Markets and Politics

Catalog description

Human societies make decisions under constraints imposed by their physical, biological, social, and strategic environments. They are also constrained by path dependency: today's choice set is limited by the choices made in the past that structure the present. How have those constraints varied across societies and over time? How did they give rise to implicit tradeoffs made by societies in terms of their political institutions, distributions of power, personal liberty, levels of economic development, and distribution of income so that they may be understood as components of an equilibrium? This course explores these questions by examining the evolution of political and economic systems across a diverse set of societies from the 16th century to the present.