Associate Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research in New York, USA
Research Project title: Cooperation: Rational vs. Social
Research abstract
Is cooperation rational? On one account, which is the dominant one in the social sciences and in decision theory – based on “rational choice” based analyses of cooperation – cooperation is seen as being frequently irrational, even when all parties acting cooperatively would benefit each of them. This is because in some situations (for instance, the famous prisoner’s dilemma) acting cooperatively seems to require acting against one’s own interest, conceived in terms of concepts such as the “dominant strategy”. The “rational” justification for acting cooperatively in such situations has generally, in this tradition, been based upon the idea that players faced with the same situation repeatedly would weigh the benefits of deviating from cooperation in the short term against the losses in the long term from other parties withdrawing their cooperation as a result. Cooperation sustained on the basis of such a calculation has been referred to in game theory as “trusting” behavior, but this seems a misnomer, since it appears to be merely “an encapsulation of self-interest”. As such, it cannot explain the decision to cooperate in a situation such as the (one shot) prisoner’s dilemma, in which standard rational choice theory would insist that cooperation is contrary to self-interest. What, then, is trust, and what role does it have to play in cooperation? Can it also provide explanatory resources that go beyond the traditionally conceived forms of “rational choice” theory? We might hypothesize that trust in the context of cooperation is defined by a reliance on a belief that others will act cooperatively (in a manner that may or may not be contingent upon one’s own actions). For cooperation to be underpinned by trust, then, is for the cooperating agents to possess a belief that others will cooperate, and for that belief to help to sustain their own acts of cooperation. Cooperation understood in this way is compatible with the game theoretic understanding of cooperation arising in repeated play on the basis of self-interest but is in no way dependent on that narrow idea. The question of how to explain cooperation (if it is thought to need explanation) is in this perspective displaced onto another question, which is that of how it is that trust comes to exist and to be warranted. The project develops and elaborates these ideas.
Research project title: The Predicament of Economics
Research abstract
During my stay I will investigate the ‘predicament of economics’, in particular the underlying sources of difficulties in establishing agreed upon and ‘law-like’ economic knowledge, and what implications this has for our understanding of the status of economic knowledge and of the role it can or should play in society.
The project thus straddles the methodology, the sociology and politics of social science to ask how and why it is that the discipline, looked to in order to provide answers to pressing questions of social explanation and of policy, often does not do so fails to do so in a manner that many could consider to be satisfactorily, and is instead y, seemingly characterized by permanent internal conflicts, and the reign of ideology, fads and fashions, and some notable predictive and explanatory failures. The project explores the forces and factors operating on the discipline to deflect or prevent it from better serving its social mission and explores the predicament of economists, asking whether certain debates can ever reasonably be expected to be resolved or whether their continuation is a manifestation of politics in another form. If there is a way forward that might permit the discipline to become both more reason-bound and more faithful to society, what is it?
Events:
Lecture by Sanjay Reddy
The predicament of Economics (and the social sciences more generally)
Tuesday 23.07.2019, 2-4 pm/ 14:00-16:00 (Building “Normative Orders”, 5.01)
Masterclass (with Sanjay Reddy)
The predicament of Economics (and the social sciences more generally)
Monday 22.07.2019 – Wednesday 24.07.2019; each day a morning session from 10-12 am and an afternoon session from 2-4 pm.
Also individual sessions can be attended.
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Biografische Angaben
Sanjay G. Reddy is an Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. He has also previously taught at Columbia University, and been a visitor at diverse academic institutions in the US, Europe and India. He has held fellowships from the Center for Ethics, the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the Justitia Amplificata program of the Goethe University of Frankfurt and Free University of Berlin and the Advanced Research Collaborative of the City University of New York. Recently he was a member of the Independent High-level Team of Advisers to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations on the longer-term positioning of the UN Development System (in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) and has served in various other functions in the United Nations. He is one of the co-founders of the Global Consumption and Income Project. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, an M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. in applied mathematics with physics from Harvard University. For more information see: http://www.sanjayreddy.com/about -
Publikationen
– Beyond Property or Beyond Piketty?, forthcoming in: British Journal of Sociology – „Population Health, Economics and Ethics in The Age of Covid-19, in: BMJ Global Health, Vol. 5, Issue 7. – What is an Explanation? Statistical Physics and Economics, in: European Physics Journal Special Topics, July 2020, Vol 229. – “Inequalities and Identities” (with Arjun Jayadev), in Deprivation, Inequality and Polarization (ed. I. Dasgupta and M. Mitra), 2019, Springer. – “Poverty Beyond Obscurantism” in Beck, V./Hahn, H./Lepenies, R. (Eds.): Dimensions of Poverty. Springer (forthcoming; 2019). – „The Middle Muddle: Conceptualizing and Measuring the Global Middle Class“ (with Arjun Jayadev and Rahul Lahoti) in Martin Guzman ed. Toward a Just Society: Joseph Stiglitz and Twenty-First Century Economics, Columbia University Press. – International Trade and Labour Standards: A Proposal for Linkage (with Christian Barry), 2008, New York: Columbia University Press.