Louis Putterman

Louis Putterman is a long-time professor of economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Following his childhood in suburban Long Island, he spent three years doing farm work in kibbutz communities in Israel before returning to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia and Yale universities. While in graduate school, he learned Kiswahili and carried out field research among peasant farmers in rural Tanzania. As a young faculty member, he then studied Chinese and pursued similar research in rural 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.

Mid-career, he developed new areas of expertise on the evolution of human economies over the millennia and on the behavioral and experimental economics of human social interaction. He has published more than one hundred scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and books and authored, co-authored, or edited seven books, including Economics, Values and Organization (1998) and Dollars and Change: Economics in Context (2001). Louis lives with his wife, attorney Vivian Tseng, in Concord, Massachusetts. He is the father of two college-aged children and is the parent and guardian of an older daughter dependent on nursing care as a result of profound brain damage. He enjoys playing Beatles and other tunes on the piano for her amusement and his.