- How did economics change as a discipline once Paul Samuelson's 'Foundations of Economic Analysis' imposed mathematical rigor on it?
Welfare Economics and Social Choice
How societies aggregate preferences and evaluate well-being.
- What does Arrow's impossibility theorem actually prove about voting systems?
- In what sense does Arrow's theorem end up being clarifying rather than simply bleak?
- Who ended up being caught by a law meant to target drug manufacturers, and why?
- What problem was Mirrlees solving when he analyzed how a government should design income tax without observing citizens' true abilities?
- How did Amartya Sen show that famines can occur even while food is still being exported from the affected region?
- What is the difference between measuring poverty by income and measuring it by Sen's idea of capabilities?
- How did Sen's work influence the creation of the United Nations' Human Development Index?
- What is the 'tragedy of the commons' and what solutions did economists traditionally propose for it?
- How did Elinor Ostrom find that communities like Maine fishing villages managed shared resources sustainably without privatization or government control?
- What was notable about Ostrom being the first woman to win the economics Nobel?
- How was the Bangkok Metropolitan Police's anti-bribery bonus scheme supposed to change officer incentives?
- Why is it difficult to measure whether the scheme actually reduced bribery?
- How did Blavatskyy measure the body-mass index of post-Soviet cabinet ministers?
- What relationship did the study find between politicians' weight and national corruption scores?
- Why does the study stop short of claiming a causal mechanism between weight and corruption?
- How did Ehrlich's scientific legacy diverge between his public predictions and his research career?