"It helps to be a Don if you're going to be a Deirdre": revisting the rhetoric of economics.

• Author: Houck, Davis W.
• Position: Review Essay

As a nineteen year-old college sophomore, I made a harrowing decision: I would declare Econ (as the in-crowd called it) as my official minor. Why harrowing? Two reasons: first, I was a declared Speech Communication major, in part because I had no desire (or ability) to take the two semesters of required calculus; and second, Professor Burnell. Looking back, the two reasons were not unrelated. Dr. Burnell struck fear into every wannabe Econ major or minor's heart. It was no secret that he taught the "guts" of economics-Intermediate Microeconomic Theory--every term because it was the hardest subject to master (tons of math), and because every Econ student had to take it. There was just no way of getting around the curmudgeonly Micro prof.

And then a funny thing happened in Dr. Burnell's 1987 fall semester Microeconomics class: I grew to like him and to distrust the subject matter. About the latter, I came to realize that he felt the same way. Every M/W/F from 9-9:50 in Kauke 210 he seemed to teach with a manic intensity that bordered on anger. As he drew up elegant graph after elegant graph, his yardstick thwacking the blackboard in a steady cadence, he seemed defensive, at times hostile, in his explanations for how utility optimization and price theory worked.

I grew suspicious of the graphs, the models, and the math for a simple, sophomoric reason: this wasn't the way that economic decision-making worked out in the world. I wasn't sitting in my dorm room figuring out how to optimize "consumption bundles." Nor was my Econ major roommate. Come to think of it, no one was. Nor could I realistically plot a personal utility curve (technically: Indifference Curve Analysis) with just two variables; it just wasn't the way it worked. I bought a twelve-pack of Carling's Black Label because it was on sale, and it was drinkable--not because it maximized utility, ceteris paribus, in some arcane, mathematically optimal way.

And then one afternoon during his office hours, Dr. Burnell let his guard down; it really floored me. I wasn't even sure if he knew my name. I was there to ask about yet another lecture I'd missed because of my intercollegiate sports schedule. An hour and a half later, and to the angry glares of many waiting Econ students, I left his office. He'd proceeded to confess the sins of Intermediate Microeconomic Theory-and to me: the models were disingenuous, the math too formalized, the textbook too abstract. He might have even forsworn most of the assumptions that made the math and graphs line up. It was a devastating critique. Suddenly, the in-class hostility made sense--even if his critique of microeconomics didn't yet sink in.

I'd been on to something with my realism complaints.

Had I known about Don--now Deirdre--McCloskey's work back then, my suspicion of and alienation from academic economics would certainly have found a friend. In a recent essay, for example, she (McCloskey, 2000, p. 179) might well have been observing Dr. Burnell's course: "Undergraduates uniformly complain about intermediate micro, which we economists uniformly recognize as the guts of the field, where we Think like Economists. The kids hate it." They do and I did--and for precisely the same reason: microeconomic theory had nothing to do with "an actual economy" (p. 179).

Deirdre McCloskey should not be a stranger to most rhetoricians. As a Harvard University-trained economist who cut her utility maximizing teeth at the University of Chicago as Donald, turned evangelical for the cause of rhetoric at the University of Iowa, McCloskey has certainly made a name in rhetorical circles. For nearly twenty years, McCloskey has, with varying degrees of success, proclaimed quite loudly to fellow economists: "you don't know what you think you know." And perhaps more impertinently, "here, let me prove it to you." At the center of McCloskey's anti-foundational critique of modem economics is an emphasis on language--how language constructs identities among economists, how it constructs disciplinary knowledges, and how it ultimately, if used with skill, good humor and appropriate table manners, might make us better people. Based on my reading of her most recent work, these issues remain central to her many projects.

As a founding member of Iowa's Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), McCloskey's "little green book," as she likes to refer to it, caused something of a tremor in rhetorical studies--an earthquake among the Econ crowd. Now in a recently updated second edition, McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics (1985/1998) took economic discourse--even mathematical discourse--seriously; it had designs on an audience; it was strategic; it used metaphors and stories. As such, economic discourse was thoroughly rhetorical. The book also critiqued, from within, the rhetoric of scientism so commonplace in academic economic inquiry. Rhetoricians, always eager for a cross-disciplinary plug, thought it great that a famous economist preached (and practiced) that rhetoric mattered. Economists, by and large, hated the little green book--not because it didn't matter, but because it exposed the Big Lies of Positive Economics, and by the ultimate insider. McCloskey had been colleagues with Milton Friedman, not Jacques Derrida. He c ouldn't be dismissed on grounds of either character or credentials.

Since publication of the little green book, much has changed for McCloskey. Most notably, Don has become Deirdre, and she has joined Stanley Fish's all-star line-up at the University of Illinois, Chicago, as a University Professor of the Human Sciences. One constant, though, is her steady output of very interesting, very readable, and often very funny writing. Hers remains one of the most unique voices competing for our ever-dwindling reading time. Just in the past three years, she's published an intriguing memoir of her struggles to become Deirdre (1999), Crossing: A Memoir. The University of Michigan Press has published a collection of her short economic editorials titled, How to be Human* * Though an Economist. And a collection of her more overtly academic writing over the course of her career, Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey, has recently been published by Edward Elgar. Each of the books is quite distinct, yet when read together they also provide a revealing look at w here McCloskey's been and where she might be headed.

I first met Donald McCloskey back in October of 1994 at a conference called the New Economics Criticism. It became clear to me during that weekend in Cleveland that among the Econ crowd, McCloskey was The Show: people took frequent shots at him; he was expected to respond whenever he was in the audience; and his work was cited at nearly every turn. He seemed to revel in the attention. Who wouldn't? By his own admission, such conferences rewarded and encouraged his aggressive (male) behavior. What I didn't know then, what his closest colleagues didn't know, was that McCloskey was uncomfortable in his own aggressively male skin. His story of that discomfort--and ultimate redemption--is chronicled in Crossing: A Memoir.

Part polemic, part apologia, part confessional, and part gender crossing pedagogy, McCloskey takes the reader on a three-year gender bender--from Donald, to Dee, to Deirdre. Along the way we learn of Donald's early cross dressing, his discovery of a virtual community, the gradual dissolution of his marriage and the split within his family, the Orwellian encounters with modern psychiatry, and the myriad surgeries, successful and not, that would give bodily evidence of McCloskey's "true" identity.

In many respects, McCloskey's memoir resembles her more overtly academic writing, often in terms of its ambivalence. As other reviewers of Crossing have noted, McCloskey seems to want it both ways: men tend be boorish pigs by dint of having a penis, and yet she also claims that gendered behavior isn't written onto our DNA (p. xv). At points the gender stereotyping is farcical: men drink beer, talk loudly only about themselves, are rabid pyromaniacs, and are infatuated with muscle cars--sort of an Archie Bunker meets Butt-head. Women, as a post-hormonal Deirdre explains, like to shop, do dishes instinctively, cry at the sight of Kleenex, and in general are far more interpersonally adept than men. In sum, the gender critique in Crossing is often caricatured in ways that reify the Mars and Venus divide.

McCloskey has made a very successful academic career out of arguing against the epistemological foundationalism so prevalent in economic circles. The differential equations and the tests of statistical significance don't speak with one voice--nor is that the Voice of God. Rather, economists argue contingent...