Institutions, power, and inequality

Content for week of Monday, March 29, 2021–Friday, April 2, 2021

Readings

Important: The PDFs of the North and Putnam chapters are posted on iCollege.

  • Introduction and 5.1–5.10 in Economy, Society, and Public Policy1
  • Tweet by Jennifer Victor
  • Freakonomics Radio, “Earth 2.0: What Would Our Economy Look Like?,” April 12, 2017
  • Planet Money, “The Dollar at the Center of the World,” episode 553, July 16, 2014
  • Chapter 1 in Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance2 (Remember to use your grad school reading skills here! Don’t try to read every word! Skim to understand the argument.)
  • Chapter 6 in Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy3 (Remember to use your grad school reading skills here! Don’t try to read every word! Skim to understand the argument.)

Slides

Download the slides from today’s class.

First slide

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:


  1. The CORE Team, Economy, Society, and Public Policy, 2019, https://www.core-econ.org/espp/. ↩︎

  2. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↩︎

  3. Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). ↩︎