EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: 4:30-6 p.m. Oct. 29, 2013

EVENT: Economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey will deliver a free, public lecture based on her book “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, 1800 to the Present,” the second in a three-part volume on the bourgeois era.

McCloskey, a professor of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is on campus Oct. 27-31 as a visiting scholar at the Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics.

In her talk, McCloskey will discuss the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. She contends that culture—not economics—sparked industrialization. Changing attitudes toward commercial pursuits, such as owning a shop, running a factory or inventing a machine, became viewed as worthwhile, useful and dignified—spurring the explosion of business and technology, the expansion of cities and the rise of the middle class.

McCloskey has written 16 books and about 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of bourgeois virtues.

The Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics was established in 2012 to promote instructional excellence and research for U-M Department of Economics faculty and students and the wider university community.

PLACE: Room 2240, U-M Ross School of Business, Ann Arbor

INFORMATION: Hilary Johnson, U-M Department of Economics, (734) 647-7257, hlj@umich.edu