On April 23, 2012, Michael Sandel (Harvard University, Government) will discuss his new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. In the book, Professor Sandel argues that markets have not only become disconnected from morals, but have also extended too deeply into new and potentially inappropriate spheres of life. Citing examples like for-profit hospitals and advertising in schools, Professor Sandel suggests a need for setting moral limits on the reach of market-thinking.
The Tobin Project is pleased to announce the 2011-2012 recipients of its Democracy & Markets graduate student fellowships. With thirteen grantees in seven different disciplines, the Tobin Project’s network of aspiring scholars is growing, and the forum program is expanding to New Haven. In the fall of 2011, the Tobin Project will host monthly Graduate Student Forums in New Haven, CT for its grantees at Yale University to share their research in an interdisciplinary setting.
The Tobin Project is pleased to announce that the MacArthur Foundation has renewed its support for Tobin Project programs with a generous, multi-year grant.
Shortly after the September release of their acclaimed book, Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob Hacker (Yale University, Political Science) and Paul Pierson (University of California-Berkeley, Political Science) headlined a panel discussion in Cambridge co-sponsored by the Tobin Project and the Harvard Kennedy School.
What are the ingredients integral to a healthy democracy? In September, the Tobin Project invited eight top scholars with expansive and overlapping perspectives to consider the fundamental institutions and processes that constitute a sustainable and vibrant democracy. The group paid particular attention to the role of civil society and education in democratic societies.
In the spring of 2010, the Tobin Project issued a call for fellowship aplications from students doing work that addresses the intersection between democratic institutions and economic markets. Fellowships were awarded to fourteen students, whose projects ranged from "Policymaking at the U.S. Federal Reserve" to "Farming Families, Farm Policy, and the Business of Southern Agriculture, 1940-1980." Many of the felloship recipients came together in September for the first fall meeting of the Democracy & Markets forum.
Personal identity, long a concern of sociology, is now being incorporated into economic models thanks to the pioneering work presented in Identity Economics (Princeton University Press, 2010), a new volume by Nobel Prize-winning economist and longtime Tobin Project friend, George Akerlof (University of California-Berkeley, Economics), and co-author Rachel Kranton (Duke University, Economics).
The Tobin Project held its second graduate student forum on November 20. The day-long discussion centered on innovative new directions in the study of political economy — in particular, working through the implications of the recent financial crisis.
These interdisciplinary graduate student forums have involved 24 students from the nation’s leading Ph.D. programs, providing unique opportunities to develop and share new research on topics that fall outside of the narrow parameters of current academic discourse.
Members of the Tobin Project’s Institutions of Democracy working group collaborated with The American Prospect in May to produce a series of white papers and blog posts responding to the Supreme Court’s decision to decline to rule on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minorities from facing obstacles to voting.
Today’s doctoral students will shape the intellectual paradigms that influence our public policy in the future. Yet this larger project can be obscured by career concerns and an attendant need to not stray too far from a discipline’s intellectual orthodoxies.