Professor of Political Economy at King's College London
https://t.co/S1HZzbPSMp
Jan 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I'm teaching my course on Game Theory and Strategic Decision-making (designed to introduce undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds in social science to game theory). Here are a few articles I find useful in teaching it, all centring on the work of the great Thomas Schelling.
The first is Thomas Schelling's 'Game Theory: A Practitioner's Approach', which provides a really nice introduction to his ideas. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Jul 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Drawing on experimental results, Elinor Ostrom contends that allowing people involved in commons-type problems to discuss possible responses to their predicament can lead to significantly-improved outcomes: "The laboratory experiments did not establish that subjects lacked...
rationality or were inexperienced ... Rather, as Sen has argued in his famous article on ‘Rational Fools’ ... the experiments illuminated that the subjects used a different form of reasoning than that presumed in many formal economic theories. When subjects had an ...
Jul 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If the UK is moving towards an increasingly bio-based economy, then it will need technicians with the skills required to operate and thereby facilitate the widespread diffusion of the new technology. This report discusses what those technicians are like gatsby.org.uk/uploads/educat…
There are currently significant problems in developing such workers (see the report linked above and this researchgate.net/publication/34…)
May 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
More from Elinor Ostrom on creative human agency: "If agency is taken seriously, we must allow for both creativity and differences in perspective. But creativity and differences in interpretation mean that lawlike social patterns are unlikely to arise … Deductive-nomological ...
reasoning suggests a mechanical view of the world, in which the same stimulus produces the same effect, ceteris paribus. Theories that view social phenomena as products of either evolutionary processes or intentional action challenge this mechanical view” (Working Together.)
May 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Elinor Ostrom on the need to transcend the simple state-market dichotomy and adopt a thicker, historically more specific notion of institutions: "Both the centralisers and the privatisers frequently advocate simplified, idealised institutions – paradoxically, almost...
‘institution-free’ institutions. An assertion that central regulation is necessary tells us nothing about the way a central agency should be constituted, what authority it should have, how the limits on its authority should be maintained, how it will obtain information, or how...
May 6, 2021 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
@RSAMatthew has written a really interesting and thought-provoking post on individualism. In this thread, I’d like to compare some aspects of his fascinating account with the ideas of an individualist whose work I know well, namely Friedrich Hayek. I do so less ...
to rebut some of the criticisms Taylor makes – he’s right on many counts - but rather to identify more precisely some of the possible shortcomings of individualism.
May 6, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Great to see Oxford Biomedica, a firm that is intimately involved in manufacture of anti-Covid vaccines, extol the virtues of training apprentices through the ATAC programme in whose inception I was involved: "Before recruiting and upskilling talent through the ATAC programme,...
Oxford Biomedica's approach was to only hire highly experienced ...candidates or university graduates for their roles. Continuing to hire from such a limited recruitment base was going to become problematic and a potential barrier to Oxford Biomedica attracting future talent ..
May 4, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
“If the individual’s wants are to be urgent, they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied ...
For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.” (J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society.)
Mar 31, 2021 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
I’ve just listened to a really interesting episode of Econtalk on two fascinating essays by James Buchanan, namely 'What Should Economists do?' and 'Natural and Artifactual Man.' Lots of interesting points were discussed. @EconTalker@econlib (Thread.)
Those points included: 1. Buchanan as an advocate of an approach that focuses on exchange under particular institutional conditions (rather than on the allocation of resources, as set out most famously by Lionel Robbins). 2. The importance of comparative institutional analysis
