Thomas C Schelling

The 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics

Thomas C Schelling keynote conference
English

Thomas C Schelling was born on the 14 April, 1921. He is an American economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (shared with Robert Aumann) for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

Thomas C Schelling  received his bachelor′s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1944. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1951.

Thomas C Schelling  served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, the White House, and the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953. He wrote most of his dissertation on national income behavior working at night while in Europe. He left government to join the economics faculty at Yale University, and in 1958, he was appointed Professor of Economics at Harvard. In 1969, he joined the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
Thomas C Schelling ′s most famous book, The Strategy of Conflict (1960), has pioneered the study of bargaining and strategic behavior and is considered one of the hundred books that have been most influential in the West since 1945. In this book he introduced the concept of the focal point, now commonly called the Schelling point.

In 1971,Thomas C Schelling published a widely cited article dealing with racial dynamics called “Dynamic Models of Segregation”. In this paper he showed that a small preference for one′s neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and nickels in different patterns on the “board” and then moving them one by one if they were in an “unhappy” situation.
The positive feedback cycle of segregation – prejudice – in-group preference can be found in most human populations, with great variation in what are regarded as meaningful differences — gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, religion, etc. Once a cycle of separation-prejudice-discrimination-separation has begun, it has a self-sustaining momentum.

Thomas C Schelling  has been involved in the global warming debate since chairing a commission for President Carter in 1980. He believes climate change poses a serious threat to developing nations, but that the threat to the United States has been exaggerated. Drawing on his experience with the post-war Marshall Plan, he has argued that addressing global warming is a bargaining problem: if the world is able to reduce emissions, poor countries will receive most of the benefits but rich countries will bear most of the costs.
Thomas C Schelling  previously taught for twenty years at Harvard University′s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, as well as conducted research at IIASA, in Laxenburg, Austria between 1994 and 1999.
Thomas C Schelling  was one of the experts who participated in the Copenhagen Consensus.

The Strategy of the conflict

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

The Strategy of the conflict

Before Freakonomics and The Tipping Point there was this classic by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior was originally published over twenty-five years ago, yet the stories it tells feel just as fresh today. And the subject of these stories―how small and seemingly meaningless decisions and actions by individuals often lead to significant unintended consequences for a large group―is more important than ever. In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations.

The updated edition of this landmark book contains a new preface and the author's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Before Freakonomics and The Tipping Point there was this classic by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Strategy and Arms Control

This volume presents an analysis of arms control with particular emphasis on the military policy involved. The basic premise of the book is that cooperative arrangements with potential adversaries could have the same objectives as sensible military policies in reducing the likelihood of war.

Strategy and Arms Control

Choice and Consequence

Thomas Schelling is a political economist “conspicuous for wandering”—an errant economist. In Choice and Consequence, he ventures into the area where rationality is ambiguous in order to look at the tricks people use to try to quit smoking or lose weight. He explores topics as awesome as nuclear terrorism, as sordid as blackmail, as ineffable as daydreaming, as intimidating as euthanasia. He examines ethical issues wrapped up in economics, unwrapping the economics to disclose ethical issues that are misplaced or misidentified.

With an ingenious, often startling approach, Schelling brings new perspectives to problems ranging from drug abuse, abortion, and the value people put on their lives to organized crime, airplane hijacking, and automobile safety. One chapter is a clear and elegant exposition of game theory as a framework for analyzing social problems. Another plays with the hypothesis that our minds are not only our problem-solving equipment but also the organ in which much of our consumption takes place.

What binds together the different subjects is the author’s belief in the possibility of simultaneously being humane and analytical, of dealing with both the momentous and the familiar. Choice and Consequence was written for the curious, the puzzled, the worried, and all those who appreciate intellectual adventure.

Choice and Consequence