Dierdre McCloskey argues entertainingly and informatively that the Industrial Revolution came not so much from economic (or technological) change as from a change in “rhetoric” – the language of persuasion.
The most important event? “In Galilee and Jerusalem around AD 30.”
Click here to read this features article in the T.H.E.
Professor McCloskey teaches economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her two most recent books are The Cult of Statistical Significance (2008, with Stephen Ziliak) and Bourgeois Dignity. Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (due out in 2010, University of Chicago Press).