Louis Putterman

Louis Putterman is professor of economics (emeritus) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, whose faculty he served on for forty-five years. He grew up in suburban Long Island (NY), spent three years doing farm work in kibbutz communities in Israel, then earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia and Yale universities. In his early career, he conducted field research among peasant farmers in Tanzania and 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. He has been a Sloan Fellow and a Fulbright Research Scholar and has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon, Luce, McArthur and other foundations.

Mid-career, he developed expertise on the evolution of human economies over the millennia and on the behavioral and experimental economic study of human social interaction. He has published more than a hundred and fifty scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and books and authored, co-authored, or edited seven books, including Economics, Values and Organization (1998), Dollars and Change: Economics in Context (2001), and The Good, The Bad, and The Economy: Does Human Nature Rule out a Better World? (2012).