Akshat Goel
The New Sociology of Economic Life
What Embeddedness Is ‘Economics,’ said Robert Lucas once, ‘cannot tell us much about the human character. It can, however, tell us about the choices we make given a particular set of preferences.’ This article tells the story of how a group of sociologists and anthropologists found the Lucas position untenable. Isn’t the point of social [...]
Fractal Finance: A Rogue Mathematician’s Search for Answers
How do you measure the rough and jagged coastline of the United Kingdom? Or the sharp, seemingly arbitrary rise and fall of a stock-price? To the layperson, the answer to the first question might seem a straightforward matter of getting on a boat and making a trip. 1 The answer to the second question might [...]
Calculus: Should Isaac Newton Earn Royalties?
It is common intuition that knowledge and ideas drive growth. But if economics were intuition and nothing more, it would not be a profession. This is the story of how a group of young economists created a revolution in technical economics by recognizing how central knowledge-driven technological change is to economies, and more importantly, modeling [...]
Bombay/Mumbai: Formalizing the Informal?
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s account of a hot night in Delhi embodies a sense of oppression felt only in Indian cities: “People eating, people washing, people arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People. People. People.”[1] Bombay faces a variety [...]
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