Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science is meant to be a continuation of Deirdre McCloskey’s past trilogy on the Bourgeois Virtues, as the first part of a new pair of volumes, the second one of which will be titled Beyond Behaviorism, Positivism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics.

In Bettering Humanomics, McCloskey frames her research agenda into what Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson call ”humanomics,” an understanding of economics that also sees it through the lens of the humanities. So she claims she had done humanomics all the time (at least for the past few decades) without knowing it. Now she realizes that her work is part of this approach and so she presents it as such, refining her previous arguments.

In her understanding, the power of the humanomic approach is its ability to include all, and not just some, sources of knowledge. So economics should rely just as much on math and statistics as on literature and poetry. Humans are not fragmented beings, so to understand how they act, we need to use all tools available, without avoiding some because they are sometimes deemed “unscientific.” And the one tool we in particular need to learn to consider is language: words.

Words, and the art of persuasion, are, in her account, what made the difference in human history. We rely on “sweet talk” for a large part of our economic activities. But, in particular, what matters is that the greatest economic growth ever recorded, a growth in the range of 10,000% in the last few centuries, was the product of a new way in which people described each other.

The liberal description of regular people as beings with equal dignity, as opposed to being shamed or presented as inferior, allowed them to take advantage of their surroundings and grow richer and richer. Once people started to admire common workers, once the idea of making money was no longer shameful, then the beneficial Pandora’s box was opened, bringing humanity all the good things we experience today.

The explanatory power of this great enrichment is thus in the power of words, in the power of ideas, not in material or institutional incentives, or scientific innovations, let alone in utility maximization.

The last part of the book is dedicated to answering critics to her previous work, reiterating that the explanation of the great enrichment relies on ideas.

The book is obviously well written and pleasant to read, given its author. McCloskey’s wit does not hide her powerful message, but it is meant to highlight it. Her words are powerful tools showing the importance of ideas, so powerful that at times they seem to imply that ideas alone brought about the great enrichment we have been experiencing in recent centuries. This may sound like a contradiction to the opening part of the book, where she lauds integrating all sources of knowledge and not relying only on one. But her words have not yet brought about the same kind of revolution in economics she describes for the great enrichment. So they need all the power they can get.