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The Rhetoric of Economics (Rhetoric of the Human Sciences)

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Even though this isn't the intent of the book (it's a persuasive work about the role of rhetoric in economics), I found this to be a really useful read when trying to write better economics papers of my own. It's ironically better in this regard than McCloskey's more explicitly instructional books, particular "Economical Writing," because of its emphasis on ideas rather than on rules; it advances a way of thinking about economics that makes economics easier to write about. For example, to McCloskey, economic models are metaphors, and I've found that writing about an economic model as a kind of metaphor rather than as some sort of idealized version of the truth is much easier. I don't pretend to have understood all of its insights (it's a challenging read), but the ones I understood were very helpful.

I first read this book as an undergrad economist, well over 10 years ago now. I discovered the book, in the course of writing about the evolution of the Phillips curve. What the Phillips curve offered, initially at least, was the embodiment of empirically-based economic theory, yet it metamorphosed, into the New Classical 'expectations-augmented' model, and the New Business School model with each, in turn, becoming accepted 'truth' by mainstream economics. What could account for this shift? Clearly it was not based on anything related to 'positive' economics or empiricism, since the theory behind the 'curve' (which was no longer a curve)had long since been wrung dry of any meaningful empirical content.

While I don't recall all of the details, this book, and McCloskey's other writings on the same theme, support the idea that, while Truth (to be differentiated from trivialities, things that are true 'by definition', for example), does exist, WE HAVE NO WAY OF COMING TO RECOGNISE IT - there are no objective criteria for doing so, that is distinguishing truth from falsity. It may come as a shock to some, but there is no dissenting from this point - if you know of any such criteria, let me know.

The slightly controversial, but logical, point that follows is, therefore, to disregard Truth as a 'useful' concept, with any explanatory power. The key to the acceptance of theory (as if it were the Truth), not just in economics, lies ultimately in its 'persuasiveness', something that is engendered through the use of 'mere rhetoric'. McCloskey is not arguing that this is how things 'should' be, but how they are - in grubby, messy reality.

If you doubt this to be so, try thinking about the recent Gulf War and arguments about WMD, as an illustration - it was Bush and Blair's ability to 'persuade' people, and politicians, that made the threat from Iraq real, or 'True'. That is, the threat might have existed independent of their pronouncements, but because we had no objective means of evaluating that, their pronouncements BECAME REALITY.

This is a text about the philosophy of economics that is extremely thought-provoking. It succeeds in challenging preconceptions of what is True and how we come to know it as such, that has implications far beyond economics. For anyone with an interest in philosophy, or economics, this is well worth reading, a real eye-opener.

Lord Chimp, the relativists will inherit the world, my friend. Like it or not, there is no black or white, only shades of grey, and neither is counterintuity synonymous with absurdity.

Although the fame of the author has taken a probably undesirable sensationalistic turn as a result of Donald's becoming, in 1996, Deirdre, the ouevre of his real fame, genius, and erudition are on display in this, the first of his trilogy on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, economics style. The second two successively are "If You're So Smart..." and "Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics". Though the third is, in my opinion, one of the most amazing works ever penned on economic methodology, his magnum opus (all three were written pre "crossing" so the pronoun "him" will be used). Cliche alert: This book should be required reading for ALL graduate economics students (though, again, the third even much more so). 'S hackneyed but 's true, friends. Buy it, read it, and you will feel what it's like to be inside the mind of a scholarly genius. He focuses on the rhetorical tetrad in economic analysis as a way of storytelling (rather than apodictic dogma) and a quick glance at his glossary will show you two things: 1. McCloskey has read pretty much every book and scholarly paper in the library on his subject and 2. His postmodernist proclivities. Although despite this many will be suprised to find that McCloskey is a libertarian, laissez-faire economist, a rarity even at the Chicago School, where he was reared and studied under Alchian, Stiglitz, and Friedman, among others. McCloskey in fact inspired me to see through a lot of the dishonest and snide ideological incompetents who have used postmodernism as a genus from which they derive their incoherent leftist, socialist positions. For example the laughably UNintellectual Eric Alterman (who is actually a fine researcher) who cites approvingly Hans Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty, fellow leftists, with embarrassing naif and lack of understanding of their works or any integrated understanding of where they derive their own leftism. When, in fact, as McCloskey and others have shown, it (postmodernism qua socialism/progressivism/liberalism) is a nonsequitur, and proves too much when it's not. I have always been VERY dissappointed in the paucity of libertarian and conservative attempts at reconciling with the last 50+ years of postmodernist philosophical contributions to the literature. It is NOT postmodernism qua socialism v. modernism qua classical and neoclassical economics; and it never could be, according to both systems. McCloskey is your savior if you too want to be in-step philosophically and maintain your laissez-faire; laissez-passer. He is an amazingly endowed writer, thinker, and economist, but is truly at his best when writing on methodology and philosophy as it pertains to the dismal science. The book critizies armchair theorizing much as Feyerabend and James did and positivism as much as the Austrians currently do, though both will probably be dissatisfied to the extent at which he takes this analysis and the value he grants that both may have, taken synchretistically. However, this rapprochement between apriorism and positivism may be his single greatest achievement, even if it was merely a means to an end, losing no irony in his self-professed pragmatism! All-in-all, a wonderful book, very enlightening. Apodictics beware, McCloskey is not a kind foe!

Deirdre McCloskey is a passionate advocate of rhetoric in economics as opposed to "big M" Methodology. She likes to project the image of a "tough New York broad" and the result is a style that obscures her message. The bluster and smart-alec citations actually undermine the core of her case which is (I think) that we need to lift our game in critical arguments (which she calls rhetoric) instead of being over-awed by defective statistical analysis and especially by the ruling fashions in the positivist philosophy and methodology of science.

One of the best sources to support that case is Karl Popper but you would never know that from reading this book.

"I started again to read philosophy of science (I had stopped in graduate school, just short of the Karl Popper level). More important, around 1980 I came upon history and sociology of science that challenged the reigning philosophy. Scientists, these crazy radicals claimed, were not the macho saints that Popper said they were." (xi)

Not sure what it means to stop just short of the Karl Popper level, possibly it means she stopped short of reading Popper. She would have encountered the sociology of science (which Ian Jarvie called "the social turn") in chapter 23 of The Open Society and its Enemies, where Popper wrote:


"Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring..."

So much for Popper's description of scientists as "macho saints". To round out Popper's point, whatever objectivity science enjoys does not come from the "objectivity" of individual scientists but from the quality of the discussion (rhetoric) in the profession. This is probably the point that McClosky is trying to make and it is a pity that she did not make it as clearly as Popper did.


In a critical section on modernism (essentially the positivism of the Vienna Circle and the logical empiricists who followed them) she "The logical positivists of the 1920s scorned what they called `metaphysics'. From the beginning, though the scorn has refuted itself. If metaphysics is to be cast into the flames, then the methodological declarations of the modernist family from Descartes through Hume and Comte to Russell, Hempel and Popper will be the first to go." (147)

However Popper was talking about the uses and the value of metaphysical theories in print since the mid 1950s and in lectures since the 1940s. McCloskey was 30 years behind the play and she could have draw on his work to support her case, especially the Metaphysical Epilogue to the third volume of Popper's Postscript to the LSD.

Pressing on with the critique of modernism she wrote "The intolerance of modernism shows in Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) which firmly closed the borders of his open society to psychoanalysts and Marxists - charged with violating all manner of modernist regulations." (158)

I don't recall Popper writing very much about psychoanalysis in the OSE and his main target was not Freud or Marx themselves but people who refused to contemplate any criticism of the master. That does not close the borders to psychoanalysis because Popper considered that there was probably a lot of truth in Freud's ideas if only they were developed under the control of various forms of criticism.

The same applies to Marxism. Popper reacted against doctrinaire and fadist Marxism in the same way that he reacted against doctrines and intellectual fads of all kinds. Of course he regarded Marxism as much more than a fad and so he devoted several hundred pages of analysis to bring out the strong and weak points of it. So where did McCloskey get the idea that Freud and Marx would be banned from Popper's open society? Not from reading The Open Society and its Enemies.

These carping comments do not detract from the positive core of the book if only you can find it amidst the distracting rhetoric, but it seems that she was more concerned with showing off her wide reading than making a clear and helpful case. The silly comments on Popper indicate that none of her friends and associates, or the publishser's readers, or the reviewers of the first edition, know better, which is a sign of something seriously awry in the US house of intellect.

McCloskey's book deserves to be read because of the original material in her book dealing with the misuse,misapplication and misinterpretation of both statistical significance and economic significance(see pp.112-138,189)in the vast majority of articles published in economics journals, that used statistical and econometric analysis,in the time period from 1935-2005.She was the researcher who was the first to point out ,in a detailed manner ,the massive amount of errors that were being published in economics articles.Unfortunately,she makes the generalization,based on this particular body of work,that all economic analysis essentially involves researchers who base their policy analysis(the rhetoric of economics)on the misuse of mathematical,logical,and statistical procedures chosen,used,and interpreted specifically to support the a priori beliefs of the researcher.Thus,all economics is basically rhetoric,with particular techniques chosen with the aim being, not scientific discovery but, persuasion.She particularly dislikes the theoretical perspective of Paul Samuelson.It is easy to give a counter example.On p.262 of chapter 19 of the General Theory(1936),Keynes gives his major result-the absence of involuntary unemployment requires that the mpc(marginal propensity to consume)=1.If the capital stock is not at an optimal level,then this condition becomes mpc+mpi=1(where mpi equals the marginal propensity to invest).In the appendix to chapter 19,Keynes points out that this equation is missing from the macroscopic analysis provided by A C Pigou in his 1933 book,The Theory of Unemployment.Keynes then derives the following optimality condition for both the labor market and the output market in chapter 20 and again in chapter 21.That condition is that w/p=mpl/(mpc+mpi),where w is the money wage,p is the price level,and mpl is the marginal product of labor in the aggregate derived from an aggregate neoclassical production function(GT,P.283;footnotes 1 and 2).It is obvious that the classical and neoclassical theories can only hold in the special case of mpc+mpi=1.Keynes's GT thus generalizes the classical and neoclassical theories.Unless mpc+mpi=1,involuntary unemployment will exist and it will be impossible for labor,in the aggregate,to reduce the unemployment rate by cutting their money wages.There is no rhetoric and/or attempt at persuasion going on here.There is only the pure force of a logical and mathematical exposition that is based on the microeconomic foundations of purely competitive firms and industries.

Deirdre McCloskey hangs out with the "wrong" crowd. She is immersed in the work of a varied group of thinkers, the likes of Paul Feyerabend, Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty - collectively often referred to as Postmodernists, although Deidre McCloskey refers to the "movement" as "Anti-Modernism" (p. 183). The common thread that unites all these thinkers is opposition to rationality - or is it to science? Or maybe just a skepticism about naïve-modernism?

Because McCloskey is an economist (and a brilliant and eccentric writer), she's not prone to adopt the radicalism of Postmodernism - her take on those ideas is opposition to naïve Modernism, but without repudiating either science, rationalism or empiricism.

Basically, McCloskey attacks Modernism, or Positivism, a simplistic view of the world according to which science is a unique channel to truth, one in which things are "proven" rather then argued, in which, if you can't count it you don't know it, where mathematics is god and a mere argument - one not backed by "the facts" - is worthless, "mere" rhetoric. McCloskey offers "Ten Commandments of Modernism" in science (pp. 143-144), including such dictates as "Prediction and control is the point of science" (the first commandment), and "Only the observable implications (or predictions) of a theory matter to its truth" (the second commandment).

My problem is, I doubt anyone has ever been a "naïve Modernist" in McCloskey's sense. I only believe in two of McCloskey's commandments, and even those with misgivings. The strongest opponents of the Postmodernists, scientists like Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, historians like Richard Evans, philosophers like Daniel Dennett - certainly are no naïve Modernists. Even according to McCloskey herself, Milton Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics", despite being "the central document of modernism in economics" (McCloskey's phrase), is "more postmodernist than you might suppose", and even Karl Popper is a "transitional figure"(pp. 144-145). So what's all the fuss about? Who is McCloskey after? When it comes to an example, McCloskey parades a research paper (by economists Richard Roll and Stephen Ross), stating:

"One should not reject the conclusions derived from firm profit maximization on the basis of sample surveys in which managers claim that they trade off profits for social good" (quoted on p. 146)

Is that so unreasonable?

Compare McCloskey's three chapters against methodology and for rhetoric with chapter four of 'Intellectual Impostures' by the bete noir of Postmodernists, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Their prose and argument is more lucid; the ideas are very similar. And as a critic of Modernist prose and scientism (and McCloskey's charge about those point is substantial), it is strange that she marshals with apparent approval the writing of someone like Stanley Fish, who writes: 'All utterances are... produced and understood within the assumption of some socially conceived and understood dimension of assessment... all facts are discourse specific... and therefore no one can claim for any language a special relationship to the facts as they "simple are".' (Quoted on p.108).

If the central argument of McCloskey's book is not all that surprising, the book is nonetheless worth reading for McCloskey's almost incidental insights. Her attack on the insignificance of statistical significance (chapter 8), is more developed here than in her "Secret Sins of Economics", and it is rather disturbing that so many economists have fallen into the trap of thinking that an arbitrary statistical test necessarily has real life meanings (chapter 8). Her discussion of the justifications for the existence of a downward sloping demand curve must make anyone interested in economics think twice: "Some economists have tried to subject the law to a few experimental tests" she writes "After a good deal of throat-clearing they have found it to be true for clearheaded rats and false for confused humans" (p. 25).

McCloskey's insight into and analysis of actual rhetoric is also fun, for example, on a classic paper by Ronald Coase:

"When claiming the ethos of the Scientist the young Coase was especially fond of "tend to", the phrase becoming virtual anaphora on p. 46 (Coase 1937), repeated in all six of the complete sentences on the page and once in the footnotes. (p. 89)

McCloskey also does some popularization of economics, almost in the matter of course. She makes the ideas of economists comprehensible for neophytes like me; Her summery of Robert Fogel's thesis about American railroad is masterly, and she actually translates the main points of a breakthrough article by John Muth from economistic into English (pp. 54-58).

McCloskey does all these things as after thoughts - but it's there that her genius really comes through.

I must admit that when I read this book in collage I was very closed minded because Deirdre McCloskey was Donald McCloskey before a sex change operation. She makes the claim that economics needs to get serious about its rhetoric, and back to science but with an underlining agenda. Even though this book has an agenda it is a good read as long as you ignore it

The "hermeneutics" of thinkers like McClosky, Rorty, and even some of those 'austrian' economists over at GMU is certainly not a new creed. It is the age-old song of the German historicist school and epistemological relativism. Okay, so it has a new coat of paint, updated with a few contemporary insights. McClosky targets economics with hermeneutic "propositions", seeking to unravel the modern methodological basis for the science (positivism/empiricism) and propose a new criterion to judging economic propositions (or any proposition whatsoever).

To McClosky, truth and falsehood are irrelevant categories -- what matters is only whether or not something is persuasive. Thus, rhetoric claims prime importance. Consider this telling excerpt from the book: "The very idea of Truth--with a capital T, something beyond what is merely persuasive to all concerned--is a fifth wheel. . . . If we decided that the qualitity theory of money or the marginal productivity theory of distribution is persuasive, interesting, useful, reasonable, appealing, acceptable, we do not need to know that it is True (p. 47)." Or, in comparing economic science to literary criticism, McClosky writes: "[Rhetoric] believes that science advances by healthy conversation, not adherenence to a methodology. . . . Life is not so easy that an economist can be made better at what he does merely by reading a book (p. 174)."

Surely, to anyone except those with a Ph.D. in philosophy, this must strike one as totally counterintuitive and absurd. Are we really ready to concede that there is no objective truth? All right -- let us do so, for the sake of argument.

But then we must of course inquire into the status of McClosky's own propositions. It is simply contradictory to make validity-claiming proposition averring that validity-claiming propositions cannot exist. Furthermore, such a claim implies a performative contradiction, as any argument presupposes the proponent's understanding of the meaning of truth and falsehood simply in order to say "I propose such and such, and you can either agree or prove me wrong." A proposition gains axiomatic status if it must be presupposed in the course of refutation. Argumentation has such axiomatic status. It is nothing but nonsense to argue that you cannot argue.

In fact, McClosky and other hermeneuticians are _so_ wrong that they can only say what they say _because_ it is wrong. For to them, there is no objective truth criterion for any proposition whatsoever. And yet, the use of language itself is a form of action, and surely there is a difference between McClosky's pronouncements and, say, the clacking of buttons on the keyboard as he writes it out (well, she was a he when this book was originally written and published, back when i read it -- i really don't know what pronoun to use). The most elementary tools of logic, like junctors and quantors, and the Laws of Identity and Contradiction, have their roots in action. these laws could never be undone by anyone, for in order to deny that they are in fact laws of reality, one would have to presuppose their validity. Accounting for the structure of elementary logical propositions (like "Hamburgers are a food") is the fact that in each and every action, a person must identify a situation and categorize it one way or another if choice is to be possible. Thus, while one could certainly say "and" means something other than "and", one could not deny its realist praxeological-ontological meaning, rooted in reality and action, without stumbling headlong into contradiction. Thus, at the _very least_, the existence of language presupposes the existence of truth categories and this could never be denied by anyone using language. Evidently, then, some common ground exists for people. McClosky's entire position is full of hot air.

Of course, McClosky levels many challenges to scientific orthodoxy of empiricism in the social sciences. All well and good -- empiricism is an empty doctrine, completely inadequate as a methodological basis for economics. But McClosky has simply chosen the wrong target. Empiricism claims that all a priori knowledge is merely analytic (in fact, it is doubted if analytical propositions qualify as knowledge at all). All facts of reality must be observable, and all truth-claims must be verifiable (or are least falsifiable) by experience. With this approach, an economist would be left willy-nilly unable to _know_ anything, since they must concede that experience could have yielded a different result. But if McClosky's purpose was to attack the foundations of objective truth in economic science, why choose empiricism? would it not have been more prudent to target the extremist-rationalist thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard? Such proponents of economics as a realistic science of a priori laws whose validity is not contingent on experience, would seem to be the antithesis of the hermeneutics position. The irony of it all is that McClosky's own methodological position is impotent to take down empiricism, much less rationalism which goes essentially unchallenged.

The refutation of hermeneutics vindicates rationalism, leaving us with no choice but to regard hermeneutics at a vacuous doctrine. This is a book of less-than-zero scientific value. If you are looking for good writings on rationalist economic science, see Ludwig von Mises, _Human Action_; idem, _Epistemological Problems of Economics_; Murray Rothbard, _Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market_; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, _Economic Science and the Austrian Method_. This book should not be taken seriously, but laughed and ridiculed as contradictory garbage.

This book provides unique insight into the rehetoric of economics and the social sciences.