Nothing is as easy as a conversation with Colin Camerer (*1959) because with Camerer one can talk about almost everything and as critical as one pleases. Camerer is an enthusiastic pioneer of behavioral economics, arguing for choice models that are informed by psychological and neuroscientific results about human motivation, judgment formation, emotions and the brain. Camerer earned a PhD in behavioral decision theory at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business under the supervision of Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth at the age of only twenty-two, in 1981. Since then, he has held appointments at the Kellog Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. In 1994, he came to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where he is currently the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics.

Describes the continuation and completion of the stagflation project, the celebration of Keynes’s centenary, and Meade’s work on labor-managed firms and the share economy.

descibes the setting up and deliberations of the Meade Committee on Tax Reform and its report, also Meade’s Intelligent Radical’s Guide to Economic Policy and the award of his Nobel Prize

This chapter argues that to understand cooperation and conflict in large-scale societies we need to blend these ideas with a systematic study of within-society conflict and the institutions and norms that structure these relations.

When a government regulates an enterprise, regulatory costs arise due to bounded rationality, uncertainty, and asset specificity. To preserve flexibility, regulators are sometimes granted discretion by law to respond to new circumstances. However, such discretion can be abused to expropriate the interests of private investors, especially when private investments become specific assets that cannot be easily used for other purposes. State ownership alleviates regulatory costs by aligning the interests of the government and the enterprises, although it incurs higher ownership costs. In sectors where regulatory costs are low, private enterprises prevail because of their advantages in reducing ownership costs. Conversely, in sectors where regulatory costs are high, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more likely to prevail and are not easy to privatize. The degree of regulatory costs depends on several factors, including the need for intense regulation in a particular sector, the degree of uncertainty, and the availability of alternative institutions that support effective regulation.

Chapter 2 provides a series of methods for understanding the overall facts regarding homesteading and how they related to land sales over the period of western settlement. This chapter defines the various features of homesteading, explains its critical logistics, examines the broad distribution of homesteads across space and through time, and shows their general relationship to land characteristics.

Describes first year in wartime government service.

Chapter 3 develops the general theory of the book, namely that homesteading was used to quickly occupy lands where the federal government had weak economic property rights (for one reason or another). The chapter begins with a discussion of the American frontier prior and up to 1862, and explains how rapid occupation solved a particular type of problem for the state.

Describes academic and other activities, 1933–36.

The first of two chapters describing Meade’s life and work at LSE, including the work which earned him a Nobel Prize.

Despite sustained efforts to privatize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) across various sectors in China, they continue to play a significant role in certain industries. Existing scholarship has yet to provide a fully satisfactory explanation for the historical development and sectoral distribution of SOEs. Economists frequently argue that SOEs serve as tools for addressing market failures, while others interpret them as outcomes of political decisions shaped by ideology and interest group dynamics.

This book advances a legal theory of SOEs, asserting that prevailing accounts are incomplete. Market failures, after all, can also be addressed through regulatory measures. The more pertinent comparison, therefore, is between the use of SOEs and the use of regulation. When regulatory costs are high, SOEs are more likely to arise, endure, and resist privatization.

This chapter describes the successful application of advances in practical truthful mechanisms design to a large-scale computationally hard problem: The FCC’s 2016–2017 incentive auction, which reallocated tens of billions of dollars of radio spectrum resources from use in television broadcasting to higher-value uses in mobile broadband. The mechanism used was an impressive combination of advances in efficiently solving NP-hard resource allocation problems (in most cases) and in new mechanism design that is simple to implement and that adapts well to limited computation capacity. The auction resulted in repurposing 84 megahertz of spectrum and yielded $19.8 billion in revenue.

This chapter turns to questions of profit, interest and interest rates. The first section focuses on why the classics and Marx see profits in the wider economy as providing the basis for any adequate theory of interest. The financial sector can ultimately only appropriate a share of value created elsewhere. It is, however, necessary to go beyond this simple fact, and a critical engagement with Keynes can add valuable nuance. The second section therefore revisits Keynes’s critique of orthodoxy and his alternative depiction of interest rate determination through the interaction of liquidity preference and the money supply. It will be argued that starting within, and directing his critique towards, the will-o’-the-wisp that is conventional theory provides an insufficient basis for an effective alternative. Keynes can demonstrate the fallacies of his opponents’ priorities but cannot secure his own. The classics’ view can provide an anchor while at the same time, Keynes’s insights should provoke a constructive reform of the classics, as analysis moves from an abstract generality to concrete investigations of profit and interest and their relation. The third section argues that Keynes’s insights into liquidity preference and state power can be better reinterpreted as second-order effects, grounded in a classical/Marxist view of profits as the basis of interest but acknowledging questions of institutional power within finance, in the state and inter-state relations, from which both Marx and Keynes abstract. So reinterpreted, Keynes’s insight allows progress beyond the classics’ generalisations particularly in terms of understanding interest rate variability.