Neat lil preview of a book coming out in November: Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism (unbelievably ugly title and pretty ugly cover, too, but whatever)

Deirdre McCloskey is a great, quirky, interesting, incredibly eloquent economist and economic historian who's spent two decades writing beautiful prose on the economic history of the modern world. And, increasingly in recent years, why liberalism -- the good old sort that founded America and before then laid the foundation for British dominance -- is fantastic.

• The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006)
• Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010)
• Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016)
• Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (with Art Carden, 2020) – popular summary of the trilogy
• The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State** w/ Alberto Mingardi

Dignity is my favorite, obvs, cuz it's the most in-the-weeds economic history and full of take downs (tldr =everyone's treasured story of why the industrial revolution happened is wrong).
McCloskey kind of dropped the ball on the third volume, Equality, promising that aaaalll the evidence desired for a decade would emerge here. Given the trumped-up expectation, it was kind of meh.

Anyway, she has a new book out in November and I had a quick read-through the first 50-ish pages. If you've read any McCloskey book before, you know the deal: incredibly eloquent and flowy, vast scope, quick and clever and evocative references. Twists, playful language, powerful story.

What struck me as interesting, in our age of AI and V4V and infinite generation vs limited attention span (#1449095), was her way of asking -- nah, pleading -- with her audience to hear her out. Maybe, just maybe the Mamdami lovers among you are somehow mistaken.

In the age of AI we must promise charity and collaborative exploration.In the age of AI we must promise charity and collaborative exploration.

assured that when in the book you come across a surprising factual or interpretive assertion—as you perhaps already have, harrumphing—they are, as often as I could manage and even if I do not in the very place give chapter and verse, based on evidence accumulated in a long career of finding and testing such claims, in two dozen books and some hundreds of scientific articles. Please exercise charity in reading. I promise in turn not to abuse your graceful indulgence by making claims that can’t be backed by scientific warrants of their truth. (You’re welcome.)

I certainly do not have this divine patience with retarded people and their fucked-up ideas

Speaking of fucked-up ideas, she digs up a perfect and wonderful description of that, from Lionel Trilling half a century ago: “...irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas” (pp. 12-13). LOL.

Purpose of the book/accounting for the very stupid title: Adam Smith’s “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”, spontaneous order → aka “equality of recognition, acknowledgment, mutual trust, dignity, egalitarian respect.” (12)

My book argues for a substantial restoration of this first, Scottish, Smithian, and individual liberty. Alone. It argues against a state-directed, collectivist, and faux-predictable pursuit of an unattainable utopia, a top-down social engineering advocated widely in the French Enlightenment, which promises, through what it calls its numerous nice-sounding but coerced “policies,” to serve a general will. (p. 12)

This, too, was beautiful: there is no general will to aggregate!

The wills, plural, of a liberated society do not need to be aggregated, not for most purposes. You do
not need to eat the same flavor of ice cream as everyone else. And so too for more important matters—religion, for example, or abortion. Intruding without limit on private purposes, which is statism, leads to insoluble—but unnecessary—dilemmas of public policy (p. 32)

Quite the start, very Adam Smith-y ("How selfish soever man may be supposed...)

We have learned from the new and old assaults on our liberties that good politics depends not so much on good institutions as on the good moral sentiments supporting the institutions. (p. 3)

I also liked this snark...

“Imagine that—you can establish yourself as a good person merely by reading editorials in The New York Times and nodding empathically in agreement.” (p. 35)

I'm enjoying this intellectual trip.I'm enjoying this intellectual trip.