Art Carden is Margaret Gage Bush Distinguished Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business. He is also a Senior Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, and co-editor of the Southern Economic Journal. His research on mass-market retailers, economic history, and the history of economic ideas has appeared in journals like the Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Urban Economics, Public Choice, and Contemporary Economic Policy. He is a contributor to Forbes.com, and his commentaries and other articles have appeared in USA Today, Productive!, and many other outlets. He earned a BS and MA from the University of Alabama and an AM and PhD from Washington University in Saint Louis. Before joining the faculty at Samford, Art taught economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His first book, co-authored with Deirdre McCloskey and titled Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020, and his second book, titled Strangers With Candy: Observations from the Ordinary Business of Life, was published by the Libertarian Christian Institute in 2023. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, their three children, and a hyperactive black lab named Lucy.

Deirdre N. McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written 25 books, edited seven more, and has published some 400 academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. Her most recent popular books are Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019), Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal with Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State with Alberto Mingardi (Adam Smith Institute and American Institute for Economic Research). McCloskey is also the author of the highly acclaimed three-part series: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (U. of Chicago Press, 2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (U. of Chicago Press, 2016).