Professor Pavel Kuchar’s History of Economic Thought provides students with a grasp of the evolution of economic thought from Plato to the present. The course also inquires into the presence of useful information within the work of earlier economic thinkers and stresses the power of injecting contemporary economic thought with ideas from economic history.
Professor Pavel Kuchar’s Social and Political Philosophy challenges students to digest and discuss texts of social and political philosophy, and then tie these texts to the economic realities of public life with the goal of understanding the normative foundations of the market and the government. In the class, students will discuss the following questions: How should we live together? What are the preconditions for successful social cooperation, and how is it sustained? Why should inequality concern us? What distinguishes the virtuous in society?
Professor Richard Adelstein’s Economic Analysis and the Law examines the intersection between economic and legal institutions. The course opens with the creation of healthy markets and regulation in the case of market failure; the course then moves onto property rights and finishes with the economics of criminal behavior.
In Professor Richard Adelstein’s seminar State and Economy in Industrial America, 1870-1940, students discuss the themes of the rapidly industrializing American state: order and planning, contracts, scientific management and Taylorism, capitalism, trusts, war, and more.
Professor Toke Aidt’s Political Economics: Institutions covers the development of the institutions that govern public decision making, particularly those which codify property rights and/or provide their members with political rights to participate in the making of public policy. The course asks: Where do these institutions come from, and what roles do they serve?
Professor Toke Aidt’s Political Economics: Special-interesst Politics provides students an opportunity to understand the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. These groups have tremendous sway over the work of public officials, and the course examines the positive and normative questions creating by the presence of special interest groups in public affairs.
Rather than exploring the normative question of how policy ought to be created, in Professor Toke Aidt’s Political Economics: Voting and Elections students investigate the positive question of how policy is actually created. The course’s focus is on the two major forces shaping policy in democratic societies: disagreement between citizens one policy and the inability of citizens to hold their representatives to full account.
