wood, matthew spalding in the 1619 project. >> joining us on book tv is doctor deidre mccroskey. she is the author of over 30 books a long time economist with the university of illinois at chicago. her most recent you can watch this program on her website booktv. org and use the search box of the top of the page look for peter wood, matthew spalding in the 1619 project. joining us on book tv is doctor deidre mccroskey. she is the author of over 30 books a long time economist with the university of illinois at chicago. her most recent book veteran human onyx is just out. when you mimi a human onyx. i >> i am an hopeful economist.

but i'm also a historian and i thought as a professor of english and philosophy. i think that economics shouldn't give up the math or the numbers or anything like that. but it should add to it when we can learn from the unanimous, from shakespeare. greta. mozart, for that matter. i learned a lot from mozart, every time i hear the flute and harp concert him, so it's an all hands on deck idea, but in order to truly understand our economic lives we have to understand our whole life. in particular the modern economics, not adam smith, --

i'm an episcopalian. i always cross myself when i mentioned adam smith. not adam smith, but his followers, tended to narrow the field until now. economists think they can do economics just by watching people. that's okay. i'm not against people watching people. but watching people doesn't tell you about the meanings that they bring to economic life -- but i mean what does your job mean to you? what does consumption mean to you. these are important questions which the humanities consider and that modern economics does not? so i'm in favor of union mimics. >> doctor mccloskey, in your view, what does a shakespeare

or a mozart add to our understanding of our economic life? >> they tell you why people do things, although that's a kind of simple-minded way of talking about it. in shakespeare, for example, none of the heroes are middle class. like in the merchant of venice. no, that's not true. one of the main characters there is the enemy. is a due. and bassano, the merchant of venice, in the title, is a fool for love. and so where you learn from that and if you have your eyes open is that shakespeare's time did not value the marketplace. it valued kings, queens, dukes,

barons. the battlefield and the church, but not the marketplace. and so you learn which makes for a successful commercial society. obviously if you are back in shakespeare's time, the merchants were considered cheaters and manufacturers were making bad stuff. we don't want them. we prefer the queen. you aren't going to have a successful economy. there is one thing you learn from shakespeare. what you learned from most art is deeper. you learn about form you learn about the creativity of violating the form. one of the most treacherous stick features of mozart. he does not repeat a lot.

when he repeats its variation, and that's a lesson in creativity, and if there's anything sensual toward modern economy, i don't call it capitalism, but individual-ism, it's innovation. so there's lots to learn of an old student of mine, gary hoover who has said, there is a lot to be learned from curiosity, keeping your mind open. >> do you dream mccloskey -- >> i cannot. >> go ahead. >> i can offer more specific, technical reasons for wanting to do humanomics, but i think you get the idea.

>> eugene mccloskey, over the years we've talked to you about several of your books. you've been on tv several times. you have brought up your episcopalian roots and activities in the past. what about your religious life? does that play into economics and human omics? >> right now, i'm working on a book called god in mammen. mammen was there. you hear him a chord, which was the language of jesus. the make word for money. mammen. and it's called the subtitle is a public theology for an age of commerce. it tries to show how god and mammon are not necessarily enemies. they can be enemies, but you can have corruption in religion,

too, not only in the marketplace. so an corrupted versions of these two, the sacred and profane, god and mammon, can work together. and my claim is in humans they do, so if you're going to understand an entrepreneur or a worker, or for that matter a consumer, he need to understand where involvement with the transcendent, it is beyond the profane. when you buy -- when i was younger i had a mustang and it all made me feel so cool. before that i had a triumph spitfire. a cheap sportscar. i was like hey, how cool!

and that meaning that we invent that we create as we consume is true to all humans. it's not just true of the modern world. this word consumerism is a very foolish when it seems to me, because humans always have both the sacred and the profane in mind. >> when it comes to ethics and morality, wood is the role that they should play in your view in economics and human onyx? >> in the same book, i'm working with witnesses called in the philosophy departments of virtue ethics, which is the take on ethics, that all cultures have. south asian, the plains,

christians, pagans. they all think of the way you talk about virtue, you have to talk about individual virtues. courage, faith, hope, prudence, temperance. justice. love is the greatest of these. and on the other hand, in the 1700s, european philosophers like -- and they tried to make up little tricky formulas for ethics, and my opinion is that they don't work, that you don't -- that you have to go back to, in a more complicated system where you use what you know about

courage and look, we've been talking about courage since the hebrew bible and the epic of yoga mesh, and the hindu masterpieces. we've been thinking about the virtue of courage or the virtue of prudence and love. and so using those, instead of trying to work the work ethics down to a formula -- totalitarianism. jeremy benn finn is another example. and although it's the foundation of economics for some purposes of like designing highway off ramp. you need costs and benefits. it's not the whole of ethics. it's not even the whole of

ethics in the economy. as we all know, for an office a small part of an organization to work well, the people have to minimally respect each other and we hope actually love each other. if your office is a war of arrogance to all, which is, so to speak, the premise of economics, you know, all that matters is maximizing utility, if that's what you think all your colleagues are doing, it's not going to work well. they have to have a sense of professionalism and love, self respect and respect for you. so it's clear that from the economy to work, it's got to have available to it, all the ethical resources of the

culture, human culture. >> you said earlier that adam smith's followers have narrowed his vision. what did you mean by that? >> well, adam smith practiced humanomics. his most famous book before his other book, the wealth of nations, was published in 1759, called the theory of moral sentiments. he was well known in europe. caught up in the germans translation, as a moral philosopher of a scottish school. so he was in touch with humanity. history, philosophy, with politics, viewed theoretically, and of course he was a

generally cultivated man. he knew shakespeare and so forth. i'm not sure of his taste in music. he was, as later economist john maynard keynes said, you can't be a good economist if you are only an economist. which he meant is if all you think about is cost and benefits, then you have this kind of sociopath at the center of your theory, you're not going to do economics very intelligently. adam smith set this pattern, but it was such a temptation to make it easier. oh, i don't want to read those books on philosophy. oh, i don't want to study history. oh, i don't want to know shakespeare. i want to make it easy. make it easy. now it has become as easy as it can be, and this is true of

both marxist economics. when i was a kid i was a marxist. and i was so thrown by marxism, because all you needed to know was that the history of all hitherto existence societies is the history of class struggle. end of your education. and all you need to know in economics is cost, and modern economics, is cost and benefits. i think we need to get back to an educated economics. >> and you went from being a marxist to attending the freedom fest libertarian convention today. >> i certainly did. although, i would prefer to get rid of this silly word, libertarian and go back to the old word liberal, which is what i am and with most of the people at this conference are.

by which i mean, people who believe that no one should be a slave to their husbands, to a master, to the state. my work these days, for this liberalism, is adult-ism. whereas all other political philosophies, left or right or middle, treat people as sad or bad children. and i think we should be treating each other as adults. certainly adam smith felt that way. for his time, he was a fierce egalitarian. not an egalitarian and outcomes, but income. but and egalitarian, bob here's a crucial point, of permissions. he wanted to allow people to trade and to go their way and

life by themselves. not by themselves, he was a very socially oriented person, so it's not social downward-ism i'm recommending. it's christian liberalism. acknowledging an obligation to the poor, but mainly an obligation to let them braid hair for a living, or become an electrician if they want to. >> dear tree mccloskey -- >> with your permission -- >> from your book, bettering humanomics, you're right, with needs to be explained in modern social science history is not the industrial revolution's, but the great enrichment. one or two orders of magnitude larger than any previous change in human history. what was the great enrichment?

>> well, it was when we continued to do to the point where now we have cameras, lights and votes for women. container-ization, all kinds of things. we continue to do after 1800, the problem with the phrase industrial revolution is that it came from french to english from a person named tone be, not the turn to you may have heard of, but his uncle, as a criticism of -- as i prefer to call it, not capitalism. in any case, it's too narrow. it's too confined in time. it's all about this, one time explosion as once was called in

the 18th century, but there have been take offs before. and they splintered out. they did not keep going. it is the keeping going that is crucial. and that took a change in ideology. a change in attitude like a change in attitude from shakespeare to jane austin. attitudes towards merchants and manufacturers, and it's continued to this day. so we still have agreed enrichment, china and india are going through it. and it comes from liberalism. it comes from this equality permission. >> the author of, probably 30 some books, professor your tree mccloskey's newest is called bettering humanomics, and she has been our guest again on book tv. >> thank you, dear.

i've enjoyed it.

of best-selling books from different eras. so before i introduce our guests, i do want to thank our sponsors like so many of our programs tonight's program is sponsored by the wish you well foundation and by connecticut public wnpr, and it's produced in part with support honoring the legacy of frank lord who was our beloved former trustee who was with us through some really rough times at the museum and had showed great leadership and compassion for the museum. so we're very happy to be able to honor him in this way. and now i want to introduce our guests. peter sokolowski is editor at large for miriam webster, and he's just a delight. we've had an interactions with him bor