The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers’ cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor l...

I present a review and extended discussion of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice and Lives by Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, a work that raises important issues related to the practice of statistics and that has been widely commented upon. For this review, I draw upon several other works on statistics and my personal experiences as a teach...

The Ebola virus epidemic has led to a “seismic political shift” in international attitudes to global health security, says Brian McCloskey, adviser to the United Nations’ special envoy on Ebola. McCloskey, who is on secondment from his job as director of global health at Public Health England, told a debate at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that Ebola had “galvanised politic...

Paolo Silvestri interviews Deirdre Nansen McCloskey on the occasion of her latest book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (2021). The interview covers personal intellectual life, main turning points journey contributions. More specifically, conversation focuses McCloskey’s writings methodology rhetoric economics, interdisciplinary ventures into humanities, Bourg...

by Professor Finsen were A nyone trying to get clear about the presented at the Pacific Division morality of the use of animals in medical research immediately faces Meeting of the Society for the the following problem: it is immensely hard to get agreement on the value of Study of Ethics and Animals, the enterprise strictly for humans. HJ. McCloskey, for example, portrays the human stake in th...

Daniel P. McCloskey,1 Susan D. Croll,2,3,4 and Helen E. Scharfman1,5 1Center for Neural Recovery and Rehabilitation Research, Helen Hayes Hospital, West Haverstraw, New York 10993, 2Department of Psychology, and Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Doctoral Subprograms, Queens College, Flushing, New York 11367, 3Graduate Center of City University of New York, New York, New York 10016, 4Regeneron Ph...

When estimating the value of Arabic numerals like ‘‘3,’’ ‘‘33,’’ and ‘‘333,’’ is each symbol treated holistically and associated with a different mental magnitude along a common scale (Dehaene, 1989), or is there unique scaling for units, decades, hundreds, and so on (McCloskey, 1992)? In this opinion piece, we argue that the evidence is more consistent with the holistic, single-scaling account...