Patrick McMahon

"Deirdre McCloskey’s books about (British) economic history and liberty have had an outsized impact on me and my intellectual development for almost two decades. After a publishing streak worthy of some sort of award, there ought to be only so much more for this academic and public intellectual to say; only so many ways to deliver the remarkable, honest, simple, and powerful message of liberalism — the good old-fashioned one of free minds and free markets (to invoke the tagline of libertarian magazine Reason), not the modern liberalism of The New York Times." thedailyeconomy.org/article/…

Inequality Is Not the Problem. Much of the research on the economics of inequality stumbles on this simple ethical point, focusing on measures of relative inequality such as the Gini coefficient rather than on measures of the absolute welfare of the poor, on inequality rather than poverty, having elided the two. Speaking of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s egalitarianism, Frankfurt observed that Dworkin in fact, and ethically, “cares principally about the [absolute] value of people’s lives, but he mistakenly represents himself as caring principally about the relative magnitudes of their economic assets.” Dworkin and the left commonly miss the ethical point, which is the liberal, Joshua Monk one of lifting up the poor. By redistribution? By equality in diamond bracelets? By codes for buildings or unions for trades? No: by the dramatic increase in the size of the pie, which has historically brought the poor to 90 or 95 percent of “enough,” as against the small percent of enough attainable by redistribution without enlarging the pie.