The Good, the Bad, and the Economy: Does Human Nature Rule Out a Better World?

Despite the past century's extraordinary advances in technology and scientific knowledge, today's world is still racked by economic insecurity, vast gulfs between rich and poor, violent conflicts, and daunting environmental problems.

What's stopping us from building a world in which there's less inequality and more nurturing of the individual's potential to lead a satisfying life? Does the central role of self-interest in human nature necessitate economic arrangements that condemn us to living on a treadmill of consumerism and insecurity? Will the gap between rich and poor countries ever be bridged? These are the key questions that Brown University economist Louis Putterman's The Good, the Bad, and the Economy addresses in surprising new ways.

Louis Putterman is a long-time professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Following his childhood in suburban Long Island, he spent three years doing farm work in kibbutz communities in Israel before returning to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia and Yale universities. While in graduate school, he learned Kiswahili and carried out field research among peasant farmers in rural Tanzania. As a young faculty member, he then studied Chinese and pursued similar research in rural China.

His edited reader on the organizational economics of business enterprises (The Economic Nature of the Firm) was adopted in leading universities and business schools. As an expert on China's economy and an authority on workplace organization, he was elected president of the international scholarly organization, The Association for Comparative Economic Studies, in 1999.

Mid-career, he developed new areas of expertise on the evolution of human economies over the millennia and on the behavioral and experimental economics of human social interaction. He has published more than one hundred scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and books and authored, co-authored, or edited seven books, including Economics, Values and Organization (1998) and Dollars and Change: Economics in Context (2001). Louis lives with his wife, attorney Vivian Tseng, in Concord, Massachusetts. He is the father of two college-aged children and is the parent and guardian of an older daughter dependent on nursing care as a result of profound brain damage. He enjoys playing Beatles and other tunes on the piano for her amusement and his.