Describes first two years as Fellow, including postgraduate year in Cambridge.

Describes Meade’s highly productive years as a senior research fellow at Christs College, including several major public lectures and the completion of his Principles of Political Economy.

Describes Meade’s appointment and first three years as Cambridge Professor of Political Economy.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the key contributions of game theory to the field of cultural evolution, focusing particularly on interfaces between cultural evolution and economics. Because many readers may not be familiar with the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution, it begins with a brief orientation to this field as a scientific enterprise and then highlights the important ways that game theory has been deployed in both theoretical and empirical research within the field, noting spillovers and interactions with economics.

But apart from perhaps the national income estimates, he is remembered more for his academic work, especially his role in the 1930/1 ‘Cambridge Circus’ which set John Maynard Keynes on the path to his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the first Keynesian textbook in economics; his contribution to the enquiries of the Oxford Economists Research Group; and his 1950s work on the theory of international economic policy, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1977, as well as a long series of academic articles and 30 books. This biography tells the story of his involvement in policymaking as well as the development of his more theoretical work in economics.

This chapter discusses both motivations and choice mechanisms that underly how people make strategic choices. It lists multiple areas where our understanding could benefit from closer study. About the early work by Tversky and Kahneman on framing (i.e., the dependence of human choice behavior on different presentations of what to rational agents should be irrelevant factors), it concludes that one must make a choice between normative adequacy and descriptive accuracy. Concerning recent work on reciprocity, it argues that players’ reactions to, for instance, kind acts may lead to volatile behavior in settings with noise, whereas reciprocity toward perceived kind types can be more forgiving and result in more stable reciprocal relations.

A large share of individuals deviates from self-interested behavior in many paradigmatic games, but in many other strategic situations almost all individuals behave in a self-interested manner. Models with heterogeneous social preferences provide a unifying understanding for these seemingly contradictory facts by focusing on the interaction between agents with other-regarding and selfish preferences. This focus explains why and when selfish agents behave as if they were other-regarding, as well as to why and when other-regarding agents behave as if they were selfish. This focus also helps understand (1) the importance of seemingly irrelevant institutional details, (2) the role of contractual incompleteness for the behavioral relevance of social preferences, (3) the role of social preferences for the prevalence of contractual incompleteness, and (4) why social preferences are an important component in explaining key characteristics of the employment relation. More recent evidence suggests that the empirical distribution of social preferences can be parsimoniously characterized by a small number of preference types which also have out-of-sample predictive power for important behaviors such as the demand for politically enforced redistribution.

Keynesian scholarship is enormous and diverse. Rather than feigning an overview of the literature, this chapter sketches three broad trajectories of Keynesian critique to make an argument that each remains limited by an ambiguous and unsatisfactory break with neo-classical economics. The chapter first considers neo-classical synthesis Keynesianism, associated with Samuelson’s textbook introduction to economics, the IS/LM (investment savings/liquidity money) models of Hicks and Hansen, and the Phillips Curve interpretation of inflation. Second, the chapter looks at market imperfections, considering alternative New Keynesian and post-Keynesian accounts, with briefer notes on money and financial instability. Despite declarations of mutual hostility, the relatively moderate New Keynesians and the putatively more radical post-Keynesians have much in common in their emphasis on imperfections, implying that neo-classical world of perfect competition remains central to their vision, even if as a focus of antagonism. There is often common ground too in hopes that states can reduce the imperfections or ameliorate their consequences. Third, the chapter considers an alternative strand of post-Keynesianism which puts more emphasis on time and uncertainty. Potentially profound insights tend to be reined in as they are marshalled for an in-house squabble with mainstream economists. Even as a more fundamental critique, the identification of radical uncertainty shows the follies of much of the existing economic formalism without providing the basis for an alternative political economy.

Under what conditions do the behaviors of players, who play a game repeatedly, converge to a Nash equilibrium? If one assumes that the players’ behavior is a discrete-time or continuous-time rule whereby the current mixed strategy profile is mapped to the next, this becomes a problem in the theory of dynamical systems. We apply this theory, and in particular the concepts of chain recurrence, attractors, and the Conley index, to prove a general impossibility result: There exist games for which any dynamics will fail to converge, from certain initial conditions, to the set of Nash equilibria. The games which help prove this impossibility result are degenerate, but we conjecture that an analogous result holds, under complexity assumptions, for nondegenerate games. We also prove a stronger result for approximate Nash equilibria: For a set of games of positive measure, there are no game dynamics that converge to the set of approximate Nash equilibria for some substantial approximation bound. These impossibility results also apply to dynamics with memory. We argue that these results further weaken the appeal of the Nash equilibrium as the solution concept of choice in game theory, and discuss alternatives suggested by the dynamics point of view.

Describes the origins of Meade’s last three published books, along with other writings such as on European Economic and Monetary Union before his death in 1995.

Chapter 4 examines the immediate aftermath of the Civil War when Congress, as part of Reconstruction, imposed the Southern Homestead Act on five southern states.

Describes the Economic Section’s activities in the final 18 months of World War II.

The legal theory of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) posits that SOEs persist due to legal failures rather than market failures. It views privatization fundamentally as a process of legalization rather than liberalization. Privatization does not always suggest the state’s withdrawal from private sectors; in many cases, it is accompanied by expanded or stricter regulatory oversight. This perspective generates two implications. First, the successful reform of SOEs depends on the state’s ability to clearly define its control and establish institutions that deter opportunistic actions. A judiciary capable of effectively distinguishing between government opportunism and the legitimate exercise of power – thereby restraining abuse of power while upholding lawful decisions – is crucial. Second, if the government can develop effective regulation of private firms without ownership, the need for maintaining SOEs diminishes. Given the advantages of private firms in terms of ownership costs, further investment in developing robust legal and regulatory institutions could promote social efficiency by reducing the role of SOEs.