This year's lecture will took place on Tuesday, December 9, 2025 - 4:00pm with speaker Wendy Carlin
Wendy Carlin is Professor of Economics at University College London (UCL), Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She leads an international project - the CORE Econ project - to reform the undergraduate economics curriculum and is co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth Concentration, Inequality and the Economy. The CORE project produces open-access e-books used in universities around the world. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, the economics of transition, and economic knowledge and education. She is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility. She has co-authored with David Soskice four macroeconomics books: Macroeconomics and the Wage Bargain (OUP, 1990), Macroeconomics: Imperfections, Institutions and Policies (OUP, 2006) and Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System (OUP, 2015). The third book integrates the financial system into the macroeconomic model to allow for analysis of financial cycles as well as business cycles and growth. The fourth (2024) is titled Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and Inequality. It brings to the fore how inequality can be incorporated in macroeconomic modelling of business cycles, financial instability, and growth in a unified way.
In 2015, she was awarded a CBE for services to economics and public finance, in 2022 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2023 as Fellow of the British Academy. She is Vice President of the International Economic Association.
This lecture has emerged from a growing concern that the presenter has had for the last few years and after more than two decades of running experiments in the lab and the field: why is it that if humans have the capacity of being prosocial in their behavior, kind to others, and are willing to make costly efforts to preserve the environment or reduce inequality to achieve fairness, we do not see promising trends in terms of the urgent planetary goals of preserving nature and its capacity to sustain society, or goals of reducing the undesirable high levels of inequality and fairness?
Sam Bowles is one of the most important contemporary figures in offering comprehensive explanations of why humans are prosocial, and cooperation can emerge in societies. His vast work draws from biology, archeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and of course economics, giving us a more detailed and structured understanding of the mechanisms that evolved in human societies to make them capable of addressing collective action problems and therefore tackle, among others, the current environmental challenges. But, throughout his entire career, Bowles has also studied inequality and has also offered us important insights into the harms from excessive unfairness and inequality in society. Also, Bowles became a key promoter of the use of economic experiments to understand all these behavioral mechanisms, and on a personal note, he supported the presenter with the strange idea at the time (late 90s) to jump the cliff and conduct experiments in the field instead of a laboratory with college students.
Given the behavioral revolution in economics, recent debates have emerged on how far nudges can go in addressing the greater challenges of society these days. Data from large samples of random controlled trials using nudges in several regions of the world have shown rather small or null net impacts, particularly for non-academic journals samples but from nudge units scaling up results from more controlled experiments. One of these controversies was brought up by Chater & Loewenstein (2022) in what they call the i-frame, where the focus is on individual change, and the s-frame where the focus is the systemic change, with the alert that the excessive attention on the former will distract us from addressing the latter at societal levels. In this lecture the presenter will propose a third option, the c-frame, sitting in between, and where most of collective action societal transformations have probably emerged. Communities, collectives, cooperatives, consortia, often create transformative changes from the bottom up, through social norms, self-governed mechanisms that scale up and sometimes in aggregate reach the s-frame levels structural transformations that have shaped history. And here it is where Sam Bowles has played a key role in offering clues on how understanding the i-frame level mechanisms, through the c-frame, can generate transformative revolutions in the structures that shape us all.
Past Lectures
Inaugural Lecture, 2015-16
Samuel Bowles
3rd Annual Lecture, 2017-2018
Nancy Folbre
4th Annual Lecture, 2018-2019
5th Annual Lecture
6th Annual Lecture
Juan Camilo Cardenas, 2021-2022
7th Annual Lecture
James Heintz, 2022-2023
Social Justice, Alternatives, and UMass Economics: Normative Propositions for Collective Deliberation”
8th Annual Lecture
Suresh Naidu, 2024-2025
The Evidence-based Path to Mostly Automated Socialism
9th Annual Lecture
Wendy Carlin, 2025-2026