and bad applications of statistics and theory to public affairs).

The author reports an open scandal in economic science, by now so serious that no economist believes a finding of statistical significance or a theoretical result from a blackboard or a policy recommendation.

This leaves the economists unable to say truthfully why they believe or why they recommend anything.

This book details the vices, tracing them to the influence of three giants of the 1940s and 1950s in economics, the Americans Lawrence Klein and Paul Samuelson, and the Dutchman Jan Tinbergen.

These masters of the economist's art, all winners of the Nobel Prize, did not intend the dismal state into which economics has fallen.

But unintended consequences happen in intellectual as much as in economic affairs.

McCloskey recommends a "bourgeois", even feminine, virtue to replace the aristocratic and masculine vices of modern economics. She sees intellectual life as a market, but a bourgeois market of negotiating equals, not the anonymous, peasant market of conventional economics or Thatcherite politics.

What is good for a liberal democracy is good for intellectual life, she argues, even in the forbiddingly mathematical world of modern economics.