"Everyone is practicing Oratory on others thro the whole of his life" Adam Smith Economists can be a gloomy bunch. Humans, they say, are simple units of consumption whose behaviour can be manipulated by the application of incentives and disincentives. And then there’s Deirdre McCloskey. Until 2015, she was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Illinois where she also taught history, English, and rhetoric. One of her great contributions to economic theory

In 1980, while the smoke was still settling on the Vietnam War, the US Military Academy at West Point founded a behavioural science unit dedicated to unpacking the operational failures of that conflict. It was headed up by Colonel Tom Colditz, a decorated veteran who’d seen a lifetime of great plans wither in the face of enemy fire. Wrote Colditz: “In war, unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expe