Economics
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Altruism of Recycling
Why do we recycle? A 1996 New York Times commentary declared recycling to be “the most wasteful activity in modern America” [1]. Critics have suggested that recycling lowers industrial rates of production and consumes enough energy to easily outweigh its scant benefits to the environment [2]. On the other hand, there is also evidence proposing [...]
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