In this lecture, Professor Bueno de Mesquita will question the impact of the Protestant Reformation, arguing that it was not a major driver either of northern Europe's economic success or of the decline of Roman Catholicism's sway in Europe. Rather, both, along with Europe's secularization and creation of sovereign states, were predictable products of the Concordat of Worms (1122).

Deirdre McCloskey taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, Chicago-School style (she taught in the Economics Department there from 1968 to 1980, and in History), but protests that “I’m a literary, quantitative,...