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Searching... | 30000010278041 | HB74.P8 A34 2010 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
How identity influences the economic choices we make
Identity Economics provides an important and compelling new way to understand human behavior, revealing how our identities--and not just economic incentives--influence our decisions. In 1995, economist Rachel Kranton wrote future Nobel Prize-winner George Akerlof a letter insisting that his most recent paper was wrong. Identity, she argued, was the missing element that would help to explain why people--facing the same economic circumstances--would make different choices. This was the beginning of a fourteen-year collaboration--and of Identity Economics .
The authors explain how our conception of who we are and who we want to be may shape our economic lives more than any other factor, affecting how hard we work, and how we learn, spend, and save. Identity economics is a new way to understand people's decisions--at work, at school, and at home. With it, we can better appreciate why incentives like stock options work or don't; why some schools succeed and others don't; why some cities and towns don't invest in their futures--and much, much more.
Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People's notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people's identity--their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be--may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives. And the limits placed by society on people's identity can also be crucial determinants of their economic well-being.
Author Notes
George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Akerlof received his Bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1962, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1966, and has taught at the London School of Economics.
Akerlof won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). and is perhaps best known for his article, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970.
Akerlof's authored book titles include: An Economic Theorist's Book of Tales (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Explorations in Pragmatic Economics (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews 1
Choice Review
The evolution of economics as a science has taken many paths. The more traditional approach is to assume that when individual optimizing behavior is incompatible with the common good, it is because the assumptions of the perfectly competitive model are violated. Imperfect information, uncertainty, externalities, and collusion lead to market failure. Much less attention has been given to how social factors (the common good) motivate individual economic behavior. Akerlof (Univ. of California, Berkeley; Nobel laureate, economics) and Kranton (Duke Univ.) are eminently qualified to take this approach, given their many scholarly publications. They present this material in a very readable and entertaining way. Their findings are that economic behavior is governed by one's social category, by the norms of that social assignment, and by how one views one's identity in that social context. What might appear as irrational may be quite reasonable, given one's perception of where one is in a group. The authors are not advocating that the traditional economic approach be jettisoned but rather expanded to allow for self-identity. The fruitfulness of this is seen in real-world examples in organizational behavior, educational attainment, gender and work, discrimination, and poverty. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division and graduate students, researchers, professionals. J. F. O'Connell emeritus, College of Holy Cross
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Economics and Identity | |
| 1 Introduction | p. 3 |
| 2 Identity Economics | p. 9 |
| 3 Identity and Norms in Utility | p. 17 |
| Postscript to Chapter three A Rosetta Stone | p. 21 |
| 4 Where We Fit into Today's Economics | p. 27 |
| Part 2 Work and School | |
| 5 Identity and the Economics of Organizations | p. 39 |
| 6 Identity and the Economics of Education | p. 61 |
| Part 3 Gender and Race | |
| 7 Gender and Work | p. 83 |
| 8 Race and Minority Poverty | p. 97 |
| Part 4 Looking Ahead | |
| 9 Identity Economics and Economic Methodology | p. 113 |
| 10 Conclusion, and Five Ways Identity Changes Economics | p. 121 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 131 |
| Notes | p. 135 |
| References | p. 153 |
| Index | p. 173 |
