William D. Ferguson

William D. Ferguson is the Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics at Grinnell College, where he has taught since 1989. He currently chairs Grinnell's Economics Department and Policy Studies Concentration and is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Midwest Economics Association. After graduating from Grinnell College in 1975, with a B.A. in history, he worked as a neighborhood community organizer in Seattle Washington until 1982. He then decided to study economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1989. Professor Ferguson's teaching has ranged from institutional political economy, applied game theory, and policy analysis to labor economics, British economic policy (taught in London), climate policy, economic statistics, and macroeconomic analysis. While writing his book, he was a visiting scholar at Indiana University's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where he discussed his manuscript with the late Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom. While writing, he also visited as a scholar at the Department of Economics at the University College London and the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University.