Some great people to read

On his Substack (and before anyone starts, I am not getting a Substack, I’m quite happy here on Blogger with my two confirmed readers), Cass Sunstein lists scholars who have influenced him the most, restricting his list to people he knew. Posner, Rawls, Elster, Ullmann-Margalit, Thaler, and Kahneman is quite a list. I have met two of these brilliant scholars (Kahneman and Thaler) but I will give a list of people below that are awe-inspiring even if I haven't met them. I spent a lot of my formative years reading Freud, Hume, Keynes, Schumpeter, Mill, Rawls and a lot of moral philosophers. I have spoke before about how reading Kahneman and Tversky's work gave me some focus and I have largely worked within that broad tradition since. Cass himself is someone I have interacted with a lot and the most influential scholar for me in terms of thinking through connections between psychology, behavioural economics, regulation, and policy. I am assuming most people who read here will know where to find work by him and by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.

Elster's works been a constant companion over the years. Ulysses and the Sirens and Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences are both marvellous and bring together many concepts in behavioural science with political and institutional thinking.

Parfit's Reasons and Persons is another one that I hope any philosophically-minded behavioural student gets a chance to read at some point. You can search "Parfit" in the blog search bar to find many posts her on the great moral philosopher, including a post here on an ongoing project on his past valuation arguments.

Nancy Folbre's work on economics and the family has constantly recurred when I am talking with students about issues such as gender, care, and the general sense that traditional economic accounts overlook the role of these factors in societal allocation. If you want to connect feminist economics with critical discussion of traditional utility theory, among many other things, her work is outstanding, clear, and very pragmatic in its orientation.

Nancy Cartwright is another person who I regularly return to and who constantly provides stimulating ideas on method and on causality in particular. Among many well-known works, her highly-cited book "Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics" is a fascinating discussion of the many different ideas of causality that are at play when we talk about relationships between social and economic quantities. More recently, many readers will recall her paper on understanding and misunderstanding of randomised trials with Angus Deaton which has been widely cited in the discussions around the use of RCTs in evidence-based public policy (See reply from Guido Imbens for a sense of the parameters of the discussion). Cartwright is obviously working within technical literature but is far from an obscurantist and I believe any social science researcher would benefit from engaging with her work. A recent paper below "Rigour versus the need for evidential diversity" is particularly relevant to many current debates about how behavioural and social science is being embedded into public policy organisations. It gives always a strong sense of points made across her work on the limits of randomised trials, the nature of causality, and the tensions between the development of generalised theories and context-specific usable knowledge.

This is not an exhaustive list and you can look around the blog for many others.