Deirdre McCloskey on writing to persuade

Few people in public life have thought more or more deeply than Deirdre McCloskey about how we can use language to persuade people of public policy ideas.

Presenter: David Walker

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About Deirdre McCloskey

David Walker: In this episode of Shorewalker On Reports, we’re hearing from a world-renowned thinker – Professor Deirdre McCloskey. Professor McCloskey thinks and writes about economics, English, communication, philosophy, history and classics. Does that seems a broad range? Try this: she’s been a professor in each of those six disciplines, at universities in the United States and The Netherlands. She’s also a Distinguished Scholar at the Cato Institute, which is where she was when we had this conversation.

I first read Deirdre’s book The Rhetoric of Economics in the early 1990s; it was already famous by then. She is well-known for her work on economic methods. She has contributed to cliometrics – that is, the application of quantitative methods to history. She’s a leading scholar of the economic history of Britain’s industrial revolution. In recent years she has become famous all over again for her series of books on the industrial middle class and its values – books with titles like 2016’s Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

Of particular interest to us today is her thinking about communication: she has looked perhaps as deeply as anyone else into how the social sciences use persuasive language to spread and advance ideas. She still often refers to this persuasive language by its old name, “rhetoric”. She also calls it, more colourfully, “sweet talk”.

Also relevant to this podcast is one more thing: Deirdre McCloskey is widely regarded as one of the great stylists of economics writing. She’s written a classic book about this too, titled Economical Writing: 35 Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose. She’s also a powerful speaker, despite the twin handicaps of stuttering and of suffering vocal cord damage later in life.

I’ve now enjoyed several of her books; I have put up a list on the podcast page at shorewalker.net. I’ve also had the pleasure of speaking with her at length several times in recent years. She’s not just hella smart; she’s also a lot of fun.

I started by asking her a fan question: How did she come to be so accomplished in so many areas?

McCloskey: The kind of sober reply is that I had been educated at Harvard in economics back in the ‘60s. And then my first job – and I was tenured there – was at the University of Chicago. And at that time, those economics departments were very far apart. One was Keynesian. The other was, well, you could say monetarist or, or classical, neoclassical. And so I was puzzled at the rhetoric of economics as I came to understand it. And that led me to the study of classical rhetoric – and the whole issue of how scientists or husbands and wives or politicians persuade each other. My kind of smart aleck version of this is that my heroine is the great American vaudeville and movie comedian, Mae West. And she said, “I was Snow White, but I drifted”. So in the end I was a professor of English and communication, economics, and I was a professor of philosophy in Holland. Yeah. All over.

McCloskey’s father was a Harvard political science professor. But McCloskey credits her mother with instilling curiosity in her.

McCloskey: Dad was an expert. And as our President Harry Truman said, an expert is someone who doesn't want to learn anything new because then he wouldn't be an expert. Whereas my mum … she denied it all her life, I kept saying it to her, “You're the intellectual and you're the one who is interested in ideas for their own sake, and are always willing to catch on and inquire into them.” And I saw I think I got that habit from her maybe got it genetically. So that's one thing and then that's I've been everything one could be in a long life and economics from a sort of a wannabe Trotskyist at one extreme, to now an advocate for what I call a humanomics at some other extreme. And I've been everything in between: I've been a Keynesian, I've been a standard issue Democrat, I've been a social engineer, I've been a Chicago School economist. And I don't do this just because I'm crazy, although there's some evidence that I am. It's because I keep seeing new truths, because of this intellectual curiosity that my mother imparted.

Persuasion is a big task

As you’re about to hear, McCloskey spent a lot of time talking with me about how we use words to communicate and persuade. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’ve realised that persuasion is the common thread running right through Deirdre McCloskey’s rich career.

McCloskey’s core contention about persuasion is this: the most important job of an economist, or a physicist, or a doctor, or almost anyone in any sort of thinking job, is to perform rhetoric. McCloskey doesn’t mean windy speechifying. She means rhetoric in the Aristotelian sense. She means rhetoric in the sense of persuasion –, of using, as she puts it, “sweet talk” to change people’s minds.To make her point, she turns – as she often does – to the 18^th-century author sometimes called the first real political economist – Adam Smith.

McCloskey: [H]is first job was to teach 14-year-old Scottish schoolboys writing. That was his first academic job. He was a teacher of composition. And what people would like is that they say something and then you just agree with it. Mathematical proof is supposed to be this way. I prove the Pythagorean theorem. There's no persuasion about it, right? Bang, bang, bang. Well, that's never been true. Humans are human … And we need to be sweet-talked, we need to be persuaded of all kinds of things. I mean, the most important thing these days that we need to be persuaded, both in your country and mine, is to continue with the project of a free society. Because there's this terrible temptation, which some of our countrymen indulge in, of admiring the man on the white horse, or the Nuremberg Rally way of being in politics. And that's just terribly dangerous. We have to be creatures of tolerant persuasion.

McCloskey has even co-written a paper (with Arjo Klamer) trying to pin down just how much of modern work is rhetoric – that is, how much is “persuasion work”, and how big is the “persuasion economy”. She argues that this persuasion economy covers everything from lawyers and judges to building site supervisors, from marketers to scientists. And her original paper calculated that persuasion was a big slice of the economy: in rich countries, it was around a quarter of gross domestic product. An Australian Treasury economist, Gerry Antioch, revisited the idea in 2013; he argued that the US persuasion economy had expanded further, to 30 per cent of US GDP. Probably that number is even higher than 30 per cent now.

Now, the idea that persuasion really matters might seem a fine thing for a marketing executive to spout. But the idea that persuasion is central to economics, and to fields like philosophy, probably seems an odd idea to most of us. The model we usually adopt shows persuasion as a sort of add-on. It’s generally assumed that we figure out how we want to say something after we’ve figured out what we want to say to people. So you write up your conclusion; and then you pass those words along to a communications team; and then the comms team changes those words as needed for the audiences; and then the audiences extract the thoughts and feelings that were injected in the first place. This is called the “conduit metaphor”.

Communication is more than just a conduit

But McCloskey points out that among communications academics, almost no-one thinks of communication as just a conduit:

McCloskey: In departments of communication, when we professors of communication are making fun of the naive view of what communication is, we call it the conduit theory. So it's like you do you remember, in the old-fashioned department stores that have those … air tubes, and they would send the receipt to the main office and they'd send it back … And that's not really how communication operates.

(For those who are interested in this area of communications theory, I should mention that the flaws of the conduit metaphor were pointed out back in the 1970s by people like the linguist Michael Reddy.)

Ideas and persuasion are intertwined

So put aside the conduit metaphor. Here’s a more traditional but long-lived concept: in the long term, at least, we win or lose the battle to persuade at least partly through ideas.

Persuading with ideas has two main strands. The first strand is this: how inherently well-suited is an idea to actually solve our problem? The second strand is not separate from the first, but intertwined: how well can an idea be used to persuade people to take it up, to use it?

These two – problem-solving ability and appeal to audience – might be thought of as separate, and they might be labelled substance and style, respectively. But that doesn’t quite get at what’s really going on.

• Clearly, better ideas are inherently worth defending: by definition, better ideas will produce greater and more lasting advantage for those who can grasp and use them.
• But better ideas are also generally easier to defend; there’s a greater chance that you can find persuasive arguments for them. Good ideas make persuasion easier.
• And we can see feedback working in the other direction too: the job of persuading makes ideas stronger. That is, in refining your persuasive language, you find out where your ideas are weak and where they are strong. Writing and speaking your ideas tells you which strands of your argument you should use aggressively, and which you should re-examine, re-formulate, investigate further, and even discard.

None of this will come as a surprise to those who understand the history of the sciences. From astrophysics to gastroenterology, the “hard sciences” establish the strength of ideas through a huge web of discussions between people. Scientists try to persuade each other. And to do that persuasion, they mix data and interpretation with the techniques of persuasion in speech and writing.

McCloskey points to two of the most famous examples of persuasion in science. These are two of the discoveries which have best withstood the passage of time relatively unchanged: Isaac Newton’s 1687 book, Principia Mathematica, set out the laws of motion and gravitation. And James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 report in Nature, titled "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", established out the architecture of DNA – essentially, the underlying structure of life.

Several studies of Watson and Crick's famous 1953 paper have argued it was carefully designed to persuade, using rhetorical techniques such as voice, narrative, irony, and a few others with names like  ethos, Kairos and stasis.

And as McCloskey points out, Isaac Newton chose a particular course to persuade the scientific community of his ideas about motion and gravity. His persuasive strategy included expressing his ideas with less sophisticated mathematics than was possible. He had just invented calculus, but he intentionally kept it out of his masterwork, Principia Mathematica.

McCloskey: Newton, in the Principia Mathematica, purposely expressed all his proofs in geometry, even though he had secretly invented calculus, when there were much simpler proofs of the propositions he was making about celestial mechanics and this, that and the other thing, with this new invention, he and Leibnitz.

And yet, the style was necessary for the audience he was dealing with, for two reasons. For one thing, the best intellects at the time were very much into Euclid. Spinoza was and Bacon was and Hobbes was. They were all Euclideans, and the axiom of proof was how they're going to do things – not simulation of a sort that one does with calculus. And the other reason which he articulated at one point is to keep it secret. You had to be a first rate intellect of the 1680s to understand his book.

So what's style and what's substance here? The style … expresses a view of what science should be …

It’s not just that the ideas are woven into the task of persuasion. The persuasion is also integral to the contest of ideas.

McCloskey: We're – what's the word to use? – we're charming other people. Or we're bringing them on our side. Or – not so nice – we're exercising our authority, our superiority. I'm a Field Medal winner in mathematics, and you're a mere ordinary professor of mathematics: shut up. It's one way of doing it, right? So it's persuasion all the way down. And that's perfectly natural. And there's nothing French or disgracefully postmodern about it. It's the way humans have always been …

We can put this another way. Persuasion, or rhetoric, – is not so much like that  box in which your Amazon parcel arrives. Rhetoric is more like the user interface on a piece of software. The language which expresses an idea, which persuades people to believe the idea, is in continual dialogue with the idea itself. They influence each other. The rhetoric helps to question and fine-tune the idea, pinpointing weaknesses and strengths in the arguments.

As McCloskey points out, rhetoric used to be a starting point for teaching people how to think.

McCloskey: The ancient sophists in Sicily and then Athens were essentially the law professors of their time. And rhetoric was the basis of education in the west, for 1500 years and longer. And they would have exercises like an absolutely standard one, which we ought to do more these days, which is to have the kids, have the young – it would always be boys, of course, they were doing this with the young boys – make a case for one side of the argument, and then say, ‘Okay guys, now make the opposite case’.

Storytelling matters

I want to pause here to underline a point. This centrality of rhetoric, of persuasion, is not some weird theoretical idea. Lots of people make the point that to have influence, people need not just to dev  elop theoretical models but to tell stories, even when the stories are backed up by models. Economics provides plenty of examples. Here’s one, from Ken Henry, a former Australian Treasury head and later National Australia Bank chairman. He’s talking with podcaster Joe Walker (no relation) about the centrality of storytelling:

Ken Henry: My younger brother said to me somewhat unkindly the other day – and he’s a mathematician, a theoretical physicist – and he said to me, somewhat unkindly, and yet it’s true, he said: ‘Is economics really anything more than storytelling?’ Well, it’s probably not really.

Joe Walker: Storytelling through models.

Ken Henry: Yeah, storytelling through models … It’s the model that’s going to give you some confidence in the intellectual rigour of the argument. But then you have to convert that formalised model into something which is a really compelling story, a story that grabs people’s attention.

You can find a link to the full version of that conversation with Ken Henry, from Joe Walker’s The Jolly Swagman podcast, in the show notes at shorewalker.net.

And to underline the point that storytelling should matter to economists, here’s one of the world’s most admired economists, Ed Leamer, talking in a UCLA video:

Ed Leamer: My view is that in economics we need to create a culture that explicitly expresses our lack of knowledge, and allow people to say: ‘That question is an interesting question but frankly it's beyond the realm of economics in its current state actually to answer.’ We never find that thing, that kind of statement being made, I think it would be better if we added humility to the enterprise and recognised that what we do is patterns and stories. We're seeking patterns in the data sets that we look for, that we're examining and we're telling stories about that …

So it’s not just McCloskey emphasising the importance of telling stories that make a point.

We should probably accept that people in the sciences are telling stories a lot of the time – and especially in the social sciences. That’s not a put-down: in this context, “telling stories” absolutely does not mean “lying”. “Telling stories” means “presenting your arguments in a way that people can understand and retell”.

To find your ideas, start expressing them

One repercussion of all this seems to be that people should start intellectual projects with a goal in mind – the goal of telling their stories so that people can understand them.

How do you do that? To start on any written work, it’s a good idea to start getting good at writing. And that means … well, writing. Only writing will really let you find out how to write well, to write in ways that persuade people to your arguments.

McCloskey: It's an old cliche of instruction in writing that the best way to learn to write is to write. You want to be a novelist? Well, start writing novels. Come on, guy, apply posterior to chair, find writing implement, write. And I find, and I'm sure you do too, that style of work is intellectually [fulfilling]. Here's an example. It's an elementary proposition in prose style, to express parallel ideas in parallel form. I won't give an example; it'll be too hard. And when you do that, and I find it all the time, I'm forced to see the parallel and to see: ‘Have I got that right? Is it really parallel? Is this an example of that?’ See what I mean? So ideas are forced into existence by writing, speaking ... A famous remark of Francis Bacon: ‘Reading maketh a full man; writing maketh [something like] a precise man.’

The precise expression of an idea through writing somehow shapes the idea itself; it is an inseparable part of the idea. And writing and speaking sometimes force new ideas into existence – and sometimes also force those ideas into a better shape. And sometimes you only actually find out what your argument really is at all when you write it, and then you look down at it, and you get dissatisfied with the bad bits and start improving it. That's not a widely accepted notion, but it nevertheless seems to me to be true.

McCloskey: It's not only true in the advice I give students and others, it's an experience of my life – and you must have the same experience – that I don't know what I think until I say it. And sometimes I can say it, like in conversation with you, but I don't really get it clear until I've written it very well. I just finished a book called – I keep changing the title a bit, but I think I’ll call it ‘God's Economics: Public Theology for an Age of Innovism’. And it's an attempt to persuade my progressive, especially Anglican believers, that they don't have to be socialist to be Christians. That's the theme of the book. But I didn't get it clear until a seminar we had last year, last November. And then it suddenly clicked and I started to see it and I can write it down. And as I wrote it, you know – writing is thinking, I think is the simplest way of putting it.

Talking is thinking too, if you're honest. If you're just a bullshit artist, and you kind of sweep along on the surface ... I know lots of intellectuals like that are scholars, and it's a great tragedy, because they don't ask themselves: 'Is what I'm saying actually true?' They just say it.

(David Walker: So one of the repercussions of that for practical report-writing is you can't do it from the top. You can't look over something and say: 'We need a report that says this and this and this, and it needs to address that and that and that, and come to this conclusion.' You've got to start with some thoughts. But you've got to accept that the people who do the work may come out with something different at the end of the process.)

McCloskey: Profoundly I don't think most people understand that. Because mostly, they hear the word 'report'. And they remember what they did in high school chemistry, where they would do these phony experiments that everyone knew how they were supposed to come out. And then they would write them up. And, you know, that's not thinking. That's typing. (Laughs) That's a wonderful remark that Ernest Hemingway made about Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing, that's typing.' And I think that that's right, wait. Amy, what is her name? ...  that excellent writer? Amy something. The sapling at Tinker Creek? What is her name? ... Amy something. But anyway ... she says the pen is like a miner's pick.

(David Walker: Amy Dillard.)

McCloskey: Yeah, that's who it is ... And the next sentence leads on to the next idea. And if you don't let that happen, if in your agency, you think you can impose ideas down on your subordinates, and that's it – they're going to just type, not think – it's pointless. You're absolutely right ... But ... the problem is, there has to be an attitude of honest discourse, or else it's not going to work. Or strategizing, or trying to please the boss, or whatever; it's not going to work.

Readers get lost and get bored

For several decades now, McCloskey has been writing and expanding her masterwork on writing. It started as an essay; these days it’s a book titled Economical Writing. And since its early days, it has contained an insight you rarely hear talked about. It’s this: far more than we usually think, most readers struggle to keep up with narrative.

(David Walker: One of the most useful ideas in Economical Writing, to me – at least it's in the 35-year-old version – is that readers are sort of lost and unsatisfied a lot of the time.)

McCloskey: All the time.

(David Walker: Almost nobody ever says this.)

You're always confused. I am, aren't you? Yep. I read something; half the time I don't know what I'm reading. I forget – wait, wait, what's, what's this mean, what?

(David Walker: And I discovered slowly a number of things – and one of them was that a lot of people, like me, don't finish many of the books that they start. Tyler Cowen, for instance, I think says he finishes one in 10.)

I don't ever finish a book.

(David Walker: You suggest that writers need to work very hard to keep readers awake.)

Just purely awake. I had a wonderful colleague in the history department at the University of Iowa, Bill Aydelotte. Like me he was a British economic, British historian. And Bill said: 'The big thing in scholarship is to keep awake'. He said: 'If you're going to be a scholar, you're gonna have to read a lot of boring things. So you've gotta learn how to stay awake.' And so vice versa? You gotta – you can't bore people ... ? You know, that seems an awfully harsh standard for some kid who doesn't know writing very well. But you got to keep them awake.

(David Walker: Also, in that book, you talk about how people get lost very easily in the words. You mentioned talking to a graduate student who assumed he had some sort of mental deficiency, because he kept getting lost in the middle of a paragraph.)

That's right. He was amazed when I told him: 'Look, everyone has this problem’. He thought he was just stupid.'

(David Walker: The other aspect of just how badly people deal with the whole issue of reading stuff is … there's a wonderful quote, from The Atlantic, I think, from a woman called Pamela Paul, who was and I think still is editor of the New York Review of Books. And she said, 'look, it's a terrible thing, you know, but I can remember the titles of books and the authors and the dust jackets and the subjects and all of this. What I can't remember is what the book actually said.)

Yeah, it's true … There's a green book. And sure enough, it's a green book, then, let's see, what was that book about? Yeah.

(David Walker: I'm 57, I feel a bit stupid that it's taken me all this time to figure out an awful lot of what people write and read, just passes through their head, like it was a bird flying through a cloud.)

Look, both you and I have read a great deal in our lives. You know, way above the average for, for people of our society … And I've read a lot of them. And you're right, there is a kind of … But there'll be a gem that you'll get from a book on page 100, though. That'll be it. Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 books. And he was asked, kept being asked by naive people: ‘Have you read all these?’ He finally came up with a very good answer. He said: ‘No, I haven't read all these.  But the next one may be the important one. It's a good answer.’

Beware the preacher’s rule

So people tend to forget what they read. One response to this is to try to repeat your message using this simple formula: ‘tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell it to ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em’.  That is sometimes called the preacher’s rule, because it frequently gets used in church sermons. McCloskey detests this rule, because it makes your writing   dull.

McCloskey: There is a modern disease, which I warn against in the book, of: 'Say what you're gonna say, say it, say that you said it'.

It's claimed that Bertrand Russell formulated this. Now, he never did it. There is no essay or book of Bertrand Russell in which he does this. But someone told me once that he said it, in which case he's burning in hell for it----. Because yes, you've got to keep people apprised – not apprised, that's not a good word – you've got to keep them aware of the forward motion of your argument and your prose. But you can't keep stopping and telling them that. You can't say, you know, now I'm going to tell you about blah, blah. When you're talking about yourself, you're not talking about the subject. So forget about that. Just use your skills as a human being in conversation.

Here's how I would suggest doing it: not by stopping and saying ‘My message is X’, but by subtle repetition. Subtle. And the great advantage of word processing is that you can search your manuscript and find how you to use words and phrases, and I've gotten in the habit of doing that, especially with books, long pieces. Then the only way you're going to achieve any unity is to make sure you're using the same word to say the same thing every time you do it. And that doesn't mean you have to repeat the whole phrase and get monotonous. 'Why is he telling me this again, he already told me that – shut up!' Don't do that. But do watch what you're using.

I mean, for example, in this current book that I mentioned to you, which I just sent off to the press … I worked at lining up my vocabulary. So when I talked about, for example, this word 'innovism' that I use in the title – 'An Age Of Innovism’ – that's a special word that I made up as a substitute for capitalism, which is a scientifically wretched word, it's a silly damn word, it's very misleading about the economics, about how we actually got to be rich, we didn't get to be rich by accumulating capital, we got to be rich by innovating, by thinking of new ways of doing things. And so I made sure that I used the word 'innovism' every time. And then, contrariwise, I wanted to attack the word 'capitalism'. So every time capitalism occurs in my book, which isn't very often – I thinned it very much and didn't mention it much, because I find it disgraceful – but I put scare quotes around it, so they know that I don't like this word.

The key messages may appear slowly

All this brings us to a key issue for any report: what are the key messages, those few central messages that we want people to remember when they put down the report?

Key messages are what we most want the public to know about a given report or issue. They answer the simple question "what did you find out". And how you answer that question with your key messages will usually make or break your report.

But whatever you are writing, your key messages may take a long time to emerge. The quest to find your central message has no simple shortcuts. McCloskey has written 16 books and almost 400 articles, and she still struggles with it.

And once those key messages do emerge, you need to revise yet again to make those key messages clear.

McCloskey: I usually don't really get the final message until I've written the book.

(David Walker: So you've got to go back and re work.)

That's what you have to do. You have to then say, oops, wait a second … There's a nice expression in journalism, burying the lede. The lede is the basic point of the news story. And if there's this modern convention in journalism, which has gotten worse and worse, of making every news story into a feature, so ‘John was walking down the street and he noticed that there was a dog over to the side and then finally it develops that there was a fire’. Who, what, when, why, how all just go right by the board. It's so irritating. Whereas in the old days, lead bang, it would tell you what the damn point of the story was right away.

So you have to find out: what is the lede to your report; what’s its one central message? Do you start with the end in mind, or find your answer after sorting through the evidence? I asked McCloskey, and found she argues for taking a careful middle course.

(David Walker: In the world that I inhabit, the world of reports, there's an argument that that says, you shouldn't try and do anything too early; you should hold hearings and listen to evidence and weigh all of that up before you start coming to your conclusions. And so it seems to me it's all a rather delicate balance, because trying to do it that way means that you're listening to people sort of in a vacuum: you don't know what your story is, and you therefore don't know what they're contributing to it.)

McCloskey: Exactly right. So that's the problem. If you don't have a hypothesis .– you can put it in terms of this rather foolish notion of the method of science – then you don't know what questions to ask. There is a passage in a Sherlock Holmes story where Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say: 'You mustn't speculate. Premature speculation is death to discovery; you should just look around.' Well, maybe. But then there's a kind of opposite point which a great philosopher of history and archaeologist himself and historian of Roman Britain – whose name I'm going to forget (DW: it was R.G. Collingwood) – wrote in a famous book published after his death in 1945 called The Idea Of History. And there, he said, 'scissors-and-paste history' is just collecting all the data there is and looking around the crime scene and looking aimlessly at everything. Whereas he says, and he's got this long passage about a detective who has a hypothesis of who the murderer is, and he goes that way ... And those are two completely separate ways. And in a way you have to do both.

Don’t neglect diagrams and pictures

McCloskey has another lesson to teach: take care to add illustrations, diagrams, charts, wherever they can help. People who want to seem sophisticated sometimes look down on pictures. But they’re frequently the best way of getting a point across. And not just to ordinary people going about their daily business, but also to some of the very smartest people in the world.

McCloskey: For a year, I was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the famous Einstein Institute. I was over with the social scientists ... every morning and afternoon, there was a more or less compulsory tea; you had to go and have tea and cookies with the other fellows. And I was very amused to see ... most of the fellows at the Institute are mathematicians, and I could see the mathematicians talking to each other by drawing little diagrams on their palm. I found that very amusing. These are very high-level mathematicians, and they were making those – ‘see, it goes up, and then it goes down’ – they're making very simple points.

Accept that persuasion is hard

We should end by looking briefly at the deep-down problem we’re grappling with whenever we try to persuade people of a case. Professor Deidre McCloskey makes this point with typical force: we have to accept that persuasion is hard. That’s not easy. We live in a world that thinks the opposite, a world that thinks everyone can be persuaded, sometimes against our will, by often dark forces – the advertising industry, the lobbyists, the politicians.

McCloskey: Their word is "manipulation". That's their big word.

But people who actually dig around and find out whether their ad spend works often discover something else: the power of advertising to manipulate us is less than they expected.

McCloskey: If it were easy to persuade people in science, or in marital relations, or in politics, or in buying Lucky Strikes, the ad, the people doing it would be very wealthy. There would be $500 bills lying around all over the place. And it would be just so easy. And it's not. There aren't any $500 bills. People believe there are; they wish there were. And then they develop conspiracy theories about the terrible advertisers or, you know, you remember that old film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? That's what they think is happening – that the advertisers are taking over our minds. Except what's irritating about that argument is that there's these people who say that advertising is terribly, terribly manipulative and important and the surveillance capitalism and so on. They say: "It's the stupid people who get manipulated. I of course don't. I can see through it. I have special insights.”

(David Walker: So if the power of that sort of commercial messaging is generally overstated, then the corollary presumably, is that the raw power of ideas is understated – that ideas rule us much more than we think they do.)

A great deal more.

That’s one of McCloskey’s core intellectual principles: the ideas really do matter. But still, persuasion is hard. And when McCloskey herself tries to persuade people of something, she does no better than anyone else.

McCloskey: It almost never works. It's very frustrating. I mean, we as scholars, scientists, journalists, politicians, whatever, wives, husbands, whatever we are, we're always trying to get through to people. Not necessarily even to bring them to our side, but to have an intelligent, open discussion. And, well, here's an example. I've been arguing for 40 years, along with many other statisticians, applied and theoretical statisticians, that a certain technique – tests of statistical significance – is bollocks. It's complete rubbish. It makes no sense at all. And this has been known for about 100 years. And yet, some scientists, not too many economists, medical scientists, sociologists, and psychologists and political scientists go on using this machine – because they love machines, it's part of modernism. They found the little machine and they can put three asterisks over a coefficient and it makes them feel very good. It's complete craziness. And I've tried everything to get this across. I've made fun of them. I've tried to sidle up to them and be very friendly and nice. I've tried to compromise. And nothing works. Nothing works.

Abraham Lincoln, in 1842, spoke to the Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois, as a young man. And ... by that time he was an experienced trial lawyer. And ... to the extent he could, he knew how to persuade people. And he said, "If you want to persuade someone, you first have to persuade them that you are their sincere friend".

If all you can do is what I do with statistical significance, is to say, "You dopes! Don't you see this is ridiculous," Abraham Lincoln says they'll turn away from you. And they won't be persuaded.

But Abraham Lincoln did not say you should stop after you persuade someone you are their friend. He argued you still have work to do. During his famous 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln said this: “If a man says he knows a thing, then he must show how he knows it.” Deirdre McCloskey takes the same stance.

McCloskey: Here's the answer though. The liberal approach to another human being is to treat them like reasonable adults with ethical standards. And whether it works or not, frankly, I don't care too much. I feel that it enacts liberalism in a deep sense – not just the Liberal Party of Australia or something, but real liberalism. But the great ethical, political turn that made us who we are, made us the egalitarians that Australians are, more than Americans of course, and made us respect each other, that makes intellectual conversations such as we're now having possible, is to treat each other as though reason, evidence, sober consideration of the pros and cons was what how we should make decisions. Now whether we actually do or not is, alas, not as common as it should be. So there's kind of a liberal program in good writing, in honest persuasion, honest sweet talk, that instantiates – to use what the English professors like to say – instantiates an ethical, liberal, I would say even a Christian attitude towards other people.

Guest

Deirdre McCloskey, distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

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