Professor Deirdre McCloskey is one of the most interesting thinkers in economics today. In this interview, conducted at FreedomFest 2021 in Rapid City South Dakota, near Deadwood, we push past a number of frontiers and traverse an open range of topics. That’s McCloskey in a nutshell – ignore the artificial fences between academic specializations and let the conversation go where it goes. In this case it goes through such territories as: the astonishing rise in standards of living since the rise of capitalism; why capitalism shouldn’t be called capitalism; what it should be called; why Bourgeois values have enriched us (and in more ways than economically); what the difference is between virtues and values; what Christianity had to do (and didn’t have to do) with the rise of modern human betterment; why theoretical economics has been wrong to obsess over “Maximum Utility” (a sociopathic form of economic modeling); the cult of statistical significance and its addiction to the p-value, and an upcoming book on Christianity and economics. Enjoy!

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
9:40 – Why “virtues” rather than “values”?
14:09 – The meaning of Jesus being born in Bethlehem
18:54 – Eurocentric economics, why some minorities are successful
27:07 – Free speech and the rich young ruler
32:11 – A party of Liberty, politics for adults
40:16 – How art can affect politics
43:35 – Bettering Humanomics
47:48 – The new atheists
50:16 – God in Mammon
59:17 – The Bible on slavery