Manhattan Institute Announces Deirdre N. McCloskey as this Year's Hayek Book Prize Winner
The Manhattan Institute has announced that Deirdre N. McCloskey will be awarded the annual Hayek Book Prize for her book Bourgeois Equality, the culmination of her Bourgeois Trilogy. McCloskey will receive a $50,000 award and will deliver the annual Hayek lecture on June 13th in New York City.
Deirdre McCloskey said, “I am so thrilled by the honor, and am especially honored to be included in a list with such fine scholars—two of whom are old friends in economic history! Yes: economic history is the scientific future!”
“Economic growth is a mystery, like a beating heart,” said Amity Shlaes, who chairs the jury for the prize. “All our finalists study this mystery. The jury enthusiastically selected Deirdre McCloskey because Professor McCloskey discerned something the rest often fail to see: that ideas, even more than capital or institutions, power the heart and the growth that are so crucial to America’s future.”
Manhattan Institute President Lawrence Mone added, “As an institution based on the power of ideas, the Manhattan Institute is pleased to award this year’s Hayek Book Prize to Deidre McCloskey for her fine work illuminating the influence ideas had on world economic history.”
Deirdre McCloskey is the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written 15 books, edited seven more, and has published some 360 articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law.
McCloskey was one of five finalists, announced in March:
- Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas Leonard (Princeton University Press)
- Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, by Deirdre N. McCloskey (University of Chicago Press)
- A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, by Joel Mokyr (Princeton University Press)
- Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, by Johan Norberg (Oneworld Publications)
- The Logic of the Market: An Insider’s View of Chinese Economic Reform, by Weiying Zhang, translated by Matthew Dale (Cato Institute)
For more information about or to attend this year’s event, please contact Michele Jacob at mjacob@manhattan-insttitute.org.
About the Hayek Lecture and Book Prize
Political philosopher and Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek, author of groundbreaking works such as The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, was the key figure in the twentieth century revival of classical liberalism. He was also a formative influence on the Manhattan Institute. When our founder, Sir Antony Fisher, asked how best to reverse the erosion of freedom, Hayek advised him not to begin with politics per se but to fight first on the battlefield of ideas. The Hayek Lecture and Prize affirm and celebrate this mission.